China Clipper

by Robert Gandt

  Glenn Martin then produced his own version of Consolidated’s design, which became the navy P3M-1. Reuben Fleet found himself stuck with a new flying boat and all its development costs—and no customer. Later he would say that Martin “underbid us a half million and lost a million on the job.”7

  Then appeared the bumptious Ralph O’Neill. And in the background remained the formidable presence of Admiral Moffett, still quietly orchestrating the conversion of the XPY-1 to a commercial configuration for O’Neill’s airline. Thus Reuben Fleet became a shareholder in NYRBA, and his Admiral flying boat, in civilian colors, became the elegant Commodore.

  The christening of the Commodore was scheduled for 2 October 1929. O’Neill planned to greet Mrs. Herbert Hoover, wife of the president of the United States, who would arrive at Anacostia by motorcade. He intended to escort her to the stand where, after O’Neill made a short speech, the first lady was to swing a beribboned bottle of fizz water (Prohibition was still the law of the land), christening the Buenos Aires and bestowing the presidential blessing on O’Neill’s airline. It would be Ralph O’Neill’s long-awaited moment of triumph.

  Mrs. Hoover’s motorcade arrived on schedule. Behind a phalanx of secret service men she was escorted to the dais. Her guards pushed the crowd back. “Clear the way—everybody!”

  The order included O’Neill. With the rest of the crowd, he found himself shunted aside. He watched while the first lady’s party proceeded to the stand, escorted by the White House chief of protocol, the Argentine ambassador and his wife, and—to Ralph O’Neill’s horror—Juan Trippe. In disbelief O’Neill stared as Trippe took his place on the christening stand next to the wife of the president. Newsmen, photographers, and spectators closed in around them and the ceremony began.

  While O’Neill seethed in a rage at the back of the crowd, Juan Trippe delivered his own speech. Pan American Airways, he announced, would soon establish its own route to Buenos Aires. Pan Am’s Central American routes would extend to all of South America.

  The nation’s first lady then christened the new flying boat. Juan Trippe beamed his approval. No one seemed to notice the NYRBALINE on the Commodore’s hull.8

  Trippe had won another round. More than ever it became a grudge fight between NYRBA and Pan Am. Ralph O’Neill needed no further convincing that his enemy was Juan Trippe. And beyond a doubt, the enemy wielded huge clout in the centers of power—New York and Washington, D.C.

  NYRBA’s code name for Pan American became “Coyote.” In intercompany communications, the activities of “Coyote” were treated like the movements of hostile forces.

  NYRBA needed mail contracts—U.S. mail. But the U.S. Post Office, O’Neill learned, was the domain of Pan American. The assistant postmaster general, Washington Irving Glover, had remained in office during the transition from the Coolidge to the Hoover administrations. Glover was a Pan American ally and routinely blocked any intrusion by Pan Am’s competitors in the South American market. Among Juan Trippe’s Washington allies, NYRBA was sarcastically referred to as “near beer.”9

  O’Neill’s only mail contracts were with the South American governments. He had agreements from Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and Uruguay for NYRBA to carry mail to the United States. The contract with Argentina required that the mail from Buenos Aires reach Miami in seven days.

  O’Neill commenced the new service on the night of 19 February 1930 under a full moon. The success of this first flight was vital to the future of NYRBA. The Argentine press had made much of the proposed new link with the U.S., and the U.S. Post Office was announcing plans to extend existing U.S. mail contracts to the South American routes. If NYRBA were to prevail in its war with Pan American, the first flight had to succeed.

  O’Neill spared nothing. To ensure success, he planned to fly the Rio de Janeiro, a big new Commodore, as the lead aircraft, followed by a Sikorsky S-38 back up. O’Neill would personally fly the entire route, changing crews at each division port.

  The inaugural mail flight was a journey of incredible mishaps. At Porto Alegre, the first stop, the Commodore struck a buoy on takeoff, damaging her hull and rupturing an oil line. O’Neill had the mail—and himself—transferred to the S-38 and continued northward.

  The Sikorsky, flown by William Grooch, an ex-navy pilot, arrived in Santos after nightfall in the midst of a violent thunderstorm. Landing on the blackened, storm-tossed ocean, the S-38 struck the waves with such force that her hull was ruptured. Grooch and O’Neill managed to lower the wheels and beach the amphibian before she sank.

  O’Neill would not give up. By telephone he ordered another Sikorsky, held in reserve in Rio, to fly to Santos and pick him up. A few hours later, he received the news that the Sikorsky, instead of being en route, was being held by the Rio harbor police as a result of an injunction brought against NYRBA by a Brazilian airline.

  O’Neill ordered yet another Sikorsky, this one in Bahia, to fly to Rio. He ordered the crew to land on the far side of the harbor to avoid the police. He then hired a taxi and, with his precious mail sacks, drove all night to Rio to join the waiting S-38. At dawn, pursued by a police speed boat, O’Neill took off from Rio.

  At Vitória there was more mail. And, incredibly, another crash. This time the S-38, piloted by Clarence Woods, struck a seawall on takeoff, crumpling the hull. Ralph O’Neill climbed from his third crash in two days, delivered a tongue-lashing to everyone in sight, then ordered another airplane flown in.

  The inaugural mail flight was badly behind schedule. Never reluctant to take risks, O’Neill decided to fly north, directly over the jungle instead of along the coastal bulge of Brazil. The route would cut precious hours off the total flight time but risk a forced landing in the impenetrable jungles of the Amazon.

  There were no more crashes. On 25 February 1930, after six days en route, O’Neill reached Miami aboard the Commodore Cuba. He had delivered the mail well within the seven-day time limit specified in his contract with the Argentine government.

  Storms, accidents, and police had not been O’Neill’s only adversaries. Along the route northward he had encountered newly appointed NYRBA executives, hired by headquarters without his knowledge. He heard disquieting stories that within NYRBA’s board of directors was a movement to replace him as president.

  O’Neill remained in character. As he met each new executive, he fired him on the spot. In Miami he learned that twenty new land plane pilots had been hired without his knowledge. One at a time he summoned the pilots to his room. He fired each one.

  O’Neill’s list of enemies grew longer. While he had been concentrating his energies—and NYRBA’s assets—on the development of the South American route system, he had ignored events in New York and Washington.

  It took money to run an airline. The Great Depression had rolled over Wall Street like a tidal wave. Although NYRBA was now operating the most efficient, longest, and safest airline in the world, it was losing $400,000 a month. The company had been capitalized, through stock sales, in the amount of $6 million. By mid-1930 its cash balance was down to $16,000.

  The backers of NYRBA were being nudged by both the Post Office and the State Department toward a merger with Pan American. Repeatedly the Post Office had excluded NYRBA from the lucrative foreign airmail contracts. Postmaster General Walter Brown’s position was that competitive bidding in South America was “of doubtful value” and was not in the best interests of the United States. “There would be,” he said, “very little real substantial bidding by men of experience able to carry on an industry of this kind. . .”

  What Brown meant was that the foreign airmail contracts in South America were reserved for Pan American.

  In the wings waited Juan Trippe. Trippe’s strategy was simple: He would let NYRBA spend itself into oblivion. Without mail contracts and without the backing of the State Department, NYRBA could not continue.

  By mid-1930 NYRBA’s backers, frightened by their losses and intimidated by Pan American’s influence in government, were bein
g pressured to accept Trippe’s offer of a buy-out.

  At a final board meeting, Ralph O’Neill listened while the terms of the takeover were read. Then he stood and made a last impassioned speech. “To demonstrate the rooking we are getting,” he said, “I would like to bring all our planes to Washington and anchor them on the Potomac. In other words, to display publicly the greatest and most modern fleet of transport airplanes in the world—all being sacrificed to the whims or interest of a shameless bureaucrat.”10

  The board listened impassively. O’Neill could no longer sway them. NYRBA’s directors had no stomach for further fighting with Pan American or the government. The board voted, and the New York, Rio and Buenos Aires Line passed into history.

  The unmaking of NYRBA put Pan American solidly in the airline business. The Commodore flying boat, ideally suited for the harbors of the South American coast, was the “right” airliner.

  For Reuben Fleet, the NYRBA–Pan American war had a happy ending. “We sold fourteen Commodores,” he reported, “ten Fleetsters [single-engine, high-wing land planes], and ten Fleet trainers and made a profit of $208,000 for our company on the deal. And, of course, we got back all our development cost on the original XPY-1 Admiral flying boat.

  “Above all else we established that in fifteen months we could produce fourteen flying boats modified for commercial service. Martin took twenty-seven months to produce their nine copies of the Admiral for the Navy. That taught the Navy a good lesson which they never, never forgot—don’t alienate the original designer from his design by giving it to someone else.”

  The Commodore lived a full and productive life. In his 1934 Report to Stockholders, Fleet wrote, “Consolidated Commodores have flown more than five million miles of scheduled passenger and mail flying in the service of Pan American; to our knowledge no passenger or person has ever been hurt in a Commodore in the five years they have been the backbone of that great American company’s service from Miami to Buenos Aires.”11

  The stately Commodores continued in Pan American service and that of its subsidiaries, Panair do Brazil and China National Airline Corporation, until the end of World War II. In 1945 Pan American sold its last Commodore to Bahama Airways, Ltd. Twenty years after its first flight, the old boat still carried passengers on scheduled flights.

  7

  Sikorsky

  In 1913, factual knowledge about the science of flight still lay obscured in a haze of pseudoscientific myth. One such notion of the day was the “ostrich” theory. Proponents of this idea insisted that it was nature’s will to inhibit the flight of objects, whether birds or airplanes, that exceeded a certain dimension. Birds the size of gulls and hawks, for example, could fly with ease and agility and even carry a load. But when a bird reached the size of an ostrich, the rules changed. The creature was incapable of flight. This same immutable logic, declared the experts, should apply equally to airplanes.

  Thus, when Igor Sikorsky’s four-engine airplane, the Grand, neared completion in 1913, crowds gathered at the factory in Petrograd. The Grand was a clear example of a man-made ostrich. No aircraft of that size had ever flown. Her wings spanned ninety-two feet. Her gross weight amounted to 9,000 pounds. She was powered by four one-hundred-horsepower, water-cooled, four-cylinder Argus engines installed in two tandem mounts close to the aircraft centerline. The Grand, in the judgment of the ostrich theorists, was a presumptuous attempt to defy the will of nature.

  In addition to her great size, the Grand incorporated features that, for 1913, seemed drawn from Jules Verne. The closed pilots’ cabin, unique for its day, had dual seats, dual controls and a full panel of instruments. A door in front allowed access to an open balcony in the nose of the aircraft. The passenger cabin was luxuriously decorated with seats, sofa, table, a washroom, and cabinets.

  The Grand flew. As a test platform, she proved the feasibility of the multi-engined configuration. The Grand not only earned for Sikorsky the acclaim of the aviation world, she lay to rest forever the “ostrich” theory.1

  Igor Sikorsky, designer and engineer, was also a mystic. He placed much faith in dreams, and he believed in the power of intuition, which he called the “mysterious faculty.” Technological advances, he believed, were mostly wrought by men whose imagination could transcend time and perceive facts, natural laws, and future events that were not yet known.2

  When he was an eleven-year-old boy in Russia, Sikorsky had a dream so vivid that he would remember each detail for the rest of his life. In his dream he was walking along a narrow passageway. On either side of the passageway were elegant walnut doors that opened to staterooms. Overhead glowed a spherical light that cast a pleasant blue illumination. Beneath his feet, under the plush carpet, he could feel a slight but steady vibration, which he already knew came from the engines of a giant flying ship. When he reached the end of the passageway, he opened the door to a luxurious lounge. Before he could enter, he awoke from his dream.

  The year was 1900. The first successful powered flight still lay three years in the future. When the boy spoke of his dream, he was told by adults that flying ships existed only in children’s fantasies. In any case, they said, such things were amusing but quite impossible.

  Years passed. In the autumn of 1931, Pan American Airways took delivery of the S-40 four-engine flying boat, christened the American Clipper. The designer and builder of the huge craft was invited, with members of Pan Am’s board of directors, for a flight over New York. He had not seen the S-40’s cabin since it was completed and furnished to Pan Am’s specifications.

  It was an evening of special beauty. The air was gossamer smooth. In the soft glow of the setting sun, the giant flying boat seemed suspended in an ethereal vacuum.

  Igor Sikorsky was walking through the front cabin toward the forward lounge when the steward suddenly switched on the cabin lights. Sikorsky froze, taken aback at what he saw.

  There were the walnut doors. Above his head glowed the bluish electric light. The carpeted passageway led to the lounge. Beneath his feet, under the plush flooring, he felt the satisfying rumble of the flying boat’s four engines. It all seemed familiar to him.

  It was just as he had seen in his dream thirty years before.3

  * * *

  Igor I. Sikorsky was born 25 May 1889 in Kiev, in southwest Russia. Both his parents had studied medicine, and his father was a professor of psychology at St. Vladimir University in Kiev.

  After three years at the Naval Academy in Petrograd, Sikorsky entered the Polytechnic Institute of Kiev in the fall of 1907. To pursue his interest in the new science of aviation, he interrupted his studies and went to Paris, then the international forum for all things aeronautical.

  When he returned to Russia, Sikorsky took with him an Anzani 25-horsepower engine and commenced work on his first manned flying machine, a helicopter of his own design. The primitive helicopter did not fly, nor did his next machine, a pusher biplane that he designated the S-1.

  With the S-2, powered by the 25-horsepower Anzani from the flightless helicopter, Sikorsky achieved his first true powered flight. Though he had never flown before, the young builder assumed the duties of chief test pilot. When the airplane and its test pilot had each accrued a total of eight minutes flying time, the S-2 inadvertently stalled above a swamp and crashed. Uninjured and scarcely perturbed, Sikorsky disentangled himself from the wreckage and commenced plans for an improved model.

  Other experimental airplanes followed. More mishaps occurred, all survivable. In 1911 Sikorsky’s S-6 set a world speed record (113 kilometers per hour, about 70 miles per hour) for a plane with a pilot and two passengers. That same year he received a contract with the Russian Baltic Railroad Car Factory to construct airplanes of his own design.

  And then on 13 May 1913, the Grand flew, acquiring for the twenty-four-year-old Sikorsky international attention. With the test data obtained from the Grand, he began construction of an even larger, more sophisticated four-engine transport.

  The Ilia Mourm
etz took her name from the hero of a popular tenth-century Russian legend. While the Grand had disproved the “ostrich” idea and shown the possibilities of multi-engine aircraft, the Ilia Mourmetz made them a matter of record. On 11 February 1914, she took off with sixteen persons on board, establishing the first of several new world records.

  The Ilia Mourmetz had a wing span of 102 feet, a wing area of 1,700 square feet, and a gross weight of over 10,000 pounds (a kitelike wing loading of 5.8 pounds per square foot of wing area). The first model used the same power plants as the Grand—four Argus engines of 100 horsepower each. The second model, identical in size, was fitted with two inboard engines of 140 horsepower, and the outboards of 125 horsepower each, producing an improvement in performance. With a power-to-weight ratio of twenty pounds per horsepower, the Ilia Mourmetz was hardly a rocket, but for her day she gave an impressive performance.

  In July 1914, at the request of the Russian Navy, Sikorsky conducted experiments with a floatplane configuration of the Ilia Mourmetz. Despite his lack of experience with waterborne aircraft, relying, perhaps, on his “mysterious faculty” of intuition, Sikorsky produced a set of wooden, flat-bottomed, shock-mounted floats. The primitive floats, unsophisticated by the standards of Glenn Curtiss, worked surprisingly well. The Ilia Mourmetz became the world’s largest seaplane.

  When the great powers of Europe lunged into World War I, Sikorsky found himself designing bombers for his beleaguered country. These were upgraded versions of the Ilia Mourmetz, and although equipped with the same four engines and similar wing area, were nearly twenty miles an hour faster and capable of an altitude of 10,000 feet with a full bomb load.