China Clipper
Page 20
The naval air station at San Diego became the boneyard for the obsolescent Pan American flying boats. BOAC’s Boeing 314s went to a similar retirement in Baltimore. Put up for sale by the War Assets Administration, some of the mothballed boats were bought by start-up airlines that appeared after the war.
Thus did the once-mighty Boeing flying boats suffer ignominious ends. Two of them, the Pacific Clipper and the Atlantic Clipper, were cannibalized for parts. The Capetown Clipper, reconditioned and renamed the Bermuda Sky Queen, was flown to England where she was chartered to bring British delegates back to America for a United Nations meeting.
En route, the Boeing 314’s inexperienced operators found the westerly headwinds stronger than forecast. Running short of fuel, they landed amid thirty-foot swells in the open Atlantic. The sixty-two passengers and seven crew bobbed on the high seas for twenty-fours while the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Bibb rescued them one boat load at a time.
In an attempt to take the Bermuda Sky Queen under tow, the bow of the aircraft smashed into the Bibb, staving in the flying boat’s nose. The damaged aircraft was declared a derelict and the order was given to sink her. Set ablaze by gunfire, the Bermuda Sky Queen vanished in the Atlantic.
Another start-up airline, World Airways, purchased all seven remaining Boeing 314s. Two of them, the Dixie and Berwick, the historic wartime transports of Roosevelt and Churchill, were broken up for spares. Until 1949 World Airways flew the surviving Boeings on cargo and charter operations along the East Coast and to the Caribbean. History and the harsh rules of economics finally forced an end to the operation, and again the Boeing 314s went into storage.
By 1951 all but the Bristol had been scrapped. She had been sold to a shadowy minister, known as “Master X,” who declared his intention to fly to Russia to negotiate a peace accord with Stalin. This bizarre mission came to an end before it began. A violent storm swept over Baltimore harbor, tearing the Bristol from her mooring and sinking her on a muddy shoal. Salvaged from the mud, she, too, went to the scrapyard. She was the last of the line.1
The story of the Martin clippers did not end with the M-130. Glenn Martin, perhaps naively, had gambled that Pan American would follow up its initial order of three M-130s with additional aircraft. Instead, Juan Trippe solicited proposals from other manufacturers, including Martin’s competitors, Sikorsky and Boeing. Ultimately, Pan American’s order went to Boeing for an advanced over-ocean flying boat. An outraged Glenn Martin was left with his unwanted M-130 derivative, a huge deficit, and no customers.
Only one model of the M-156, the advanced Martin clipper, was constructed. She had the same distinctive lines as her M-130 predecessors, but her overall dimensions were greater. Her wings spanned 156 feet, and the maximum gross weight was increased to 62,000 pounds. The tail was configured with dual vertical stabilizers, a design improvement intended to correct the single-finned M-130’s wallowing tendency in rough air.
Finding no buyers in the United States, the M-156 was finally sold to the Soviet Union. Christened the Russian Clipper, the flying boat entered the service of Aeroflot. In 1940 she was based in Khabarovsk, in the Far East, replacing the shorter-ranged Savoia-Marchetti S.55.
For four years the Russian Clipper maintained a scheduled service. She flew the route from Khabarovsk, along the lower reaches of the Amur River to Nikolayevsk-na-Amure, then rounded the southern tip of the Sea of Okhotsk to the city of Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula. This 1,200-mile route suited the capabilities of the Martin boat comfortably, allowing her to transport a substantial load and still carry sufficient fuel for diversion. Previously, Aeroflot aircraft were forced to take the lengthy route around the perimeter of the Sea of Okhotsk, via Magadan, using primitive coastal facilities for refueling and repair.
The Russian Clipper’s operations were confined to summers, the brutal Siberian winters devoted to refurbishing the flying boat. In 1943 the clipper was scheduled to have her Pratt and Whitney engines replaced back in Baltimore. This plan was canceled, probably due to wartime priorities, and Soviet-made engines, Ash-621Rs, were installed instead.
For another year the M-156 flew with her Russian power plants. In 1944, for reasons now lost in the smoke of Russian history, the M-156 Russian Clipper was sacrificed for scrap metal.
The late-arriving Sikorsky VS-44As had barely come of age before their time was up. Flown by American Export Airlines under U.S. Navy contract, two of the three flying boats survived the war. The Excalibur, holder of numerous early speed and distance records, was lost at Botwood, Newfoundland, in a takeoff accident on 3 October 1942. At war’s end, American Export, like its competitors on the lucrative North Atlantic routes, opted for Douglas-built land planes. Both VS-44As were sold to a charter operator and found themselves engaged in various questionable operations in South America.
The once-proud Exeter, wartime transport of diplomats and flag officers, became a gunrunner. She was used to supply arms and ammunition to rebels trying to bring down the government of Paraguay. During one such mission on the evening of 15 August 1947, the Exeter’s captain failed to rendezvous with the rebel gunboats on the Paraguay River. With darkness falling, he elected to turn back to the Rio de la Plata estuary, on the South Atlantic coast. By the time he arrived over the estuary, near the Punta Brava Lighthouse, an inky darkness blanketed the water.
In a classic flying boat scenario, the Exeter approached too fast, too steeply, smacking the water nose first. She waterlooped, careened through the water broadside, and was destroyed.2
Only the Excambian was left. The last VS-44A was acquired by a group of Baltimore businessmen and refitted as a flying trading post for service on the Amazon River. This adventurous enterprise failed, and the Excambian became a derelict, mouldering in a Peruvian harbor. And then in 1957 a former navy flying boat pilot named William Probert bought the Sikorsky and ferried her home to California.
Operated by Probert’s airline, Avalon Air Transport (later Catalina Air Lines), the old ocean boat carried tourists over the forty-five miles of water between Long Beach and Catalina Island, a journey that took her twelve minutes each way.
In 1969 she again changed hands. One of her earliest admirers, Charlie Blair, who had flown her as chief pilot of American Export Airlines and had set Atlantic speed records with the VS-44As, bought the old flying boat. Blair and his actress wife, Maureen O’Hara, founded Antilles Air Boats, a Caribbean-based seaplane airline. The Excambian, sole survivor of the great American oceangoing flying boats, became, briefly, the flagship of their airline.3
Based in the U.S. Virgin Islands, the VS-44 made over a thousand commercial flights. In 1971, after an accident in which her hull was run aground, it was discovered that the decades of salt water and neglect had taken too great a toll. She was no longer serviceable. Once again she was beached.
Thereafter she became a venerated relic, residing briefly in the U.S. Naval Aviation museum at Pensacola, Florida, and then returning to the place of her birth, Bridgeport, Connecticut. There, with the support of the Sikorsky Aircraft Division of the United Technologies Corporation, she underwent extensive renovation prior to her installation in the Bradley Air Museum at Windsor Locks, Connecticut.
* * *
Within the British Commonwealth still lived the remnants of a bygone, Kiplingesque era. To these outposts, many still unvisited by the engineers and bulldozers, the stately Empire-class flying boats continued to fly. For another decade beyond the war, the Empire boats and their derivatives tramped through the backwaters of Africa, the Far East, and the South Pacific.
Conceived in the middle thirties, the Empire-class flying boat had proliferated in astonishing numbers. No fewer than 792 examples were constructed, far more than any other four-engined flying boat of any nation. Most of these were S.25 Sunderlands, long-range versions delivered to the Royal Navy. Approximately forty Sunderlands were converted to civilian model Sandringhams, and a few, the Hythe class, were produced for commercial use after the war.
The largest Short flying boat, the S.35 Shetland, first flew in military version on 14 December 1944. This ambitious aircraft had a 150-foot four-inch wing span and a maximum weight of 130,000 pounds. Her wings, swept back at the leading edge, mounted four 2,500-horsepower Bristol Centaurus 600 engines. The Shetland II, with accommodation for as many as seventy passengers on two decks, made her maiden flight 17 September 1947.
But by this time BOAC had cast its vision beyond the flying boat. Neither of the huge Shetlands ever entered service. The first was lost to fire and the second scrapped at Belfast in 1951.5
Of the famous S.26 G-class boats built at the end of the thirties, only the Golden Hind survived her military service. Though these most glamorous of the Empire boats were intended for the North Atlantic, their true range (with payload) never permitted such operation. Luxuriously refurbished, with accommodations for twenty-four passengers, the Golden Hind returned to BOAC service in September 1946 and flew the prestigious Poole-to-Cairo route. She made her last flight for BOAC in April 1948 and was finally scrapped in 1954.
The Australian airline Qantas resumed flying boat operations after the war, as did the predecessor of Air New Zealand, Tasman Empire Airways (TEAL). TEAL remained one of the staunchest flying boat adherents, keeping their Solents in operation until 1960.
BOAC’s flying boat era ended on 3 November 1950 with the departure of the Somerset, an S.45 Solent, from Southampton to South Africa. The four-and-a-half-day flying boat journey was about to be shortened by half with the introduction of land planes. Ironically, it was on this route, formerly served by the slow but reliable flying boats, that BOAC chose to introduce the futuristic—and tragically flawed—Comet I jetliner.
In Australia, the independent airline Ansett continued to operate their two Sandringhams until 1966. Aquila Airways took BOAC’s place in Southampton, operating Hythe-class and Solent boats to tourist destinations throughout coastal Europe. A string of accidents, including a grisly crash when the Solent Sydney crashed in a gravel pit on the Isle of Wight, hastened the end of Aquila Airways.
On 26 September 1958, the Awateri, a former TEAL Solent acquired by Aquila, became the last flying boat to depart on a commercial passenger flight from the historic Southampton marine terminal when she took off for Madeira, Spain. On 20 December, the last three Solents remaining at Southampton were ferried to Lisbon, where they were to commence a new airline operation. But like many such enterprises, the venture failed. For thirteen years the three flying boats lay idle on the Tagus River before being scrapped.6
Freed from occupation and the constraints of war, Air France resumed operations in 1946. The elegant Laté 631, ordered in 1938 and first flown in 1942, metamorphosed as a postwar production airliner, powered by American engines (six 1,600-horsepower Wright Cyclone fourteen-cylinder radials). Air France took delivery of three new Laté 631s, and on 26 July 1947 put them in service on the historic French flying boat route across the South Atlantic. One of these, F-BANU, was given the name Guillaumet, in honor of the pioneering Air France pilot, Henri Guillaumet, who had commanded the Laté 521, Lieutenant de Vaisseau Paris, during her Atlantic flights of 1938–39, and who was killed in combat during the war.
The Laté 631s thus earned the distinction of being not only the largest flying boats ever to operate a commercial passenger service, but were the last commercial boats to fly scheduled transatlantic routes. Staging from the Biscarosse base near the French Atlantic coast, the big flying boats flew to Port Etienne, in West Africa (now Mauritania), then across the Atlantic to Fort-de-France, in Martinique.
Despite their clean-lined beauty, the Laté boats proved to be too vulnerable. One was destroyed, even before entering service, during her delivery flight. And then, on 1 August 1948, one of the new boats, F-BDRC, vanished in the Atlantic with fifty-three passengers aboard.7 Following this disaster, Air France made the decision to end its long and sentimental association with the flying boat.
A total of eight Laté 63 1s, including the prototype, had been produced. Following their withdrawal from Air France service, an airline called Société France-Hydro laid plans to use all seven remaining aircraft on a cargo operation between Douala and Chad, in central Africa. An experimental service was conducted for three years with one of the boats, with a large cargo door built into the port side just abaft the wing. When this aircraft was lost in an accident near Banzo, in French Equatorial Africa, the operation came to an end. Two of the Laté 631s were sold to breakers, and the others perished in hangars destroyed by a snowstorm.8
She was still the famous China Clipper. But ten years in the career of a flying boat amounted to several lifetimes. By 1945 she was obsolescent, relegated to the backwaters of Pan American’s system—the route from Miami to Léopoldville on the coast of West Africa. She had just been returned from U.S. Navy custody and restored to her original colors.
Captain Marius Lodeesen was sent back to Miami to check out again in the China Clipper after nearly a decade of flying other aircraft. Like most of the Pan American pilots, Lodeesen loved the old flying boat. He felt at home amid the oil-and-leather cockpit smells, the old-fashioned throttles, the familiar rounded-back pilots’ seats.
Not much had changed. Gone was the spiderlike candy-machine crane they had used to operate the Sperry autopilot. Gone, too, was the clothesline used to send notes from the cockpit to the engineer’s station. Now there was an intercom.
On the night of 8 January 1945, Lodeesen’s phone in Miami rang. It was the Pan American airport manager. “Lodi. . . there has been a crash. The China went in at Port of Spain. . .”
The China Clipper had been on final approach to Port of Spain, Trinidad. It was a clear, starlit night, the water slick as glass. The landing path was illuminated by flares. The captain, Cyril Goyette, had turned the controls over to the first officer, Leonard Cramer. As the aircraft was descending toward the flarepath at an airspeed of one hundred knots, the hull smacked into the granite-hard water and ripped apart. The China Clipper sank like a stone in thirty feet of water. Nine of the twelve crew members and fourteen of the eighteen passengers were lost.
The official accident investigation gave the probable cause of the accident as the pilot’s “failure to realize his proximity to the water and to correct his altitude for a normal landing, and lack of adequate supervision by the captain during the landing, resulting in the inadvertent flight into the water at excessive landing speed in a nose down attitude. . . .”
There were dissenting opinions. Several surviving crew members believed that the clipper had struck an object, possibly a small boat. No evidence of a foreign object was found.9
Marius Lodeesen had his own theory. When Lodeesen was sent to Miami to check out again in the aging China Clipper, his instructor was a younger man who hadn’t flown the Martin boats in the Pacific.
He did not approve of Lodeesen’s landing technique. “Too slow. Eighty-five knots in the approach.”
“That’s too fast,” argued Lodeesen. “We always approached at seventy-five knots, at night even slower. She has no flap. When you come in fast, the bow is too depressed and you could waterloop.”
“We want to be conservative,” said the instructor. “At seventy-five knots you are only a few knots above stalling. Better do it our way and don’t confuse the pilots you fly with.”
Lodeesen relented. He later wished he hadn’t.10
Until the night in Port of Spain, the China Clipper had led a charmed life. She had flown over fifteen thousand hours. She had covered 2,400,000 miles carrying 370,000 pounds of cargo, 380,000 pounds of mail, and 3,500 passengers. During a wartime mission to the Belgian Congo, she had brought back a cargo of uranium that would be used in the top-secret Manhattan Project—the fi
rst atomic bomb.11
Flying boats would soldier on for a few more years. There were still backwater outposts to visit. There were islands not yet accessible by land planes. But with the death of the China Clipper, the age of the great boats had come to an end.
26
Dinosaurs and Might-Have-Beens
What was it about the flying boat that intrigued men of vision and talent like Martin and Sikorsky and Hughes? Why were they so convinced, even while history was giving its blessing to the land plane, that the great, long-range flying boat still had a place in commercial aviation?
Geniuses are often stubborn men. They can cling to outdated notions just as tenaciously as ordinary men. They can be, like Howard Hughes, driven to prove their critics wrong. They can be, like Grover Loening, simply obsessed by the mystique of a vehicle like the flying boat.
By the 1940s, certain statistics were incontrovertible. No hull-bottomed, water-based commercial airliner in the world could match the coldly efficient DC-4. The flying boat, as a viable commercial airliner for the postwar decade, had few true believers. Pan American, BOAC, and Air France, all traditional proponents of the long-range flying boat, had smelled the kerosene of the coming jet age. Speed, versatility, operating efficiency—these would be the criteria of the new generation of commercial airliners.1
In Britain, where the airline industry had become nationalized, a dichotomy of thinking bisected the Air Ministry. In a bold stroke to regain twenty years of lost ground, Britain was developing the futuristic De Havilland jetliner, the Comet I. In a simultaneous leap into the past, the Air Ministry had placed an order with Saunders-Roe for the largest commercial flying boat ever intended for airline use.
In May 1946, specifications were laid down for three models of the Saunders-Roe SR-45 Princess, a ten-engined transatlantic flying boat. From its inception, the project was plagued with delays. Not until 22 August 1952 did the Princess make her maiden flight. She was the first and, as it turned out, the only one of the three to fly.