“Don’t worry. We’ll keep in touch, and I’ll let you know just as soon as we know something. It may not be anything but a radio problem.”
“I’ll be here, right by the phone.”
“Oh, one other thing: If I don’t call by 3 a.m. you’ll know that the plane’s gas supply has been exhausted and the plane is down.”
What a cold, heartless thing to say, she says to herself, then freezes like an iceberg. That chill. That late-morning chill is back again. Now she knows what it was all about when Daddy left the airport this morning.
“Oh God. What now? What will I tell the boys? Please, God, don’t let anything be wrong.”
“I am so sorry, Mrs. Fortenberry, but we’ll keep you informed. Someone will call in an hour or so.”
She phones some of our neighbors, who rush over. They spend the long, worrisome night with her.
It is the longest night of her life.
A contact from Pan Am calls every hour with an update, but the news is never good.
“This is Pan Am again, Mrs. Fortenberry. I’m afraid we haven’t found Bill’s plane yet.”
“Have you heard anything?”
“No, I’m afraid not, but we’re still hoping that it’s just a communications problem. Their radio might just be out.”
“I hope so, but that’s what the other fellow told me a couple of hours ago. What is Pan Am doing to find them? A big plane like that can’t just disappear, can it?” she asked.
“We have every available plane and ship in the area searching their route. Everyone’s doing everything we can. We’ll stay in touch.”
At 10 p.m., Honolulu Air Traffic Control sends a message “in the blind” to Flight 7, broadcasting in hopes that the plane’s crew can hear radio transmissions but for some unexplained reason is incapable of sending them. The tower gives Flight 7 clearance for a standard instrument approach to the Honolulu International Airport, and every ship in Pearl Harbor turns on its searchlights for twenty-five minutes. The sky comes ablaze with bright lights, beacons for the missing plane.
Again, nothing. Moments later, all approaches to the Honolulu airport are cleared of all other aircraft just in case Romance of the Skies needs to make an emergency landing.
My mother paces the floor, wringing her hands behind her back. From the kitchen to the family room. From the family room to her bedroom. Back to the kitchen and on to the family room. Again and again. When the phone rings shortly after 3 a.m. she knows what she will hear.
“They’re definitely down now, Ronnie, but we have to keep the faith. We have our planes in the air, the Air Force is helping us, and the Coast Guard is sending out ships. Every plane—commercial and military—along the route is being told to be on the lookout for our plane. Bill’s plane has survival equipment—rafts, radios, and such—and we just have to be hopeful that we’ll find them soon.”
Mom tries to be hopeful, but she has keen instincts, and those instincts tell her the news won’t be good from here on out.
A Quantas airliner is flying nearly the same route as Romance of the Skies when Captain Max Bamman gets the word to be on the lookout for the missing airliner. He immediately descends from 15,000 feet to 5,000 feet and follows along the route of the missing plane’s last reported position.
The weather is clear. There is a full moon. All aboard are asked to look out the windows for any sign of the plane.
They see nothing.
We are on a long family camping adventure, somewhere in Oregon on our way to Canada, when Daddy suddenly pulls the car off the two-lane road near a high steel bridge that crosses a river. We’re not sure what’s on his mind, but when he opens the trunk and takes out our fishing gear Jerry and I get excited. This isn’t just going to be another stop to pee; it’s going to be a fishing adventure!
I grab my rod and reel and remember to keep my thumb slightly on the reel as I let the line down to the slow-moving river below and hope for a bite.
It’s not long before I grow bored.
“Patience, son. Patience,” Daddy urges, and I keep staring down at the red-and-white floating plastic bobber below.
Then it happens!
A tug like I had never felt before, and I instantly start reeling the line in.
“That’s my boy. You’re doing fine,” Daddy encourages as he rushes over, pats me on the back, and looks below.
“Keep reeling, son. Steady now. It’s a whopper, Kenny. A dad-blamed whopper!”
I can barely contain my excitement but somehow manage to pull the fish in as Daddy grabs the line to secure the catch.
“It’s a crappie. The biggest crappie ever!” he says proudly.
I break into a huge grin as Daddy tells me to open my hands and to hold the fish tightly so it doesn’t get away.
He’s right; it is the biggest crappie ever.
I’m a real fisherman now. Just like Daddy.
It is Saturday morning, November 9, and there has been no word from Romance of the Skies since the routine position report nearly twelve hours ago, and there is no doubt now that the giant airliner is down somewhere in the middle of the Pacific. The plane had enough fuel to stay in the air until 3 a.m., and the urgent questions now are: where did it go down, and is anyone alive?
“We are now past the gasoline endurance point and the aircraft must be presumed to be down somewhere in the Pacific,” Pan Am executive vice president Robert B. Murray Jr. tells reporters. “The crew is experienced and well trained and we are still hopeful.”
In the gloomy predawn morning at Pan American’s San Francisco base, a Boeing Stratocruiser and a DC-7C are parked nose to tail on the ramp outside the dispatch office. The aircraft are surrounded by trucks and service vehicles as ground crewmen prepare them for missions that might last more than twenty hours in the air.
Pilot Cliff Pierce, who had been asked at 10:30 the previous night to join in the morning search as “extra eyes,” slowly walks into the briefing room. Today, there is none of the usual good-humored banter. No conversation or light jokes among crewmembers. Pierce knows there is nothing to laugh about.
On this morning, a Pan American plane is missing; six of Pierce’s colleagues have disappeared.
Forty-seven-year-old Captain Don Kinkel, a Pan Am assistant chief pilot who flew the Korean air lift with Captain Brown six years ago, will command the Stratocruiser; Captain Sam Peters, the DC-7. When they reach the search area, they will drop down to 200-300 feet and fly patterns covering 200 square miles of ocean. They really don’t expect to find the plane, and they realize that even if it made a controlled landing and had not broken up there is little chance it will still be afloat.
They are, however, hoping to find people in life rafts, and the pilots are desperately praying that they will be found alive before they perish at sea. But even that seems unlikely. Pierce and the other Pan Am employees understand that if the plane had been able to make a safe landing the crew would have had time to report the problem, like Captain Dick Ogg had done a year ago, when he successfully ditched N90943 in roughly the same area with no loss of life.
Still, they hold out hope.
By 5:30 a.m. the search planes are in the air, each with two pilots, two flight engineers, and four observers. It will take them four and a half hours to reach the search area, about 1,106 miles east of Honolulu. None of the searchers have had breakfast, but once aboard their planes they check out the galleys and are surprised to find bacon, eggs, toast, and piping-hot coffee for all. It takes a slight edge off the stress.
At about 10 a.m. they rendezvous with the Coast Guard weather ship Minnetonka, stationed halfway between San Francisco and Honolulu. The ship was the last known contact for the missing airliner, and the search commences from that point.
There is plenty of junk floating on the ocean this morning, and observers quickly jump at everything they see. It doesn’t take them long to become accustomed to the floating garbage, and the novice observers become veteran searchers within an hour. The area is
saturated with military aircraft, cargo vessels, the passenger liner Matsonia, even a submarine. Everyone is searching within hundreds of miles in all directions for anything that might provide a clue to the missing airliner.
As morning breaks, the house at 1338 Loyola Drive in Santa Clara is being held captive, tossed and turned by hope one minute and despair the next
“Is the paper here yet?”
“I don’t know, Ronnie. Here, why don’t you have a cup of coffee?” Dr. William Schaffer urges, as he hands Mom a white-and-gold China coffee cup from a set Daddy had bought on one of his overseas trips. “I just made it fresh. You haven’t slept a wink all night.”
Dr. Schaffer and his wife, Marjorie, across-the-street neighbors, are a sweet elderly couple who love children and occasionally invite my brother Jerry and me over for root beer floats and a game of Parcheesi.
“Thanks, Dr. Schaffer. I’ll get some in a minute, but I want to see the paper first,” Mom replies as she opens the front door and walks outside. The first thing she notices is the sweet smell of the cedar siding on our almost-new house. It smells so fresh, so alive. My mother picks the newspaper up from the sidewalk, rips off the rubber band, and opens the front page with its big headline. It seems to scream off the page at her:
SF Airliner Overdue With 44 On Board
HONOLULU - A Pan American Stratocruiser, last heard from at 5:40 p.m. yesterday and due to run out of gas at 3 a.m. today, was presumed down in the West Pacific Ocean, somewhere between here and San Francisco.
This is no longer a terrible nightmare to be shaken out of. This is real. She feels that bone-chilling cold again, and now she knows for certain why she had felt that way yesterday morning. She scans the names of passengers and crew and shakes uncontrollably when she finds what she is looking for and still hoping not to see:
Second Officer William H. Fortenberry, 35, 1338 Loyola Drive, Santa Clara.
Her eyes flood and she begins to weep. She has always known that flying an airplane carries with it certain risks, but she has tried not to think about something like this ever happening. But there it is, in black and white, and it can’t be denied anymore.
Bill may be dead, and she will be left all alone in the world to raise three little boys, more than 3,000 miles from any relatives back in South Carolina. It is a thought she quickly erases. Bill is still alive. She just knows it. The phone will soon ring and someone from Pan Am will tell her that Bill and all the others have been found safely aboard life rafts floating in the ocean.
Walking back into the house, her head buried between the pages of the newspaper, she nearly trips on a cracked piece of sidewalk.
“Bill said he was going to fix that when he got home,” she mumbles and starts to cry.
I meet her at the front door. There will be no Saturday morning cartoon watching today; Dr. Schaffer has broken the news to Jerry and me that our father’s plane is overdue in Honolulu and that a big search is underway.
“Did they find him, Mama? Did they find Daddy?”
My mother pulls me close and her tears overflow onto my face.
“Not yet, honey. Not yet. But they’re still looking.”
“They’ll find him, won’t they, Mama?”
“Oh, Kenny. Let’s hope and pray they do.”
“Daddy’s a good swimmer, Mama. He’ll be OK. I know it.”
The families of the other crew members of Flight 7 spend most of Saturday fielding questions from reporters, talking with friends and relatives, and praying for some good news.
They remain hopeful that the plane has successfully ditched in the ocean and everyone is safely aboard life rafts awaiting their imminent rescue.
The telephone rings in the suburban Detroit, Michigan home of Wynne and Barbara Clack just as Wynne begins to fix breakfast for their children, Norma and David. His wife, calling from her job at J. L. Hudson’s in Detroit, tells Wynne she has just heard part of a radio newscast about a missing plane and thinks she heard the report mention Wynne’s brother, Lee.
Wynne, a teacher at Van Dyke Junior High School, immediately turns on the AM radio, tunes in the 9 a.m. news, and calls Norma and David into the kitchen to listen while he continues to fix their breakfast. The next words shatter his life:
“A Pan American flight from San Francisco to Hawaii is overdue and is presumed to be down at sea. Among the passengers is a Michigan resident—Dow International executive H. L. Clack and his family.”
The thirty-two-year-old Wynne freezes, and for a few moments tries in vain to answer his children’s questions, then is consumed by grief. He asks Norma to finish breakfast, then goes into his bedroom and closes the door. He kneels by his bed and begins crying, his face buried in the covers. The unfolding tragedy is so overwhelming that his mind can’t grasp what is happening. A decorated Navy veteran who served in the South Pacific during World War II, he has seen some terrible things in his life, but nothing—nothing—has prepared him for a moment like this.
He grows numb and, like others who are getting the awful news this morning, cries until he can cry no longer.
In the Los Altos home of Captain Brown, thirty-nine-year-old Emily speaks briefly and tensely with reporters who have gathered for news of her husband’s overdue plane. The house is packed with concerned neighbors and friends who are trying to comfort the family, but there is nothing they can say, nothing they can do, to ease the near hysteria of Mrs. Brown and her five children.
Her eldest son, nineteen-year-old Edward, hovers over his mother and tells her that everything will be OK. She runs her fingers through her hair, smiles weakly, and speaks softly as her eldest daughter, eighteen-year-old Aminta, sits reassuringly by her side.
“I pray to God everything will turn out all right,” Mrs. Brown says.
“We are hopeful it will be turning out all right, and the next thing we hear is that they’re fishing from rafts,” Hal Gillespie, a former Pan Am pilot and friend of Captain Brown’s, answers.
She looks around and asks no one in particular:
“How much gas did he have? How long can he keep it in the air?”
In midafternoon, my mother walks to her bedroom, opens a closet door, and pulls out a Buster Brown shoebox—once containing a pair of size-four shoes for either Jerry or me. It is now her treasure chest of letters from Daddy. The letters are postmarked from places like Berlin, Beirut, Frankfurt, Wake Island, Tokyo, and Sydney. They always comfort her when he is away on a flight. Now, she fears, they are more than just letters.
She sits on the edge of their bed and opens the first letter she comes to:
Hotel Monopol-Metropol
Frankfurt, Germany
8 p.m., Tuesday, November 9, 1954
“Dear Mother and Boys:
“Last night when I got home from Beirut there was a letter from my dear Mom and my boys. Gosh! It was good to hear from you!
“You are a wonderful and beautiful wife, Darling, and I know it. I knew you would be. That is why I married you. You have been everything to me and I love you more and more each day. I know that home is where I grumble most and am treated best. In this business, I have to be sweet whether I like it or not and it is great to be able to come home and grumble a little. When I get home I don’t think I will ever grumble anymore. I’m going to spend all my time giving you all the love I have been saving for you. . . .“I can’t say that I’m sorry I came here, but I sure do miss you. It will be good in several ways: this will be the longest we have been apart since we were married, and you will have time to decide whether to keep me or not! I think the boys will keep me and maybe you will, too. You could do better, but you might do worse!
“I’ll write more tonight.
Love, Daddy”
Mom falls face first on the bed, grabs a pillow, and covers her head.
“Oh, God, grumble for me again, Bill. Please, grumble for me, Bill!!”
Minutes later she regains her composure and walks back into the family room, where more people have joined th
e vigil. She notices a newspaper on a coffee table. It’s the afternoon final edition of the San Mateo Times, and its big, bold headline strikes even more fear and dread in her heart:
AIRLINER HOPES FADE
44 Aboard Lost For Over 22 Hours
She picks it up and doesn’t even notice the main picture and the other headline on the page. It’s a remarkable story about a mysterious blazing unidentified fireball—“as bright as a searchlight”—that fell at an angle from the sky over nearby Hillsborough last night and smashed into a field.
By 4 p.m. the 1,600-crew aircraft carrier USS Philippine Sea, docked at Pier E in the Long Beach Naval Shipyard, about twenty miles north of Los Angeles, is being readied to join the massive search-and-rescue mission for the missing plane. Navy shore patrol trucks and police cars are roaming the streets of San Diego, contacting sailors and ordering them back to the ship. Sailors strolling arm in arm with their girls are stopped dead in their tracks and told to report back to the ship at once.
Switchboard operators at the Long Beach Naval Station begin making phone calls to the ship’s key personnel, and in San Diego the same scene is being repeated, these calls being made to crewmen of Squadron VS21, an antisubmarine outfit equipped with propeller-driven Grumman aircraft, and to crewmen of HS6, a helicopter squadron. The crews from both units are ordered to fly to Long Beach, and by late afternoon a steady caravan of cars begins pulling up to the big gray flattop carrier as other crew members report for duty.
“Now hear this, now hear this,” the ship’s loudspeakers blare on the public-address system. “This ship is being made ready to join the search for the airliner that is missing at sea. You will be notified of further developments as they are received.”
Trucks loaded with supplies for the big ship, which had just returned from deployment in the Far East, begin arriving at shipside, and promptly at dusk the first of twenty-eight helicopters from San Diego roars over the carrier and lands on the flight deck.
Flight 7 Is Missing Page 8
