The elaborate theories about the Hawaii Clipper didn’t get fleshed out for many years, and when they did, it was almost by accident. In 1964 an Earhart searcher named Joseph Gervais was investigating whether the wreckage of an old airplane on the Pacific island of Truk was Earhart’s Electra. It was not, but having come five thousand miles, he had nothing to lose by sitting down with the locals and listening to their stories. According to them, fifteen people arrived on the airplane before the start of the war, and they were escorted by the Japanese, who were using Truk as an air base. The travelers were executed, and their bodies buried below a concrete slab.
Remarkably, after hearing the story, Gervais’s response was “I’m not interested in a plane with fifteen people. I’m interested in a plane with two people, a man and a woman.” Then, in 1980, he had a change of heart after reading Ronald W. Jackson’s China Clipper, a book that sets the loss of the Hawaii Clipper against the backdrop of the conflict in the Pacific.
The Japanese were apprehensive about the development of Pan Am’s island seaplane bases. They understood how the American military could use them to dodge international prohibitions on arming in the Pacific. When the first Pan Am survey flight from San Francisco to Honolulu was flown, a Japanese newspaper editorial noted the worry: “Even if the route is restricted to commercial flights, who can assure that it would not be used for military purposes in case of emergency?”
Jackson writes that the Japanese set out to disrupt the Clipper service. On the eve of November 22, 1935, the inaugural transpacific flight, FBI agents arrested two Japanese nationals who had slipped on board the Hawaii Clipper as it sat in the harbor at the Alameda base, across the bay from San Francisco. The men had been tampering with the plane’s radio direction finder, key to navigating across the vast ocean. The airline kept the arrest quiet. On January 5, 1936, as another Pan Am captain was sailing the same flying boat through a channel in San Francisco Bay, the hull was sliced by several concrete pillars studded with iron rods that sat just below the water’s surface. Who had placed them there was not known. Once again, the suspected vandalism was hushed up.
From these accounts, Jackson concluded that the Hawaii Clipper was hijacked by Japanese stowaways who’d boarded the plane on its overnight in Guam. Backing up his scenario is an FBI report from William L. MacNeill, a former U.S. Marine who worked for the military and Pan Am in the village of Sumay for three years in the mid-1930s. MacNeill claimed that a spy ring operated in Guam and that the Japanese had “all the chance in the world to plant a time bomb on any ship or clipper that comes in.” All this convinced Gervais that the Pan Am mystery was worth another look. His narrow focus on Earhart broadened.
I pause here to point out that ten years before deciding he had stumbled on the final destination of the Hawaii Clipper, Gervais cowrote7 Amelia Earhart Lives, a book claiming that she survived capture by the Japanese during the war and afterward returned to the States to assume a new identity as Irene Bolam. Gervais met Bolam, a private pilot in her youth, through a mutual friend at a flying club meeting in Long Island. Bolam was said to look a lot like Earhart, leading Gervais to believe that she actually was Amelia Earhart. There were several problems with his theory, the most significant of which was that Bolam insisted she was not Earhart. So bear this in mind when I refer to Gervais’s findings.
In 1980, Gervais was invited to meet with a group of retired World War II–era Pan Am mechanics who would view the photos of the airplane he saw in Truk sixteen years before and consider the possibility that the passengers and crew of the Hawaii Clipper ended up interred there. The sixteen former Pan Am men quickly concluded that the plane was not a Martin 130, and two days later they sent a recommendation to airline management advising against an investigatory visit to the island, according to documents in the airline’s historical archives at the Richter Library at the University of Miami.
To me, the meeting with Gervais gives the impression that the company was trying to get at the truth, but in a memo to executives, Pan Am’s then-director of corporate public relations, James Arey, wrote that the official position had not changed. As ever, “the Clipper was lost during a storm.”
Ten years earlier, however, Pan Am founder and chairman Juan Trippe had a very different view.
In a memo Guy Noffsinger found in the airline’s archives, Harvey L. Katz, who preceded Arey in the Pan Am public relations department, details a meeting with Trippe on August 26, 1970, at which the recently retired former CEO dropped this startling tidbit. “Mr. Trippe said that after the war, he was told by the Navy department that the Japanese hid in the aircraft and commandeered it in mid-flight,” wrote Katz. There was more: “The aircraft then was flown to a Japanese base where the engines were studied and, according to Mr. Trippe, were copied in detail for use on Japanese fighter aircraft. He said passengers and crew were killed.” Katz wrote the memo to John C. Leslie, a senior VP for Pan Am international affairs.
So why was the airline not receptive to Gervais’s account? The crash hunter’s mistake, according to Charles Hill, was hanging the entire hijacking theory on the aircraft wreckage he photographed in Truk in the 1960s. The Pan Am review committee said it was a British Sunderland, a four-engine flying boat of the same era used by the Royal Air Force during the war. The misidentification of the plane allowed the committee to dismiss all Gervais’s claims.
Hill’s Fix on the Rising Sun is at times complimentary to Jackson’s and Gervais’s accounts and at other times contradictory; and the book is often incomprehensible. It does include some of the same details Trippe revealed, and Hill’s theory is eerily similar to the one proposed by Jeff Wise in the disappearance of Malaysia 370.
Both these armchair investigators, Hill and Wise, proposed that the flights were skyjacked by technically savvy interlopers who took control of the planes and then made deceptive transmissions. With the Hawaii Clipper, the theory goes, hijackers forced the pilots to fly to a Japanese-controlled island. In Malaysia 370, the hijackers were Ukrainian, and the destination was Russian-controlled Kazakhstan. In Hill’s version of events, the crew was desperate to communicate their plight surreptitiously to ground stations while under the watchful eye of the Japanese skyjackers—so Pan Am’s radio operator, McCarty, transmitted false navigational fixes, a kind of code that, when deciphered, would point the listener to the location of three Japanese seaplane bases in the Pacific. The message being “The Japanese have us.”
In the Malaysia 370 scenario Wise proposed (before the discovery of the wing flap convinced him he was wrong), the skyjackers slipped through the floor hatch leading to the aircraft’s electronics bay near the cockpit. Having accessed the plane’s satellite data unit, they reprogrammed it to transmit signals that would send out phony information about where the plane was heading, sending the search-and-recovery teams on a wild goose chase on the wrong side of the equator. With access to the plane’s brain, the hijackers seized the flight controls from the pilots and remotely flew the plane to their target destination.
In the case of the Hawaii Clipper, was McCarty’s ingenious code lost on the recipients? Did the airline’s ground operators figure out the message but were subsequently told to keep its significance to themselves? Hill does not say. The official statement was then, and still is to this day, that no one knows what happened to the plane—just as with Malaysia 370.
“I’m considered among the whack-a-doodles,” Wise told me when journalists were still interested in what he called his “spoof theory” of MH-370. A charmingly self-effacing science writer with a private pilot’s license and a penchant for the technical, Wise is not a basement-dwelling nerd spinning plots involving hostile foreign powers and Ernst Blofeld–style, computer-hacking villains. Well, maybe he is a little, but Wise didn’t expect the world to embrace his view. He just wanted the possibility considered.
I never bought Wise’s “north to Kazakhstan” idea, but we did agree on one thing. The most troublesome piece of data, the one that opens the
door to consideration of some kind of hacking into the electronic system, is that after MH-370 disappeared from radar, the signal to the satellite was inexplicably lost for as long as an hour and twenty minutes. Something interfered with the satellite data unit, or SDU. This is why I was so interested in the water damage to the E&E bay on the Qantas flight to Bangkok in 2008 and in similar events.
“Nobody has tried to grapple with the key data point, the reboot of the SDU,” Wise told me, noting that deactivating the satellite communication system is not something most pilots would know how to do. To Wise, this cries out for further study. “This indicates to me that there was tampering by somebody, and a tampered piece of equipment—you have to put an asterisk by that.”
Wise’s spoof theory required imagining a state-backed plot involving a number of people with detailed knowledge of the inner workings of a sophisticated, computer-driven machine. It points out the alarming possibility that airliners can be digitally commandeered. In this respect, Wise is the voice of a small community of people who warn that it is indeed possible. The digital airliner has outpaced the industry’s ability to protect against all cyber threats.
In a presentation to the 2014 Black Hat, a computer security conference, Madrid-based cyber security expert Ruben Santamarta demonstrated how he hacked into an airliner’s SDU through Inmarsat’s SwiftBroadband connection. Santamarta said he was able to bypass normal security gates and log on using the industry standard naming protocol of the aircraft.
Once in the satellite data network, a hacker can “modify settings, reboot the terminal, turn off the terminal, and do nasty things,” he told the crowd. “Obviously we are not crashing airplanes with these vulnerabilities, that has to be clear,” Santamarta said. “These attacks—one can be used to disrupt or to modify satellite data links.”
Santamarta’s claim has been challenged by those who argue that his lack of access to actual equipment used by airlines casts doubt on his conclusions. Still, if it could theoretically happen, it must be considered a hazard; one the industry should be dealing with—yesterday.
Wise is the lucky alternative theorist whose scenario has been disproven to his satisfaction. Being wrong isn’t too bad if it provides closure. It is a different story for Guy Noffsinger. “I’m in it for the long haul,” he told me well into the second half of a decade spent wandering down the many side roads of the Pan Am Clipper enigma. He is waiting for some kind of satisfying ending, which, like the missing flying boat, is nowhere to be found.
1 This was an error, as the flight was Three Seven Zero, not Seven Three Seven Zero.
2 Commonly, eastbound flights fly at odd-numbered altitudes, and westbound flights at even-numbered altitudes.
3 Airways, Pan Am employee magazine, no. 5 (July–August 1938).
4 Flying the Oceans, by Horace Brock.
5 Malaysia Airlines no longer flies the Boeing 747.
6 Spencer Rumsey, “TWA Flight 800 Exposé Takes Off at Stony Brook Film Festival,” Long Island Press, July 8, 2013, http://www.longislandpress.com/2013/07/08/twa-flight-800-expose-takes-off-at-stony-brook-film-festival/.
7 With Joe Klaas.
PART TWO
Conspiracy
Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.
— JOSEPH HELLER, Catch 22
A Little Mistrust
If Juan Trippe, with all his political connections, knew that the Hawaii Clipper had been taken by the Japanese in 1938, choosing to share it in a conversation with a public relations executive in 1970 was a very understated way of setting the record straight. So while his astonishing confirmation of the long-held theory about the Hawaii Clipper added another curious element to the story, it fell short of providing certainty.
Ah, certainty. Before I started writing this book, I had no idea how elusive certainty could be in investigating air crashes. Yet the more accidents I looked at, the more odd elements I found.
The Helios 522 case seemed straightforward until 2011, when consultants hired by a Helios mechanic and three executives of the airline, all facing criminal charges in the accident, reexamined the wreckage as part of their defense and came to a conclusion that differed from the official report. With the assistance of Ron Schleede and Caj Frostell, now retired from the International Civil Aviation Organization, they asked to reopen the investigation.
Schleede and Frostell had questioned whether the pilots failed to pressurize the aircraft, based in part on their examination of the system-selector knob found at the scene in the Off position. When the consultants examined it, they thought the scoring on the back was evidence it might have been pushed to the Off position upon the airplane’s impact with the ground, rather than because the pilots failed to pressurize the plane on takeoff. That would have meant a case of mechanical failure rather than pilot error. Boeing disagreed; the Greeks and the Americans opted not to reopen the case. The official report had been published; public attention had moved on.
An air disaster dominates the news until the next story. For those involved, however, the investigation, in all its gritty, tedious detail, is enormously important. People can face jail, as the Helios workers did. Airlines and manufacturers can be sued and fined, ordered to make expensive design or operational changes, and subjected to new regulations. Aviation authorities can be exposed as derelict, and government secrets can be exposed.
In air accident investigations in some countries, unlike in criminal cases, people with an interest in the outcome take part. The airline, pilots, maintenance workers, air traffic controllers, flight attendants, product manufacturers, and government officials work together. The idea is that that their conflicting interests keep them all in check.
Still, there is a real knowledge disparity. For example, when Inmarsat arrived in Malaysia with the news that its satellite data could be used to help locate the airplane, its calculations showed that the 777 flew into the South Indian Ocean. This news was met with skepticism.
Inmarsat’s vice president for aviation, David Coiley, kept defending the company’s research, telling me that the calculations and conclusions were peer reviewed. But seriously, who were the company’s peers? This was new to everybody. Coiley said even his own people didn’t understand completely. “We could tell [only] so much from a simple handshake or logon.”
An experienced tin kicker is a generalist—a mile wide and half an inch deep. Conversely, the designer of a microprocessor or satellite communication system is a specialist—half an inch wide and a mile deep. The trend for future investigations will be toward more sophisticated, niche areas of specialization, according to Robert MacIntosh, former NTSB chief of international aviation affairs. “We’re going to have to depend more and more on the technical expertise we get from the manufacturers.”
Cue the menacing Jaws theme music here, because this approach calls for trusting the untrustworthy, those with a stake in the outcome, said Florida State University professor Lance deHaven-Smith. A fervent contrarian, deHaven-Smith said people who will suspect the activities of foreign governments are reluctant to doubt their own, even though they should. “We got enough events where the government is not giving us an adequate explanation,” he said. When accidents happen that benefit the powerful, or happen with a frequency that defies the odds, a little mistrust can be a good thing.
There were many reasons to question the cause of the crash that killed Dorothy Hunt, wife of White House fixer E. Howard Hunt, in 1972. Ms. Hunt was a former CIA operative who was said to have delivered hush money to the Watergate burglars in the scandal that led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation.
On an overcast afternoon in December of that year, she was flying on United Flight 553 from Washington to Chicago.
Snow and freezing rain fell as the Boeing 737 stalled on approach to the city’s Midway Airport and plowed into a residential neighborhood. The NTSB said in its final report that it found no evidence of “any medical condition that would have incapacitated the cre
w, or of any interference with the crew in the performance of their duties,” in short, no evidence of foul play. Still, there were several eyebrow-raising details. Hunt was carrying $10,000 and had bought $250,000 of flight insurance before boarding.
“It’s pretty wild when you have the White House being blackmailed by a former CIA agent to keep quiet about a crime,” deHaven-Smith said of the circumstances. “Then she dies in a plane crash with ten thousand K? If you’re not suspicious of that, you’re crazy.”
The investigation was more difficult because the flight data recorder was not working. Despite that, the NTSB found oversights by the crew during the critical period as the plane neared the airport.
By analyzing the engine noise and other sounds captured by the cockpit voice recorder and time-syncing them with the air traffic control radar, the investigators deduced that the pilots were trying to comply with requests from ATC to slow their arrival so that another plane could clear the runway. With gear down and spoilers deployed, the crew did not maintain enough speed after leveling the airplane and got dangerously close to a stall.
Flight 553 was at one thousand feet, just below the minimum decision height, when the controller asked the crew to execute a missed approach. At precisely that time, the stick shaker started and the pilots retracted the flaps to fifteen degrees and applied takeoff power.
The Crash Detectives Page 7
