by Robert Gandt
The disaster struck closest to the airmen of Pan American. They were a lighthearted, normally irreverent bunch. The death of a pilot was nothing new. But this was different. This was Musick. Musick was the most conservative, most meticulous, most professional pilot in the profession. Ed Musick, they had thought, was indestructible.
Captain Leo Terletsky had never been thought indestructible. Terletsky, in fact, had been the particular worry of his former chief pilot, Ed Musick.
Leo Terletsky was a White Russian, a man of considerable charm on the ground. In the air his easy charm left him. In command of a flying boat, Terletsky seemed beset by fears and uncertainties. He performed erratically, issuing and countermanding orders, infecting his crew with his own anxiety. Some copilots and engineers refused to fly with him.
Soon after the inauguration of the transpacific service, Leo Terletsky was transferred to San Francisco to fly the M-130s. His checkout over the Pacific was given by the chief pilot, Ed Musick. There had been no significant weather, no en route problems, and Terletsky’s performance was judged acceptable. Later, it would be thought by his colleagues that Terletsky, who seemed to fear flying, would always perform competently so long as an experienced captain like Musick was with him. Alone, Terletsky became the victim of his own lack of self-confidence.4
On 23 July 1938 Terletsky took off from San Francisco Bay in the Hawaii Clipper. His copilot for the flight was “Tex” Walker, a competent aviator whom Terletsky often asked for as his first officer.
The Hawaii Clipper’s Pacific crossing was normal, transiting Honolulu, then Midway, Wake, and Guam on schedule. On 29 July, Terletsky and his crew of eight, with six passengers, prepared to take off from Guam’s Apra harbor.
Before dawn Terletsky and Walker checked the en-route weather. There were occasional rain showers, scattered thunderstorms, cumulus tops at eight to ten thousand feet. This was typical summer Pacific weather. The airmen foresaw no difficulties.
Shortly before 6:00 A.M., the patrol launch fired a star shell signaling that Apra harbor was clear. The Hawaii Clipper roared across the bay, smacking the evenly spaced waves, then lifted into the dawn sky.
Throughout the morning the clipper droned toward Manila, diverting slightly to the south of a tropical depression. Radio Officer McCarty tapped out regular position and weather reports: “Rainy flying conditions, head winds, cruising at 10,000 feet.”
At noon, when they were 565 miles from Manila, McCarty signaled that the Hawaii Clipper was flying in rough air through the tops of cumulus buildups, still bucking head winds, still in rain. Panay, on the Philippine coast, acknowledged the report, then asked to transmit the midday weather sequence. “Stand by for one minute before sending,” replied McCarty, “as I am having trouble with rain static.”
It was the last message received from the Hawaii Clipper. Fourteen navy vessels and long-range army bombers from the Philippines swept the ocean between Guam and Manila. On the second day, an army transport, the Meigs, found a large oil slick near the Hawaii Clipper’s last reported position. Nothing more was ever found. On August 5, after a week-long sweep, the search for the Hawaii Clipper was abandoned.
There was speculation that the Japanese had interdicted the Pan American flying boat. It was conjectured that Japanese hijackers had stowed away on board the Hawaii Clipper in Guam, then forced the airplane to divert to a Japanese base where the crew and passengers were killed.
The year before, Amelia Earhart had vanished in the South Pacific during her round-the-world flight. With her was the pioneer navigator Fred Noonan, who had flown with Musick aboard the China Clipper and on the early Pacific flights.5 Earhart and Noonan had taken off from Lae, New Guinea, on 2 July 1937, bound for Howland Island, a tiny island on which the U.S. government had recently constructed a landing strip.
They never made it. Earhart’s last worried radio communication reported that her fuel supply was nearly exhausted and estimated their position to be a hundred miles from Howland.
Despite the largest air-sea search in history, no trace was ever found of Earhart and Noonan. There was—and continues to be—conjecture that she was on an intelligence-gathering mission for the United States government. Her route brought her in close proximity to Japanese fortifications in the Micronesian islands. Clues were uncovered supporting a theory that Earhart and Noonan died while in Japanese captivity. No conclusive evidence was ever offered, and the fate of Amelia Earhart became an appealing mystery.6
Japanese sabotage was suspected on earlier occasions. Before the first transpacific flight in 1935, two Japanese nationals had been caught trying to sabotage the airborne direction finder. Later a Honolulu-bound clipper was forced to return when the crew was unable to transfer fuel from the bilge tanks. Though this problem was traced to a fuel line plugged with a cork left in place after an overhaul, Japanese saboteurs were again blamed.
The press embraced these rumors. Villainy, particularly by the Japanese, made a better story than an unsolved mystery.7 But to the airmen who regularly flew the oceans, the probable culprit in the Hawaii Clipper’s disappearance was the Pacific and its vast, brooding storms. Clipper pilots had reported anvil-topped cumulonimbus clouds that towered above 60,000 feet, far higher than any storm was previously believed possible. To blunder into such a storm in a man-made craft like the Hawaii Clipper would be an intolerable risk. In the case of the Hawaii Clipper, it was fatal.8
19
The Right Vehicle
Meanwhile, in Britain the need for a transoceanic flying boat could no longer be ignored. The Empire-class boat, despite its load-carrying limitations, would be made to fly the North Atlantic.
By mid-1937 the long-standing recalcitrance of His Majesty’s government to enter a reciprocal rights agreement with Pan American began to dissolve. Imperial Airways and Pan American scheduled a series of survey flights to prove the feasibility of sending mail by air between the two continents.
Caledonia and Cambria, the second and third production aircraft of the S.23 series, were modified for these flights. Their standard fuel capacity of 4,680 pounds was increased to 17,864 pounds by adding fuel tanks in the wing bays and along the wing spars in the hull. Their wing spars and planing bottoms were reinforced and all passenger accommodations, including even the cabin flooring, were stripped from the cabins.1
On 5 July 1937, the Caledonia lifted from the Shannon River at Foynes, Ireland, bound for the bay of Botwood on the Newfoundland coast. Three hours later, the Clipper III, a Pan Am Sikorsky S-42B, took off from Botwood, bound for Foynes. The clipper, commanded by Pan American Captain Harold Gray, flew a great circle course, arriving in Ireland after a flight of twelve hours, thirty-four minutes. The Caledonia, flown by Captain A. S. Wilcockson, flew a slightly longer rhumb-line course and, bucking the prevailing westerly wind, took fifteen hours, three minutes to reach Botwood.2
Though the simultaneous flights were hailed as a milestone in the progress of commercial aviation, their real importance lay in the ending of a political stalemate. Since 1935, had the British government seen fit to grant the concession, Pan American’s S-42Bs could have conducted a scheduled mail service between America and Britain and even transported a small passenger load. Though the British made much in their own press about the S.23’s slightly superior speed and “breakthrough” design features, the truth lay in the numbers. Even with the complete removal of all cabin accommodations, the S.23, fully fueled, could not transport a ton of payload. The S-42B, with only one of its four passenger compartments reconfigured to carry extra fuel, also fully fueled, had a payload capacity of nearly 7,000 pounds. For its first Atlantic survey flight, the Clipper III, in fact, carried a kit of maintenance spares for the English base. The kit, which weighed 1,995 pounds, could as easily have been eight commercial passengers.3
After the ceremonies and celebration of the Atlantic survey operations had faded from the press, a grim melancholia settled over the directorship of Imperial Airways and the British Air Minis
try. They were compelled to face an unhappy truth: Britain still did not possess a true transatlantic airliner. The Empire boats, for all their futuristic appearance and reasonable speed, were severely limited. Worse, Pan American not only had the transpacific Martin M-130 but was advertising the arrival of its next generation of flying boat, the Boeing B-314, which would transport both cargo and a substantial passenger load nonstop over the Atlantic.
An inescapable fact about long-range flying boats was that such airplanes could fly at a far greater weight than that at which they could take off. Crucial amounts of energy—and weight—were sacrificed simply to lift the flying boat from the water.
The inherent problem of the Empire-class flying boat was one of weight control. The structurally heavy S.23 simply could not accommodate the great weight of fuel required to take off and then cross an ocean.
Thus was conceived one of the most bizarre efforts to lengthen the range of the flying boat. The Shorts’ technical director, Major Robert Mayo, devised a scheme that involved mating two four-engined aircraft, using their combined power and lift for takeoff and climb, then separating the smaller machine to continue the ocean journey alone. The larger aircraft of the composite took the name Maia and was designated S.21. The upper aircraft, mounted on a frame above Maia, was a sleek, twin-float plane christened Mercury, which became the S.20.
Mercury was a high-winged monoplane powered by four Napier Rapier V engines of 340 horsepower each. Her 1,200-gallon fuel tanks in the wings provided a still-air range of 3,800 miles. Her maximum weight taking off alone was 12,500 pounds, but this increased to 20,800 pounds when launched from Maia.
Though the design work on the two aircraft began before the arrival of the S.23 series, Maia was a derivative of the Empire boats, differing from the S.23s by the extra width in her fuselage, a greater area in her vertical stabilizer and rudder, and 250 square feet more wing surface. To provide clearance for Mercury’s floats, the outboard engines were mounted farther out.
Extensive flight tests were conducted throughout 1937, at first with individual aircraft, and then with the two machines coupled. On 6 February 1938, over the Short plant at Rochester, Mercury made her first in-flight separation from Maia. In July, after separating from her mother ship near Foynes, Ireland, Mercury continued nonstop to Montreal in twenty hours, twenty minutes, completing the first nonstop commercial flight over the North Atlantic. In October she established a world distance record for seaplanes, leaving Maia near Dundee, Scotland, and flying 6,045 miles to the Orange River in South Africa in a time of forty-two hours, five minutes.4
The scheme received much public praise, though its only true function amounted to the fast transport of mail. At best, the Mercury-Maia composite served an interim role, that of flying the flag over the Atlantic, while the British Air Ministry awaited the arrival of a true long-range airliner.
On 10 August 1938, the Germans, who had been generally excluded from the British-American transatlantic negotiating, startled the world. A Deutsche Luft Hansa Focke-Wulf Condor took off from Berlin on a 3,800-mile nonstop flight to America. In just under twenty-one hours, the Condor arrived in New York. Three days later the airliner made the return journey to Berlin, without problem.
The Condor was a rakish, four-engined, 39,000-pound land plane. It could transport twenty-six passengers over a distance of 1,000 miles, or nine passengers for 2,500 miles. It cruised at 220 miles per hour at 12,000 feet—numbers that were unattainable by any contemporary flying boat.
To prescient observers of 1938, the flight of the Condor was a glimpse into the future. The “right” vehicle for the North Atlantic was not the flying boat. Not only had DLH turned to land planes, Air France Transatlantique was experimenting with high-altitude land planes and was already flying regular schedules over the South Atlantic with their four-engined Farman land planes.
To Charles Lindbergh, still a technical advisor to Pan American, the flying boat had always been an expedient. As early as 1933 he predicted “that land planes would eventually replace flying boats wherever airports could be built within practical range of one another.” He believed that the seaplane–land plane debate, from the safety aspect, was a matter of psychology. “If passengers would fly in a land plane through storms and over fog-covered mountains, surely they would also be willing to fly in a land plane over water. But the first years of transoceanic airline operations would have to be with flying boats.”5
Lindbergh was nudging Pan American toward the age of the land plane. In his diary he wrote that “they have eventually come round to the ideas I have been advocating for so many years, in regard to using land planes for the North Atlantic route.”6
The age of the great flying boats had barely begun. Now it was almost over.
The British, committed to the Empire mail scheme and the development of the Empire-class boats, were not ready to be converted. In 1938 they produced an upgraded C-class boat, the S.30, powered by 1,010-horsepower Pegasus 22 engines. Eight of these aircraft were ordered by Imperial Airways, and though they were intended for the Bermuda–New York route, four were configured for in-flight refueling with tanks of 2,750 gallons and assigned a maximum takeoff weight of 53,000 pounds.
After lengthy trials, a weekly transatlantic mail service commenced on 5 August 1939. Handley Page Harrow tankers, staging from Ireland for westbound flights and out of Newfoundland for the eastbounds, refueled the S.30s en route. Sixteen of these flights were carried out before the outbreak of WW II. Thereafter the commercial in-flight refueling scheme, like the Mercury-Maia composite, was abandoned.
The final C-class boats, the S.33 series, combined the Pegasus XC engines and short-range tanks of the S.23 with the strengthened hull of the S.30. They were ordered in 1938 by Imperial Airways for the short-haul segments of the Poole–Karachi service. Like all other flying boat projects of the late 1930s, the final production models were abandoned in favor of military construction.7
In 1939 appeared the S.26, an enlarged derivative of the C-class boats, designed to fly mail nonstop across the Atlantic. First of these was the Golden Hind, delivered in September 1939, followed by her two sister ships. These ships, called the G-class flying boats, were powered by four Bristol Hercules engines of 1,380 horsepower each. With a gross weight of 75,000 pounds and an intended range in excess of 3,000 miles, they were designed to compete with the newly introduced Boeing B-314s of Pan American.
Golden Hind. The romantic name conjured up images of imperial glory, of full-rigged merchant ships and pith helmets and Bengal Lancers. From the cabins of the Empire-class flying boats passengers could gaze down on the Nile, on the vastness of India, on nomadic desert caravans. The Empire boats carried the flag to the outposts of the world. They maintained, briefly, the illusion that Britannia still ruled not only the waves but perhaps even the skies.
20
Boats of the Reich
Elsewhere in Europe, swastikas had begun to adorn the tails of Deutsche Luft Hansa aircraft. With the rise of the Third Reich, the general suspicion of all things German deepened in Britain, France, and the United States. Germany’s flag-carrier, DLH, found itself largely ignored in the negotiating of North Atlantic air facilities.
Britain controlled the landing rights in Shannon, Bermuda, and Newfoundland. France’s Aéropostale, prior to its demise, had negotiated exclusive access to the Azores base at Horta. The Americans, in the person of Juan Trippe, controlled the rights to the eastern shore of the United States. The Germans had no card of their own to play.
But ambitious Germany had already launched what was the first transatlantic commercial air service with the airships Graf Zeppelin and, later, the Hindenburg. With catapult ships in the South Atlantic, Wal flying boats were flying a regular mail service.
Now the Third Reich placed its bets on a new series of Dornier flying boats. The first of these, the Do 18, was a direct descendant of the Wal. Her seventy-seven-foot nine-inch tapered wing was parasol-mounted on a faired centerline pyl
on. The two tandem-mounted Junkers Jumo 540/600-horsepower diesel engines were slickly cowled into the center section of the wing. Six of these handsome aircraft went to DLH, and the remainder of the production series were marked for Luftwaffe duty.1
In the summer of 1936 DLH obtained agreement from the British and the Americans to operate an experimental mail service in the North Atlantic. The agreement contained numerous restrictions, including limits on the amount and type of mail and allowing the use of Newfoundland bases only in the event of inclement weather.2
Two DLH Do 18s, christened Zephir and Aeolus, were stationed aboard the depot ship Schwabenland. In September the pair took off from the Azores on separate headline-grabbing flights. Zephir flew nonstop to New York in twenty-two hours twelve minutes, arriving with a reserve of ten hours’ fuel. On the same day Aeolus flew directly to Bermuda in eighteen and a quarter hours and then continued on to join her sister ship in New York.
In March 1938 a Do 18, modified for a heavier maximum weight and given an extended wing span, was catapulted from the Westfalen in the English Channel. The Dornier flew southwestward over the Atlantic, nonstop to Brazil, an astonishing journey of 5,214 miles in a flight time of forty-three hours. This feat captured the world’s straight-line distance record, which had been set at 4,447 miles by a Japanese Kawanishi H8K2 Emily flying boat.3
The depot ships dragged behind them a large canvas apron that was used to flatten the water for the landing mail plane. In rough seas, oil was poured on the water to calm the waves. The mail plane would be hoisted aboard by crane, refueled, then catapulted on her way again. The German catapults used propellants of compressed air, accelerating the flying boats down a 110-foot track from zero to ninety-five miles per hour in two seconds. To stretch their range, the mail planes would often fly for the next several hours only a few feet above the sea, riding the cushion of air beneath their wings called ground effect.
