Flight 7 Is Missing

by Ken H. Fortenberry

  Later that afternoon, my brothers and I traveled to Yosemite National Park, where Jerry and I had so many fond memories of family camping trips. I can still see Daddy tying a shiny gold-and-orange lure onto his fishing line and gently tossing it into a rushing creek, hoping a trout would strike.

  We soaked in the natural beauty of that magnificent area, and Craig, who was just two years old when our father died, listened patiently as Jerry and I talked about old times. The only thing Craig knows about his father is what he has learned from us or by looking through family pictures.

  We tried to find some of the campsites where Daddy had pitched our tent. We walked along several creekside trails where we played as kids, and after dinner we talked for hours about our father, our family, the crash, and how our lives might have been different had he not been taken from us while we were still children.

  It was one of the few times that the three of us had bonded as adults, and it felt good. Very good.

  When I went to bed that night in a Yosemite cabin, for the first time since I had been a crying six-year-old in my Santa Clara bedroom I felt a sense of relief and closure. Something came over me and said that everything was going to be OK, that it would be all right to let go of yesterday and get on with my life.

  And that’s exactly what I intended to do.

  But I couldn’t.

  Within a week I was back in the search for my father’s killer. Nagging at me now were the troubling comments purser Crosthwaite’s stepdaughter, Tania, had made to the San Francisco Chronicle reporter who wrote the front-page story about the anniversary of the crash.

  “It’s hard to believe that my stepdad did this,” she said. “He was so good to me, so kind. All those police reports, I think they got something confused.”

  Confused? So good? So kind?

  The only person confused was Tania, and I had her sworn statement to a federal investigator back in 1957 to prove it.

  She told the newspaper that she hoped I would find peace and noted that we shared “a terrible thing that happened . . . we lost loved ones.”

  How could I ever find peace until I solved this mystery? Why was she lying to the newspaper? Had she forgotten that she had once stated that her stepfather had treated her like dirt? Why would she intentionally try to paint Crosthwaite as a loving, caring father? Was she trying to send me off in another direction and divert attention from her stepfather, or had her memory failed her after all these years? What could possibly be her motivation for lying to the reporter?

  I reached out to Tania several times in the following years, but she would not respond. It would take me more than a decade to get the answers to those questions.

  Simply on a hunch a few years later I persuaded a researcher at the Otto Richter Library in Miami to look into a specific file in the Pan Am archives and see if she could locate any records about the weak and garbled radio transmissions that may—or may not—have come from the plane. By this time archivists at the library were making significant headway in categorizing and archiving the now-bankrupt Pan Am’s historical records.

  What she found in that file folder was nothing short of a bombshell.

  Dr. Herken and I knew that on January 17, 1958—the day after the formal CAB hearing had concluded—audio engineers from the Dictaphone Corporation volunteered to study the recordings once again. Two weeks later, using advanced equipment on loan from the Voice of America, Dictaphone claimed to have deciphered a weak transmission from Romance of the Skies, beginning approximately seven minutes and thirty seconds after Flight 7’s last position report. This information was sent to the CAB before its final report was issued in 1959, but the CAB for some reason ultimately decided that no emergency transmission had ever come from the airplane.

  That didn’t make sense, because the Dictaphone transcript report in the archive’s files included what appeared to be an urgent emergency call and an unusual exchange among crew members over open microphone:

  “SO 292 Special Number and Flyer. (Also understood as '…number on fire.')

  “Attention All Stations Pan American Air.

  “Verification Channel Bearing 11.

  “Still have one tank full. Am ditching flight.

  “CQ, CQ, Syracuse, New York.

  “J arm is missing, tail.

  Then, in a voice different from the one who gave a position report:

  “Did you chart me? [Inaudible]… Special position.

  And then the same voice who made the position report:

  “Fuel control—3, 4, 5, 6,

  “Zero 2 fuel flow! Zero 2 fuel flow! Coordinate.”

  Then, two voices speaking excitedly, and these final words:

  “What about 3 engine?”

  Dr. Herken and I concluded that Flight 7 did indeed send some kind of distress message. However, even after speaking with numerous Stratocruiser pilots and aircraft experts and sharing the transcript, we could not locate anyone who was able to understand what the crew was trying to say, other than the plane was in distress.

  In 2013, Dr. Herken and I received the Dave Abrams and Gene Banning Research Grant from the Pan Am Historical Foundation and headed back to the Richter Library at the University of Miami. We spent days poring over hundreds of documents and in January 2017 wrote a follow-up article for Air and Space magazine titled: “What Happened to Pan Am Flight 7? Sabotage? Negligence? Fraud? New clues surface in 60-year-old aviation mystery.”

  We reported that statistically, the B-377 was half as safe, per passenger-mile flown, as other aircraft used on the same routes by Pan Am’s rival airlines at the time: United’s Douglas DC-6s and TWA’s Lockheed Constellations. Of the 56 B-377s built, ten were lost in accidents, and in five of those cases the crash occurred after a propeller failed, causing that engine to be torn from the wing.

  We also reported another troubling tale: In the weeks before the crash, N90944’s engines had experienced a “constant fluctuation” in oil pressure, leaks from the turbochargers, and persistent cooling problems—problems Pan Am didn’t want the public to know.

  “In May 1958, J.J. Cantwell, an attorney representing Pan Am, wrote to CAB official Robert Chrisp to protest Chrisp’s plan to cite Pan Am’s lax maintenance in the government’s report. In a separate letter to the airline’s legal department, Cantwell frankly admitted that he hoped to persuade Chrisp ‘to withhold the maintenance report from the public record.’

  “Although the CAB report acknowledged the board had found a ‘number of irregularities in maintenance procedures and/or practices’ at the airline, the absence of a clear distress call and the dearth of physical evidence from the crash made it ‘obviously impossible to associate (those irregularities) with, or disassociate them from the accident.’ The report makes no mention of union rep Phil Ice’s allegations of poor maintenance,” we reported.

  We disclosed that the report’s conclusions had been hotly debated within the CAB and that documents we discovered showed that three weeks before the report’s public release, CAB chairman James Durfee dissented from the conclusions reached at the Bureau of Safety meeting at which the final report was approved.

  “I am not satisfied with the language, the discussion, or the findings with respect to Pan Am’s maintenance practices,” he wrote. Durfee also noted that the CAB’s parent organization, the Civil Aeronautics Authority, had yet to reprimand Pan Am for its maintenance deficiencies or to ensure that the deficiencies had been corrected.

  There may have been a reason for that: The CAA had a built-in conflict of interest. Even though it was the agency responsible for investigating commercial aviation accidents, it was also charged with promoting flying to the public.

  “CAA and CAB officials, including members of the Bureau of Safety, were routinely given free tickets by the major carriers, and were wined and dined by the companies they were supposed to be overseeing. One mechanic at the 944 hearings testified that he’d overheard a CAB investigator and a Pan Am executive discussing where to go to
dinner that night, and what time to play golf the next morning. The CAA was subsequently abolished and replaced by the Federal Aviation Agency (later the Federal Aviation Administration), which had responsibility for investigating aircraft accidents, not for promoting air travel,” we reported in the Air and Space article.

  “The government never fully investigated the role that shoddy maintenance may have played in the loss of PAA-944. Nor did the CAB conclude that the cause was catastrophic mechanical failure, despite the evidence of the Dictaphone transcript.”

  Our conclusion was this:

  “Ultimately, what brought down Romance of the Skies was human fallibility. A propulsion technology had reached its limits. A government agency had become cozy with the companies it was meant to police. And an airline, in its rush to enter the Jet Age, had decided to cut corners, ignoring the risk to passengers and crew.”

  Years after Herken and I wrote this story I learned that CAB chairman Durfee frequently had been the recipient of unusual hospitality by airline companies regulated by his agency. In September 1957, for example, Eastern Airlines treated him to a four-day trip to Mexico, and a month later Trans World Airlines gave Durfee and his wife a four-day free trip to Rome. A year earlier, he was the guest of Flying Tiger Airlines on a three-day golfing party trip to Pinehurst, North Carolina.

  Although we concluded in the Air and Space article that mechanical failure was the most likely cause of the crash, I still had nagging questions—questions that we had never been able to answer. Dr. Herken was convinced that mechanical failure, probably a thrown propeller, was the culprit, but I remained skeptical even though I had coauthored and signed off on the article with him.

  Clearly, the Stratocruiser had been a troubled aircraft, and the arguments in favor of mechanical failure were compelling. Maybe a propeller did tear away from an engine, rip through the fuselage, and bring the airliner down. Maybe an engine did catch fire, and it could not be extinguished before flames spread and entered the fuselage, crippling the plane.

  Maybe.

  Was mechanical failure possible? Of course. Was it probable? I wasn’t so sure, and neither was the Civil Aeronautics Board when it had issued its tentative and inconclusive report in 1959. I still can’t fathom the possibility that Pan Am failed to make a quick, simple, inexpensive repair to an oil transfer tube.

  I continued to believe that there was as much evidence or more, if only circumstantial and coincidental, that the plane had been sabotaged by passenger Payne or purser Crosthwaite. I kept reminding myself that investigators had only bits and pieces of the giant airliner to work with when they had issued their report, and even after thousands of hours of study they had been unable to agree on a probable cause, leaving the mystery unsolved.

  As a journalist I had been trained to check everything out, and then check it out again. An editor once told me: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” So even after the Air and Space article I continued to check things out.

  Lodge owner Payne remained my prime suspect, and I hadn’t yet fully written off purser Crosthwaite. Payne’s son, Michael (Kim), and his stepson, Kip, clammed up and declined to talk with me once they realized I was writing a book. I have been unable to reach their estranged sister, Kitti Ruth, a former high school rodeo star who briefly surfaced in the news several years ago when she unsuccessfully sued Publisher’s Clearing House. She had no established address or working phone number. The owner of a California trailer park she had used as an address for several years told me she had never heard of her, and even the homeless women’s shelters in the area had no knowledge of her existence, even though she had given their addresses as her own. I have left numerous messages on her Facebook page, but she had refused to answer them.

  Although the Paynes weren’t talking, which seemed suspicious to me, I was able to find a man in California who had gone to school with Kip and Kim Payne when they lived in Scott Bar, and his recollections of the days after the plane crash were revealing.

  “I think people wondered why they moved up there in the first place. It was like they were hiding from something,” recalled William Nowdesha. “Anyway, it was a very strange thing when he disappeared. Everybody had their eyebrows up. There’s only about fifty people around there, and everyone was wondering.

  “The community was talking about [the crash], and they were feeling sorry for [the widow Payne]. All of a sudden, the FBI [likely the CAB] shows up, and that became the talk of the town. It was quite a big event for the year. We always figured somebody did it for the insurance money.”

  Nowdesha, who used to wait for the school bus at Roxbury Lodge with the Payne boys, then said some things that raised my eyebrows:

  “Not long [after the crash], what we would call a gigolo moved in with her [Payne’s widow]. He wasn’t involved in anything, but we did see her carry him around the town. He was a tall, good-looking man. He was dark-complected. People notice that sort of thing in a small town. When that fellow moved in so soon after the crash it was a big red flag.

  “And not too long later the place burned down. FBI agents were around to try to prove that she had done something to it. I believe the kids were with relatives in Manteca when it burned.”

  Nowdesha said he and others in the tiny community visited the ruins of the lodge a week or so later.

  “There wasn’t much left. Just a fireplace and a few things, like a metal walk-in freezer.”

  I wondered how the widow Payne and her children had handled the news of the plane crash and their missing husband and father.

  “They didn’t seem concerned,” he said. “They just faded into the background. They never talked about it. They were very quiet. They more or less withdrew into the house and never had much to do with anyone after the crash. They retreated into themselves.”

  Nowdesha’s observations seemed to add fuel to the fire that Payne and perhaps his widow were involved in some sinister plot to blow up the plane. Then again, the Paynes may have been so consumed by grief that they simply did not want to interact with nosy neighbors.

  Nevertheless, having covered my bases as best I could with the Payne family, I turned once again to Crosthwaite’s stepdaughter, Tania. I continued to be puzzled by her comments to the San Francisco newspaper years earlier, when she had claimed that her stepfather was a wonderful man who would never, ever do something as awful as sabotaging an airplane and killing innocent people.

  Why would she lie like that? My gut told me something just didn’t add up.

  Still dissatisfied with the CAB’s 1958 report and getting nowhere with either the Paynes or with Crosthwaite’s stepdaughter, on Monday, August 14, 2017, I formally asked the National Transportation Safety Board to reopen the investigation or to at least finish what its predecessor agency, the Civil Aeronautics Board, had left undone. I also asked Congressman Rick Larsen of Washington, a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and ranking member of the Aviation Subcommittee, for his assistance. Not surprisingly, Larsen, whose major contributors include The Boeing Company, did not even offer me the courtesy of a response.

  The NTSB, however, did respond, with an email on September 13, 2017: “Regarding the loss of Pan Am Flight 7, the NTSB is not planning any further investigative action because this type of aircraft and major systems onboard are not in commercial service within the United States and the air carrier no longer operates,” Dr. Elias Kontansis stated. “In essence, commercial aviation operations have moved well beyond the state of the industry in 1957 . . . and reopening the investigation would not contribute significantly to improving the safety of current or future commercial aviation operations.”

  Dr. Kontansis advised me to contact the FBI if I believed the crash may have resulted from an intentional act, and that’s exactly what I did. Not surprisingly, the FBI turned me down again. I was disappointed, but not surprised.

  With no help from the FBI or the NTSB, I turned to another federal agency, the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration, and pleaded for its assistance in searching the ocean bottom for the wreckage of Romance of the Skies. NOAA has been involved in undersea exploration for many years and I thought that because several active-duty servicemen and other government employees had perished in the crash that the agency might consider a search of the area, perhaps when it was working on an unrelated project nearby.

  On Thursday, July 20, 2017, I received a courteous rejection from the agency.

  “I appreciate your interest in this specific wreck and the meaning its discovery would have for you and your family. Unfortunately, at this time we do not have any planned deepwater operations for the area and will be heading to the Atlantic Ocean this fall to begin several years of operations in that ocean basin,” Alan Leonardi stated in an email.

  “As such, we will not have any near-term opportunity to support your request. I hope you may have luck in your quest in the coming years and can find partners who can meet your expedition needs,” he stated.

  I wasn’t ready to give up on a deep-sea exploration so I asked Leonardi to suggest one of those “partners” to me and he recommended two organizations that had the kind of assets needed for such a monumental undertaking—the Ocean Exploration Trust and the Schmidt Ocean Institute.

  I immediately contacted both.

  Dr. Carlie S. Wiener, director of marine communications for the Schmidt Ocean Institute, told me that her organization’s schedule was very tight for the next several years, but encouraged me to send coordinates of the search-and-recovery area in the remote chance that a team might be in the area in the future. She also said that the Ocean Exploration Trust might be better suited to handle a search for Romance of the Skies.

  Ocean Exploration Trust is perhaps best known for its discovery of the RMS Titanic and the German battleship Bismarck. Its founder, Dr. Robert Ballard, is considered by many to be the preeminent ocean explorer of our time.