China Clipper

by Robert Gandt

  Only NC-4 remained in the game. Dubbed the Lame Duck for her lateness in joining the others at Trepassey, she had outdistanced her sister ships during the night. From the navigator’s station in the nose of the aircraft, Albert Read checked off each ocean station precisely on schedule. Then came the dawn, and the Lame Duck, like the others, flew into fog and squalls and severe turbulence. In the gray murk, Read missed station 17. Walter Hinton, at the controls of NC-4, wrestled to maintain control of the wallowing aircraft. Finally Read ordered him to climb above the overcast and, with neither the ocean stations nor celestial navigation available for guidance, continued toward the Azores by dead reckoning.

  At 0930 Azores time, through a gap in the cloud cover, Read spotted the dark color of land—the cliffs of the island of Flores. Hinton spiraled the flying boat down through the overcast. Cruising low on the water, the Lame Duck flew toward the island of Faial and the harbor of Horta. Fifteen hours and eighteen minutes after her departure from North America, NC-4 came to rest in the Azores.3

  For Read and his crew, the rest of the trip was routine. After a lengthy delay for weather, they continued to Ponta Delgada, then across the eight-hundred-mile span of ocean to Lisbon, Portugal. Beneath them, as before, was a lifeline of some fourteen navy ocean stations. Three days later they were airborne again, stopping at Figueira and Ferrol. They followed their “bridge of boats” onward to England. Amid wild acclaim, salutes, sirens, and official greetings, NC-4 arrived in Plymouth. The Lame Duck and her crew of U.S. Navy airmen had won the distinction of being the first to conquer the Atlantic by air.

  In Newfoundland, two teams of British flyers were poised for their own transatlantic attempts. Harry Hawker and his navigator, Mackenzie Grieve, and Freddie Raynham with his fellow Briton, C.W.P. Morgan, received the report that the navy boat had safely landed in the Azores. Although the news subtracted from the historical significance of the British efforts, the navy’s feat was not a nonstop flight to European soil. The Daily Mail prize money was still up for grabs.

  Hawker and Grieve took off in their single-engine Sopwith and proceeded out to sea. An hour later, Raynham and Morgan strapped into their Martinsyde biplane and roared down their makeshift Newfoundland runway, bound for Europe.

  Neither made it. The heavily loaded Martinsyde Raymor, caught by a gust, collapsed its landing gear and crashed on takeoff. Meanwhile, Hawker and Grieve, in their Sopwith Atlantic, reached mid-ocean before their engine lost its coolant and forced them to ditch in the ocean alongside a Danish freighter. Despite their bad luck, both British crews managed to survive their crashes.

  Early in June the team of John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown took off from Newfoundland in their twin-engined Vickers Vimy bomber. Sixteen hours and twelve minutes later, after a nose-down landing in an Irish bog, they became the first to cross the Atlantic in a single flight.

  So what did it all mean? Who had, in fact, been first to cross the Atlantic? Patriotic fervor prevailed on both sides of the Atlantic. In the New World, jingoistic American newspapers left no doubt that Albert Read and the crew of the NC-4 were indeed “first across.” Harry Hawker, on the opposite shore, bespoke the British view: “I am more gratified than I can say that British air supremacy has been maintained by British aviation and a British machine has made the first successful crossing.”

  What, in fact, had been proved by the NC adventure? The planned use of the “bridge of boats” obviated much of the need for self-contained navigational means. The over-dependence on the lifeline of destroyers led, in part, to the undoing of the NC-1 and NC-3 who, when contact was lost with their surface guardians, chose open-sea landings in order to verify their positions. Little practical use came of the weighty radio gear installed in the NCs.

  There were the inevitable cries of indignation at the outlay of material and money. These were the same arguments raised half a century later during the Apollo missions to the moon. Why, asked the skeptics, should a nation’s treasury be expended on an exploit—transatlantic flight or lunar exploration—that produces no tangible military or economic reward?

  But priceless lessons were learned. NC-1 and NC-3 survived their downings at sea—an overwhelming argument for the practicality of flying boats. The requirement for specialized airborne celestial navigation techniques, including the use of Byrd’s bubble sextant, was established. The infant craft of meteorology, particularly in the oceanic regions, came into its own.

  The flying boat, it had been proved, could cross an ocean. In the case of the NC boats, the flight was a government-sponsored endeavor. But it raised questions: Was there a commercial future in such an enterprise? Would passengers pay to fly across bodies of water? Could money be made with flying boats?

  4

  Boats for Hire

  On New Year’s Day, 1914, the mayor of St. Petersburg, Florida, A. C. Pheil, settled himself into the passenger seat of a two-place Benoist Airboat. While the mayor waved to the cheering crowd, the wooden-hulled flying boat skipped across the bay and clattered off in the direction of Tampa, Florida, where it landed twenty-three minutes later in the Hillsboro River. Mr. Pheil had become the first airline passenger in history. His pilot, Tony Jannus, was one of the pioneer seaplane airmen of the day.1

  The St. Petersburg–Tampa Airboat Line flew between the two cities twice daily, charging five dollars for a ticket. Though the Benoist could carry only one passenger, the airline soon acquired a larger model with double the capacity—two passengers. The boats were products of the Benoist Aircraft Company of St. Louis, Missouri. Similar in appearance to the Curtiss F-boat, the wood and fabric biplane was powered by a seventy-five horsepower Roberts engine connected by chain drive to a single propeller that was mounted behind the cockpit and between the wings. It had a top speed of about seventy miles per hour. Each of the airline’s two aircraft cost $4,150, a hefty investment in equipment for 1914.

  The St. Petersburg–Tampa Airboat Line lasted only three months. The trickle of revenue failed to match expenses, a condition endemic to the airline business for years to come. The little airline had operated its flying boats with great regularity, covering some 11,000 miles and carrying over 1,200 passengers.2

  * * *

  Until 1926, the only significant airline passenger service in the New World was provided by flying boats. On the inland routes of continental America, the slow-flying war-surplus land planes had nothing to offer that could beat the nearly-as-fast passenger trains with their Pullman accommodations. Only on the fair-weather, over-water routes did the airplane—and particularly the flying boat—have a distinct advantage over surface transport.

  The end of World War I was followed by two events that shaped the course of commercial aviation. The first was Prohibition, imposed in 1919, casting its dry pall over America. The second was the sudden availability of war-surplus aircraft, including flying boats, suitable for conversion to passenger transports. Thus was provided both the need and the means for affluent pleasure-seekers to be flown beyond United States borders, to Cuba or the Bahamas, for their fun and spirits.

  Two types of war-surplus flying boats were favored for passenger operations. The first to become available was the Curtiss HS-2L, developed from the HS-1 built in 1917. More than a thousand of these boats had seen U.S. Navy patrol service. The HS-2L was a wooden aircraft, powered by a single 350-horsepower Liberty engine driving a four-bladed pusher propeller. Fully loaded, she weighed a maximum of 6,223 pounds and could fly at a top speed of eighty miles per hour. Her range of 375 miles was sufficient to reach any of the Bahamian islands or Cuba from Florida.

  The largest of the surplus boats, the F-5L, had a mixed ancestry. The F series of flying boats was developed at the Seaplane Experimental Station in Felixstowe from the original Curtiss design. The last of the series, the F.5, fitted with Liberty engines, was manufactured in the United States at the Naval Aircraft Factory in Philadelphia and at the Curtiss factory on Long Island. When the F-5Ls became available after the war, several we
re acquired by the American Plane and Motor Company in New Jersey and modified for passenger transport. These became known as the Aeromarine 75 or Curtiss 75.

  A large flying boat for her day, the Aeromarine 75 had broad wings, the upper overhanging the lower, spanning 103 feet, 9 inches. She had a maximum takeoff weight of 14,348 pounds and could fly a still-air distance of 830 miles. Her crew of two sat in an open cockpit, between the wings. Two enclosed cabins accommodated up to twelve passengers.3

  Two small flying boat operators, Aero Limited and West Indies Airways, both flying from Florida to Nassau and Havana, amalgamated in 1919 to form Aeromarine West Indies Airways. Their assets were, in turn, taken over by Aeromarine Airways, an airline founded by Inglis M. Uppercu, who had been a manufacturer of navy seaplanes during World War I.

  Aeromarine commenced a passenger service in November 1919 from Key West to Havana, flying the Aeromarine 75 flying boats. The fare for the 105-mile trip was fifty dollars, an exorbitant sum in 1919, particularly compared to the nineteen-dollar ticket aboard a steamer. The flight took one-and-a-half to two hours, depending on the wind.4

  Aeromarine adopted an ingenious system to match the seasonal ebb and flow of their passenger traffic. Beginning in May 1921, they moved their flying boats north and began service between New York and Atlantic City. In June the airline flew between Detroit and Cleveland, cruising straight across Lake Erie, operating six days a week. In the autumn, with the return of cool temperatures and a renewal of thirst and tourism, the airline resumed flights from Florida to the Caribbean.

  Aeromarine was a pioneering airline, both in its use of flying boats and its approach to the economics of the business. On 1 November 1919, Aeromarine became the first United States airline to receive a foreign airmail contract. Between the mail subsidy and the seasonal deployment of their flying boat fleet, the airline managed to stay afloat.

  Both the single-engine HS-2Ls and the Aeromarine 75s were, for their day, comfortable passenger aircraft. In their advertising brochures, Aeromarine declared:

  “Passengers wear their ordinary clothes. No leather garments, goggles or other paraphernalia are necessary in Aeromarine Cruisers!”

  In another brochure, passengers’ questions were asked and then answered:

  Q:“Can passengers carry baggage?”

  A:“Yes—thirty pounds. Your heavy baggage follows the same night by steamer.”

  Q:“Is this really an event to look forward to?”

  A:“Yes, no advance in transportation on this hemisphere has been so eventful. Once by flying boat from Key West to Havana you will say ‘Never again by steamer.’ ”5

  Aeromarine continued its operation, expanding in size, until 1924. Suddenly its economic underpinning was yanked away. Without warning, mail subsidies were withdrawn by both the United States and Cuba. The airline flew its last scheduled trip, Miami to Nassau, on 1 May 1924.

  Excepting the brief life of the St. Petersburg–Tampa Airboat Line, Aeromarine was America’s first scheduled passenger airline and the first to make commercial use of the flying boat. It had accounted well for itself, carrying over 30,000 passengers and undetermined tons of mail and cargo. It had proven the viability of the flying boat as an instrument of air commerce. It had served as a test bed for future airlines and a training ground for flying boat pilots. One of Aeromarine’s pilots, a former naval aviator named Ed Musick, would become the most famous airline pilot of his time.

  Across the Atlantic, the former belligerents were assembling fleets of seagoing aircraft. The colonial powers, including a beaten but still vital Germany, viewed seaplanes and flying boats as the logical commercial vehicles to link them to their Asian, African, and South American subsidiaries.

  About to be fettered by the Versailles Treaty, the German aircraft industry was continuing the development and production of commercial aircraft via licensees in Italy, Sweden, Denmark, and even in Soviet Russia. An airline called Deutsche Luft Reederei commenced operations only two months after the 1918 armistice. Flying converted A. E. G. JII military biplanes, the airline served a route between Berlin and Weimar.6 Early in the 1920s, German-owned airlines made their appearance in South America. The firms of Junkers and Dornier turned their energies toward the production of flying boats and float-equipped transport aircraft.

  In July 1920, the Belgian airline SNETA began an adventurous operation in equatorial Africa using the Levy-Lepen R flying boat. Called the Ligne Aérienne du Roi Albert (LARA), this Congo River airline flew from Kinshasha to N’Gombe and then, the following year, expanded its route system inland to Lisala and Stanleyville. The Levy-Lepen, originally built for the French Navy in 1917, accommodated only two passengers in addition to the pilot. The little flying boat was powered by a Renault 300-horsepower engine, driving a pusher propeller. With a loaded weight of 5,401 pounds, the Levy-Lepen had a speed of ninety miles per hour.

  Among the airline’s many problems was the irksome necessity, because of the heat and humidity, to re-attach the fabric to the structure of the aircraft after each flight. When the company went out of business in 1922, it had flown some 77,000 miles. Though it had hauled 4,400 pounds of mail, the airline had managed to accommodate only ninety-five passengers.7

  With an eye on the Atlantic, in 1919 the Italian firm Caproni conceived the idea of an enormous flying boat designed to cross the ocean with one hundred passengers plus a crew of eight. The bizarre aircraft, the Caproni Ca 60 Transaero, had a fuselage like the hull of a ship. She was equipped with no fewer than nine wings mounted in triplane stacks on the front, mid, and aft sections of the fuselage. Within the forest of wings, wires, braces, and struts were eight Liberty engines arranged in a mixture of pusher and puller installations. Two lateral pontoons for stability on the water were installed at mid-fuselage.

  The Ca 60 Transaero had a brief life. During her maiden flight on 4 March 1921, she rose to an altitude of sixty feet above Lake Maggiore. From that lofty height she abruptly nose-dived into the water and broke up. The project was abandoned.8

  As a commercial vehicle, the flying boat still had not proved itself. Nor had it yet been demonstrated either in Europe or America that a commercial overwater airline could turn a profit and sustain itself. An enterprise as uncertain as the airline business appealed in the 1920s only to a few men. These were, for the most part, visionaries and entrepreneurs with the energy and optimism of youth. One such man was a young former naval aviator named Juan Trippe.

  5

  Trippe

  Juan Terry Trippe was part visionary, part Yankee businessman, part conniving schemer. He and the flying boat came of age at the same time. More than anyone else, it was Trippe who made the flying boat an instrument of international commerce.

  Aviation had been Trippe’s abiding passion since the day in 1909 when his father had taken him to an air race. He had just turned ten years old. The Wright Brothers were engaged in a grim competition with their arch rival, Glenn Curtiss, whom they had accused of stealing their patented “wing warping” design for aeroplane roll control.

  In the strong autumn winds, Curtiss could stay airborne no longer than forty-five seconds. The day belonged to Wilbur Wright, who made three separate flights, soaring around the Statue of Liberty, climbing high enough for millions of New Yorkers to see him.1

  From that day forward, Trippe was obsessed. When the United States entered World War I during his freshman year at Yale, Trippe and most of his teammates on the football squad quit college and volunteered for military service. Despite his less-than-perfect vision, he finagled his way into navy flight training. He made his first solo in a Jenny biplane over Long Island. After flying boat training at Hampton Roads, Virginia, he volunteered for night flying training at Pensacola, Florida. At Pensacola, on 17 June 1918, he was commissioned an ensign and designated Naval Aviator Number 1806. On his way to New York to embark for Europe, he heard that the war had ended.

  Back at Yale, Trippe played football, rowed, played golf, studied business,
and began to cultivate the connections that would further his later career. He helped re-form the Yale Aero Club, and participated in intercollegiate flying competitions.

  Trippe became a contributor, and eventually an editor, for Yale’s illustrated magazine, the Graphic. In May 1919, as the U.S. Navy was readying the NC boats for their transatlantic attempt, Trippe contributed his viewpoint:

  If our big sea plane is the first to get across, and needless to say, all Americans hope she will be, her pilots will have doubly distinguished themselves, for they will have been not only the first to fly across the Atlantic Ocean but also the first to demonstrate that a flight across the Atlantic Ocean is a perfectly safe and sane commercial proposition and not a gigantic gamble in which the prospective transatlantic pilot or passenger has big odds against his safe arrival in the U.S.2

  In the spring of 1921 Trippe graduated from his three-year curriculum at Yale with a degree and little money. Aviation, his chosen profession, had little to offer. He chose a traditional course, one that befitted a Yale man and his father’s son. He accepted a job as bond salesman in the Wall Street firm of Lee, Higginson & Co.

  After two stifling years, Trippe declared his independence. Disregarding the counsel of family and associates, he announced that he would pursue a career in the aviation business. Invoking the Yale connection, he made the rounds of former classmates. He produced letterheads for his business-to-be, using as an address 50 Vanderbilt Avenue, which happened to be the Yale Club. He sold stock in the new corporation, which he called Long Island Airways. He exercised his prerogative as principal shareholder and elected himself president and general manager.

  At an auction in Philadelphia, Trippe paid $500 each for seven navy surplus Aeromarine floatplanes, designated type 49-B. These were single-engine aircraft that normally accommodated a pilot and one passenger. By replacing the Aeromarine’s 90-horsepower Curtiss OX-5 with a 220-horsepower Hispano-Suiza engine, Trippe modified the floatplane to carry two passengers. Early in the game he had learned a fundamental premise of the airline business: Increase capacity by whatever means, and you multiply revenues.3