China Clipper

by Robert Gandt

  Ed Musick was a reluctant hero. He abhorred the flashbulbs and handshakes and the constant clamor for remarks about what, to him, was simply a job.

  But as the day neared for him to take the China Clipper across the Pacific, Ed Musick’s life changed. Each day became a steady torment of interviews and photographs and public speeches. The press wanted to know about his private life (prosaic), his tastes in spirits (none), his outside interests (minimal). Time would report in its cover story only that “he lives quietly with his blonde wife, Cleo, has no children, likes baseball, Buicks, apples, ham and cheese sandwiches, vacations in Manhattan.”

  There was little about Musick that would fill space in the tabloids. In photographs he appeared as a man medium in height and slight of build, slightly stoop-shouldered, with thinning black hair. He had a permanent five-o’clock shadow that defied any razor.

  Musick’s shy, laconic comments to the press had become the particular frustration of Pan American’s public relations department. When he flew the S-42B on the proving flight to Hawaii, the press director had pleaded for newsworthy reports. Would Musick please send something—anything—that was publishable?

  Musick balked. “I’m a pilot, not a newspaperman. I wouldn’t know what to send.”

  “Send something about the sunset over the Pacific.”

  Okay, Musick agreed. From over the ocean he radioed: “SUNSET, 0639 GMT.”

  That was Musick.1

  * * *

  Born in 1894 in St. Louis, Musick had grown up in Los Angeles where, like Glenn Martin, he became obsessed with the craft of flight. His first airplane, which he built himself, crashed without flying. Musick worked as a mechanic, first on racing cars and then at Martin’s new Los Angeles aircraft factory. After he learned to fly, he became a professional air-show pilot. He performed along the Pacific Coast as “Monseer Mussick, the famous French flier,” or, at other times, as “Daredevil Musick.” Along the way Musick was acquiring a passion for precision. He studied the causes of the accidents that befell his colleagues and began to devise his own methodical, meticulous procedures.

  With the onset of WW I, Musick worked as a civilian flight instructor for the army, then received his commission as a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps Reserve. Designated Naval Aviator Number 1673, he spent the rest of the war instructing navy student flyers in Miami.

  In the postwar years Musick, like most professional aviators of the day, took whatever flying jobs he could find. What he found was usually dangerous and frequently illegal. He flew flying boats to the Bahamas and to Cuba for the over-water airline Aeromarine until the company folded. It was the era of Prohibition. For lack of better employment Musick made a living flying booze from offshore supply boats to clandestine fields on the East Coast.

  In 1926 his name came to the attention of the operations manager of Philadelphia Rapid Transit Airline. The manager, whose reputation for meticulousness equaled Musick’s, was a Dutch immigrant named Andre Priester. When Priester moved on to a new airline called Pan American, he took Musick with him.

  On the afternoon of 22 November 1935, twenty-five thousand people had crowded onto the Alameda seaplane base on San Francisco Bay. On the speaker’s platform, Postmaster General James Farley read a message from the president: “. . .Even at this distance, I thrill to the wonder of it all. . .” The wonder to which FDR referred lay at her mooring, her bow directly behind the platform.

  Farley launched into his own speech. “. . . A person or letter will arrive in China within six days after leaving New York. This is, indeed, an epoch-making achievement and one which rivals the vivid imagination of Jules Verne. . .”

  Juan Trippe, beaming from his place of honor on the reviewing stand, knew precisely to whom the credit for the achievement should go. In only eight years, from a company with no assets or airplanes or routes of its own, Trippe had built Pan American into America’s premier international airline.

  “Therefore,” Farley said, “I anticipate that our friendly relations and our commerce with the countries of the Orient will be strengthened and stimulated by the transpacific airmail service.”

  Airmail had made it possible. Trippe had taken a colossal gamble, proceeding with his Pacific plans before he had a mail contract in hand. Not until 21 October 1935, only a month before the inaugural flight, did the Post Office Department award FAM 14—Foreign Air Mail contract number fourteen—to the sole bidder, Pan American Airways, at the highest allowable rate of two dollars per mile.

  Today’s inaugural flight—and all to follow for the next year—would be mail flights. The China Clipper would carry 110,000 letters in her bulging mail sacks. Only after sufficient experience had been gained on the Pacific would Pan Am commence passenger service to the Orient.

  Farley concluded his address. A radio announcer took over, heaping hyperbole on the occasion, praising the Post Office, the aviation industry, Pan American, and the seven airmen who would fly the China Clipper. “On the wings of these sturdy clipper ships,” he said to his radio audience, “are pinned the hopes of America’s commerce for a rightful standing in the teeming markets of the Orient.”

  Trippe listened with a sanguine expression. The script had been created by his publicity director, William Van Dusen, an imaginative young man hand-picked by Trippe himself. For this occasion, Van Dusen had outdone himself.

  The crew marched aboard. The radio announcer, reading from Van Dusen’s script, eulogized the crew members, Trippe, the Post Office, the airplane, and the country in general. “What a thrilling sight she is! So confident, so sturdy. Her gleaming hull and wings glistening in the sunshine, her great engines ready to speed her on her way!”2

  The five ocean bases in the Pacific—Honolulu, Midway, Wake, Guam, and the Philippines—precisely on cue, each signaled by radio its readiness to commence the transpacific service.

  The lines were cast off. While the band struck up “The Star Spangled Banner,” Musick powered the China Clipper out into the bay. Radio audiences heard the national anthem punctuated by the throaty rumble of Pratt and Whitney engines.

  After a couple of circles on the bay while the engines warmed, the China Clipper surged forward. Rockets blazed from shore. From overhead, a swarm of light airplanes buzzed down to escort the clipper on her departure.

  During the past eleven days Musick and his crew had rehearsed heavy-weight takeoffs. Each time the China Clipper had lifted her great load into the air precisely on schedule. Today, with a final tick on the water, she again broke free and was airborne.

  Ahead loomed the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, which was still under construction. It was Musick’s intention, taking off to the west, to soar up and over the bridge. From the cockpit he could see the unfinished pylons and the dangling cables and the girders still festooned with scaffolding.

  The China Clipper was flying, but barely. With her great burden of fuel, she had gained no more than fifty feet. Despite Musick’s best efforts, the clipper would climb no more. She skimmed across San Francisco Bay, roaring hellbent toward the Bay Bridge.

  At the last instant, with the steel mass of the Bay Bridge filling the clipper’s windscreen, Musick changed the script. He nosed the China Clipper down toward the water. The flying boat zoomed beneath the bridge, between the massive girders and under the hanging cables. Directly on her tail came the escorting airplanes, their pilots all thinking this was part of the show. To the astonishment of the few on the shore who knew better, they all made it.3

  While the crowd cheered from the shores of the bay, the China Clipper slowly gained altitude and vanished beyond the rim of the Pacific Ocean.

  For the westbound flyers, nightfall came slowly. When darkness finally enveloped the China Clipper, she was flying between layers of cloud. Musick chose the southernmost of the surveyed oceanic tracks, skirting the towering cumulus buildups that lay along the route to Hawaii.

  Fred Noonan labored over his chart table, plotting radio direction finder bearings and celest
ial fixes that he managed to shoot through breaks in the overcast. In the red-lighted cabin Noonan looked like an alien creature in his fur-lined flying suit and leather helmet. He needed the costume to take celestial shots with his sextant from the opened after hatch atop the clipper’s fuselage. Like most aerial navigators, Noonan did not trust the accuracy of celestial fixes taken through the glass of an aircraft hatch. It was believed that the aircraft glass might refract the light of his celestial target.

  Each crew member alternated two hours on duty with a period in the crew’s rest bunk. Musick and the first officer, Rod Sullivan, rotated command in the cockpit. The junior flight officer, George King, took over the navigating duties while Noonan catnapped.

  The radio operator, Wilson Jarboe, passed Noonan’s position reports at half-hour intervals to Alameda where, in the lobby of the seaplane base, Van Dusen had mounted a gigantic wall map. The prolific Van Dusen produced a fresh press release for every position report from the China Clipper.

  Dawn overtook the clipper as slowly as the night had fallen eight hours earlier. Still 200 miles from their destination, Sullivan spotted farther to the south the dark mass of Mauna Kea jutting from a layer of cloud. When they were thirty miles from Honolulu they recognized Diamond Head.

  At 1010 A.M., 20 hours and 33 minutes after taking off from San Francisco Bay, Ed Musick landed the China Clipper in Honolulu’s Pearl Harbor. The longest leg of the 8,210-mile transpacific route had been flown.

  Following a flower-strewn reception and gala welcome, the China Clipper was loaded with staples for the island bases—twenty-one crates of fresh vegetables, twelve crates of turkeys for the first Thanksgiving on the atolls, cartons of cranberries, sweet potatoes, mince meat, and crates of material including paint, typewriter ribbons, baseballs, a complete barber’s outfit, and tennis racquets.

  The 1,380 miles from Honolulu to Midway were the easiest leg on the route to Asia. When the weather was clear, as it almost always was, navigators needed only to follow the strand of islands spaced along a northwestward arc toward the atolls of Midway.

  In the ripple-free air even the Sperry autopilot, normally given to wild fits of cantankerousness, kept the China Clipper on a steady course. Leaving Oahu, the clipper flew over the island of Nihoa, then Necker, French Frigate Shoals, Gardner Pinnacles, and Laysan Island. The strand of islands pointed like signposts to Midway.

  Midway had changed. The buildings were now brightly painted, the grounds landscaped, flags flying at their masts. The white-uniformed Pan Am staff stood at their posts on the landing float. The clipper swooped low over the base, touching down in the lagoon at 2:01, one minute off schedule.

  At dawn the China Clipper was again westbound. There were no signposts marking the 1,260-mile route to Wake. After Kure Island, only twenty minutes past Midway, there were a thousand miles of trackless ocean. No landmarks, no chain of atolls pointed to the destination. There was only Wake Island—two-and-a-half square miles of sandspit—barely awash in the Pacific.

  It was the most demanding feat of aerial navigation in the world. There were no alternate landing sites and not enough fuel for a return to Midway. The only aids to navigation were the sun, sometimes a glimpse of Venus, the driftsight, the navigator’s own dead reckoning, and the Adcock Direction Finder, a capricious device not fully trusted by navigator Noonan.4

  From his bag of navigational tricks, Fred Noonan produced a technique called “aim off.” “Aim off” was a tricky but effective way to ensure that a vessel or aircraft did not overshoot a tiny target like Wake.

  The navigator would deliberately fly a course to one side of his destination. Then, when he had intersected a precomputed line of position he would obtain by sun sight, he would turn and fly down the sun line to his target. “Aim off” was not infallible, but it solved half the navigational problem—that of knowing on which side, north or south, the China Clipper might be from Wake.5

  Two minutes before the crew of the clipper spotted Wake, the Pan Am base on the island radioed that they had sighted the inbound aircraft. Five minutes ahead of schedule, the China Clipper glided to a touchdown on the marine runway in the Wake lagoon, now lengthened and deepened since Rod Sullivan’s visit in August.

  At sunrise the next morning, the China Clipper lifted from Wake’s lagoon, bound for Guam, 1,560 miles to the west. With the clipper’s cabin windows open, warm tropical air filled the cabin. Musick regularly changed altitudes, seeking the tailwinds that would shave time from the long flight. Flying at 8,000 feet, the clipper covered the last 160 miles to Guam in less than an hour.

  There they discovered that their precision flight planning had been in vain. Though they had arrived in Guam’s Apra Harbor exactly on schedule, the crew learned that the arrival celebration in Manila was scheduled for two days hence. Someone in the public relations department had become confused about the international date line. It was now too late and too embarrassing to reschedule the event.

  Musick and his crew, grumbling, spent an unwanted day off in Guam, trying to be inconspicuous, ignoring the clamor of questions over the radio.

  On Friday, November 29, the China Clipper embarked on the last leg of her journey to the Orient. The Guam–Manila segment was the only portion of the voyage never flown during the feasibility testing. By now the crew had confidence in themselves and in the sleek new Martin flying boat. The China Clipper had proven herself. She was a faithful and sturdy vessel. She made the journey to Manila without incident.

  None of the hoopla of the inaugural flight quite matched the celebration in Manila. A hundred thousand excited greeters watched the China Clipper appear on the horizon. After a circle of the city, the giant craft landed in Manila Bay. A swarm of fighter planes flew overhead in salute. Hundreds of small launches escorted the clipper to her landing barge. Through flower-bedecked arches the crew walked ashore. Newsreel cameras whirred while Ed Musick presented a letter from President Roosevelt to Governor Quezon.

  There was a motor parade, a banquet, an official reception. The man of the hour was Ed Musick. The press hounded him for comments. He was asked to describe the historic flight across the Pacific. True to form, Musick described in two words one of the most momentous feats in aviation history: “Without incident,” he explained.

  But the spotlight remained on Musick. Despite his wishes, he could no longer escape fame. The first transpacific flight of the China Clipper earned for him the prestigious Harmon Trophy, previously won by only two other Americans: Wiley Post and Charles Lindbergh. The cover of Time magazine featured his face. He was besieged by requests for interviews. Ed Musick, whether he liked it or not, had become an authentic American hero.

  17

  Orient Express

  Not only was Musick a celebrity, so were the China Clipper and her two sister ships. Whenever one of the Martin M-130s lay at her mooring in Alameda, crowds gathered. The very name—China Clipper—conjured up a spell of adventure. California to Asia in six days! The sense of wonder was the same Americans would feel half a century later for the orbiting space shuttle.

  A China Clipper craze swept the country. A song appeared, written by Norma Morton and Ethel Powell. Then came a dance step to the same music. Restaurants and night clubs adopted the name. Magazines featured articles about the famous flying boat. First-person accounts were published in newspapers by passengers who had flown in her.

  Hollywood lost no time cashing in. In 1936 Warner Brothers produced China Clipper, starring Humphrey Bogart and Pat O’Brien. In the film, scripted by former naval aviator Frank Wead, Bogart played an aviator loosely fashioned after Ed Musick. O’Brien portrayed a tough, single-minded airline boss whose real-life counterpart was clearly Juan Trippe.

  Though the film lacked artistic excellence, it played to sell-out audiences. Besides the dramatic footage of the China Clipper, clipped mostly from newsreels, the movie was perhaps most notable as the first major aviation movie produced without loss of life.

  The movie contained a
n ironic scene in which cinematic art imitated life. Bogart had just managed to fly the China Clipper through a typhoon, narrowly making a critical deadline that saved the airline. When he emerged from the cockpit, he referred to his visionary but insensitive boss: “I was just thinking how swell it would have been if he’d said thanks.”

  The irony was probably lost on Trippe, who rarely said thanks to anyone. It did not pass unnoticed by the pilots who flew for him.1

  Almost a year had passed since the inaugural mail flight. All three of the Martin M-130s had entered service. Joining the China Clipper were her sister ships, the Philippine Clipper and the Hawaii Clipper. It was time to commence passenger service.

  In his global strategy, Trippe planned to link his Pacific air route to Pan American’s Chinese subsidiary, China National Airlines Corporation. The ideal connecting point was the busy market port of Hong Kong. Pan American, however, still had rights only to Manila and then to the Portuguese colony of Macao, about 40 miles west of Hong Kong. The British government, recalcitrant as ever in their dealings with Pan American, had denied landing rights in the crown colony of Hong Kong, Trippe’s wished-for destination. The matter was stalled on the familiar issue of reciprocity, since the British Air Ministry demanded landing rights in the Philippines.

  Trippe’s tactic was one he would use repeatedly in his dealings with foreign governments. He let the powerful merchants and taipans of Hong Kong worry that their traditional markets were being bypassed in favor of Macao. He let it be known, too, that they had their own government to blame for this travesty. To fuel their worries, Trippe ordered construction of radio and docking facilities at Macao, and showed every intention of making the sleepy Portuguese colony the new aerial hub of the Far East.

  It was a typical Trippe charade, but it worked. Immense pressure came from the trading houses, banks, and colonial administration of Hong Kong to the British Air Ministry. By September 1936, His Majesty’s government had reconsidered its position on the matter. Pan American was granted landing rights at Hong Kong’s Kai Tak airport and the marine facilities of Victoria Harbor. The first passenger flight was scheduled for 21 October 1936.2