China Clipper

by Robert Gandt

  There was no time to wait for the Martin flying boat. To the Sikorsky S-42 would fall the task of pioneering the Pacific airways. The second of the S-42s delivered to Pan Am went back to the Sikorsky plant. There she was stripped of her cabin furnishings, fitted with extra fuel tanks and a maze of plumbing inside the fuselage, and two rest bunks in the after cabin. More powerful 800-horsepower Pratt and Whitney S1EG engines were installed, affording a 5,000-pound increase in gross weight, up to a new maximum of 43,000 pounds. Her wing span was lengthened to 118 feet 4 inches. The modified aircraft, now equipped as an S-42B, had a still-air range of nearly 3,000 miles, sufficient for the longest Pacific segment, San Francisco to Honolulu, some 2,400 nautical miles.7

  Rechristened the Pan American Clipper, the modified S-42 went to Miami in February 1935 for endurance and navigation trials. Under command of Pan Am’s chief pilot, Captain Edwin C. Musick, the Pan American Clipper rehearsed her Pacific journey. Long-range cruising techniques were developed using carefully calibrated fuel counters, installing carburetors with a new, automatic mixture control, experimenting to determine the most efficient power versus revolutions per minute for the new Hamilton Standard controllable-pitch propellers. Tests were performed with each engine shut down, one at a time, and the resulting fuel consumption noted. Emergency procedures were rehearsed. Multiple engine failures were practiced. The crew learned to hand-pump fuel from the fuselage tanks to the wings in the event of an electrical pump failure.

  On the afternoon of 23 March 1935, Musick and his crew took off in the reconfigured S-42 and pointed the nose of the flying boat out over the Atlantic. Darkness came, and they continued southeastward, in the direction of the Virgin Islands. Throughout the night they flew, navigating by the stars, pumping fuel from the fuselage to balance the load in the wings, practicing the myriad tasks of long-range flight. The smell of fuel pervaded the cabin. Worried, the crew opened the windows.

  This was the longest flight ever attempted by a flying boat. The craft of aerial navigation was a new skill, still being developed, but founded in centuries-old principles. Navigator Fred Noonan, who had worked aboard sailing ships before coming to Pan American, was perhaps the first professional aerial navigator in history. Now Noonan labored with his bubble sextant, shooting and reshooting his celestial fixes, checking and rechecking his calculations, while the S-42 cruised through the night sky at two-and-a-half miles a minute.

  Six hours into the flight Musick sent for Noonan. A blinking light had appeared on the horizon. A lighthouse? How could there be a lighthouse in the middle of the empty ocean? Noonan stared at the blinking light, as perplexed as Musick.

  Gradually, the light became steady. Noonan began to laugh. The light, which was not a lighthouse, happened to be the planet Jupiter rising from a low shelf of cloud over the rim of the earth. Then everyone laughed, including the taciturn Musick. But the relieved laughter betrayed their anxiety. The men realized that in this new flying boat they were entering an unexplored world where nothing was what it seemed. Planets became lighthouses. The ocean had become a trackless void.8

  The dawn came. Musick had already turned and headed the flying boat westward. The S-42 continued past the Bahamas chain, over the Florida peninsula and back out to sea into the Gulf of Mexico. Again they turned and, after seventeen hours, sixteen minutes in the air, touched down in Biscayne Bay, back in Miami.

  It had been proved. The Pan American Clipper had the necessary range, and her crew possessed the skills. They could fly to Hawaii.

  “GIANT SILVER CLIPPER SHIP ARRIVES FOR TRANSPACIFIC SERVICE,” reported the San Francisco News. Musick and his crew—First Officer R. O. D. Sullivan, Navigator Fred Noonan, Second Officer Harry Canaday, Engineering Officer Vic Wright, and Radio Officer Wilson Jarboe, Jr., made several preliminary flights out to sea, homing back to Alameda on Hugo Leuteritz’s DF. They learned to identify by sight each of the bays and harbors on the California coast. They practiced blind landings in San Francisco Bay.

  On the sunny afternoon of 16 April 1935, Musick taxied the Pan American Clipper out into San Francisco Bay. A few minutes before four o’clock, he pushed the four overhead throttles full forward. The big flying boat surged across the bay, lifted in a trail of spray and foam and climbed slowly westward. She disappeared in the low overcast over the coast, then broke clear at about six thousand feet.

  Noonan’s navigation kept the flying boat precisely on course. In smooth air the S-42’s engines thrummed all night without missing a beat.

  Soon after sunrise, the gray hump of Molokai came into view. Musick ordered his crew to shave and don fresh uniforms. Eighteen hours and thirty-seven minutes after leaving Alameda, he landed the Pan American Clipper in Pearl Harbor, one minute behind schedule. They had broken by six hours the record set a year earlier by the six navy P2Ys.

  The return journey was another story. For almost the entire flight the clipper bucked unpredicted headwinds that slowed its ground speed to less than a hundred knots. As fuel and time were expended, the clipper neared the end of its endurance, which had been calculated at twenty-one-and-a-half hours. At Alameda Trippe and the crew’s anxious wives waited in silence. On a wall chart they watched the Pan American Clipper’s painfully slow progress.

  Musick tried different altitudes, searching for better winds. Vic Wright leaned the engines, slowing the RPMs, squeezing the most mileage from each drop of fuel. Fred Noonan struggled to pinpoint their exact position in the cloud-filled skies. His fixes showed their ground speed to be less than a hundred knots.

  With less than half an hour of fuel remaining, they spotted the California coast. When Musick settled the Pan American Clipper down on San Francisco Bay, they had been airborne for twenty-three hours and forty-one minutes.

  Nothing was said to the press about the scarcity of their remaining fuel, or the fact that for much of the night the Pan American Clipper was lost. The press release explained the delayed arrival as intentional. The crew had been conducting tests on three different ocean tracks during the long flight. Juan Trippe told the press that “the results fully justify early inauguration of through service to the Far East.”9

  During the summer months of 1935 Musick again flew to Honolulu, and then on to Midway where the new flying boat facility had been readied. There were no difficulties on this return voyage.

  In mid-October, while Musick went to Baltimore to begin acceptance tests of the Martin M-130, Rod Sullivan took the Pan American Clipper again to Honolulu, onward to Midway, and then farther westward to the untried lagoon of Wake Island.

  Rod Sullivan, in the opinion of his fellow airmen, was “a diamond in the rough.” He was a burly, pug-nosed Irishman with a quick temper and a heavy-handed touch with both airplanes and people.10

  When Sullivan arrived over Wake Island in the Pan American Clipper, the lagoon was still only partially ready for flying boat operations. From the air he could see the deadly coral heads still protruding like mushrooms through the greenish clear water.

  For months a young ex-varsity swimmer from Columbia University, Bud Mullahey, had been assigned the risky task of dynamiting coral heads in the Wake lagoon. Daily Mullahey had dived beneath the surface, planted his charges and removed the obstacles, one by one. He had now exploded over a hundred coral heads. Hundreds still remained. But a channel of sorts had been cleared, marked by buoys, barely deep enough and long enough to accommodate a flying boat.

  Sullivan brought the S-42 in, fighting the cross wind that ruffled the lagoon. His first approach was too fast and too long. He took the flying boat around for another try. Tension began to mount both in the cockpit and on the shore. There was no alternate landing site. Wake was surrounded by a thousand miles of ocean.

  On the next attempt, Sullivan landed the flying boat, a bit too fast, and was able to stop only scant feet before running aground on the opposite shore of the lagoon.

  Sullivan’s explosion of temper, according to reports, continued from the dock up the sandy path and in
to the mess hall. His anger seemed sufficient to melt the icing from the cake especially baked for the occasion by the bedraggled builders of the desert island base.

  The icing on the cake read “Welcome to Wake Island.”11

  13

  Wings of Empire

  Great Britain in 1934 had nothing that could match the Sikorsky S-42. An official myopia had beset the British air transport industry. Colonial administrators and merchants still journeyed to the outposts of the empire aboard bi-winged anachronisms like the Short S.17 Kent and the Calcutta flying boats. As late as 1934, Arthur Gouge, Britain’s eminent aircraft designer, was designing a new flying boat for Imperial Airways—a four-engined biplane. Like the empire it served, Imperial Airways was living in a bygone age.

  The issue of American supremacy in the development of airline equipment had begun to rankle British sensitivities. Between 20–24 October 1934 the MacRobertson air race was conducted from Mildenhall, England, to Melbourne, Australia, a distance of 11,300 miles. The winner, not surprisingly, was a British De Havilland DH.88 Comet, three of which were specifically designed for the race. A shock, however, was the runner-up, a KLM Douglas DC-2. The third-place finisher was also an American-built airliner, a Boeing 247, which beat out another British entry.1

  About concurrently came a pronouncement that changed everything. Henceforth, by decree of the postmaster general, all first-class Royal Mail was to be carried to empire countries on the air routes to South Africa, India, Burma, Malaya, and Australia, at no surcharge, by air. This decision galvanized the moribund British aircraft industry. It meant that the development of long-range transport aircraft, just as in America, was to be subsidized by the infusion of airmail revenues. Imperial Airways ordered the development of a new fleet of long-range flying boats.

  To the slow-moving aircraft industry of between-the-wars Britain, the order for twenty-eight eighteen-ton flying boats landed like a lightning stroke. No aircraft order of that magnitude for airline equipment had ever been placed in Great Britain, nor had an aircraft of such size or complexity ever been constructed. The specifications were laid down by Major R. H. Mayo, Imperial Airways’ technical adviser. Imperial wanted a flying boat with a capacity of twenty-four passengers and a normal range of 700 miles—long enough to serve the route to South Africa. Not yet specified—but clearly anticipated—was that a variant of Imperial’s new aircraft would soon be flying over the North Atlantic.

  There was never any doubt as to whom the flying boat order would go. The Short Brothers firm of Rochester was a venerable company that had produced numerous flying boats both for the military and for Imperial Airways.2

  But there were severe time constraints imposed by the contract. The Shorts complained that there was insufficient time to develop an aircraft as advanced as the huge flying boat specified by Imperial. It would take years to make the giant leap from the plodding Calcutta-class boat to the ship Mayo wanted. There was no time for such luxury. Oswald Short, unwilling to forego the most lucrative deal in Shorts’ history, signed the contract. Thus began one of the most intense development projects in British aviation history.

  Arthur Gouge (whose accomplishments would eventually win him knighthood) was the guiding hand in the design of the new flying boat. Beginning with the cubic capacity specified by Imperial, Gouge produced a design for an aerodynamically clean, cantilever-winged monoplane with a span of 114 feet and a fuselage length of eighty-eight feet. Her empty weight would be 24,000 pounds, and her maximum gross weight 40,500 pounds. She would be powered by four Bristol Pegasus engines of 920-horsepower each, turning De Havilland controllable-pitch propellers.

  The new lineage of Shorts’ flying boats took a regal name—Empire class. Beginning with the S.23, the Empire class advanced the British flying boat standard an entire generation in one leap. Altogether, some forty-one S.23s were constructed. Each was given a name beginning with the letter C, and the series was collectively called the C-class flying boats.

  Gouge’s design incorporated features hitherto unseen on transport aircraft. Because of the S.23’s size, a new hull design radically different from the Shorts’ earlier flat planing bottoms, had to be constructed. Gouge experimented with various hull tapers and beams until arriving at a narrow and effective shape that would allow the fully loaded ship to free herself from the water on takeoff.

  Another innovation was a trailing edge flap design, patented by Gouge, that increased wing area by 30 percent with virtually no increase in drag. In actual use the Gouge flap succeeded in decreasing landing speed by twelve miles per hour.

  The seventeen-foot-deep hull allowed space for two decks. On the upper deck was the cockpit, called the “bridge,” adopting the same nautical vein as Pan American. It was a businesslike, spacious compartment equipped with the latest instrumentation of 1936, including an autopilot, Sperry artificial horizon and directional gyro, Hughes turn indicators and compasses, Kollsman altimeters, and a Marconi homing indicator. Abaft the cockpit on the upper deck was a long compartment containing space for freight and mail and, on the starboard side, the ship’s clerk’s office. In the forward section of the bottom deck was a spacious marine compartment containing the ship’s mooring equipment. The rest of the lower deck was devoted to passenger accommodations. The forward passenger saloon was connected to the midship cabin by a central corridor that contained toilets on one side and the galley on the other. Abaft the midship cabin was a luxurious promenade cabin that could be configured both for seats and for sleeping berths. On the port side was a rail so that passengers could observe the outside scenery through the cabin windows. Yet another cabin, directly over the after step of the hull, contained seats for six passengers or more sleeping berths.3

  Canopus, first of the regal Empire boats, first flew on 4 July 1936. Produced at a rate of about one a month, the C-class boats began carrying passengers and mail throughout the Imperial Airways network. For the remainder of the decade, wherever the Union Jack waved, the Empire-class boats flew. S.23s began serving the long route from Southampton to Alexandria, then southward across the African continent to Durban. An S.23 commenced the first flying boat service from England to Australia. Yet another opened service to Karachi.

  The Empire boats’ speeds, as advertised by the Air Ministry, were impressive. They had a maximum cruise speed of 165 miles per hour, with a maximum speed of 200 miles per hour at 5,500 feet. At a maximum gross weight of 40,500 pounds, the S.23 required a relatively brief takeoff run of twenty-one seconds.

  But for all their elegance and aesthetically pleasing lines, the Empire boats lacked the hard-nosed operating efficiency of their American contemporaries, particularly the Sikorsky S-42 and the Martin M-130. The S.23’s still-air range, with the medium-range tanks installed, was only 760 miles. In terms of load-to-tare ratio, the S.23 was an iron eagle. She was a weighty machine whose range and capacity never matched her builders’ expectations. Although her maximum takeoff weight was 40,000 pounds, this included a disposable load of no more than 10,250 pounds, a load-to-tare ratio of only 25:75. In contrast, the Sikorsky S-42’s load-to-tare ratio was 42:58, meaning that nearly half the aircraft’s total weight amounted to fuel and payload. The S.23’s “uncluttered” profile, including the cantilevered wing (regarded as an aerodynamic ideal in the 1930s) came at a dear price in structural weight. The great thickness required at the wing root to support the unbraced wing resulted in a dramatic increase both in weight and profile drag.4

  There was more, however, to the economic equation. The Empire boats, appropriately named, were built to serve an empire. To Arthur Gouge and Oswald Short and the directors of Imperial Airways, the North Atlantic route was not the crown jewel of the airways as it was to Igor Sikorsky and Juan Trippe. Imperial Airways’ routes were across the Mediterranean, over the Sudan and the jungles of Africa. They were the ancient routes to India. Passengers expected—and received—accommodations of unequaled luxury aboard the double-decked, lushly appointed S.23s and S.30s and, ultimat
ely, the mighty S.26s. Imperial’s competitors were not the flying boats of Pan American, but the DC-2s flown by KLM from Europe to the Far East, and the new Dewoitine D.333s entering the Europe-to-Southeast Asia service of Air France.5

  Nonetheless, pressure would continue to build for a British-built, transoceanic aircraft to make its appearance on the Atlantic. Not only was the United States in the lead with their S-42, Britain’s European rivals were now sending their own flying boats over the Atlantic.

  14

  The French Flair

  The shortest and most benign route to the Americas lay beneath the equator. Only 1,890 miles separated Dakar and Senegal from Natal, on the eastern salient of South America. The prevailing weather on the South Atlantic was balmy. In contrast, the air distance from Shannon, on the coast of Ireland, to Botwood, Newfoundland, was 1,980 miles. The North Atlantic, with its ice-filled harbors and howling winter winds, was ill-suited to flying boats.

  Both the German airline, Deutsche Luft Hansa, and the pioneering French company, Compagnie Générale Aéropostale, began to extend their routes to the Americas. As early as 11 May 1930, the famous French aviator, Jean Mermoz, and his crew took off from Dakar in a Latécoère 28 single-engined twin-float seaplane, the Comte de la Vaulx, landing in Natal nineteen-and-a-half hours later. With this flight, Aéropostale accomplished the first delivery of transatlantic mail and established a new distance record for hydroplanes.