by Paul Lally
Anston asked some questions about fuel consumption and range and got precise answers that he jotted down in his notebook. Bauer seemed content to just be in the presence of such an array of modern technology.
Ziggy turned to me, ‘How do you park this thing once you land?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Do you use an anchor or what?’
I explained how the fourth officer manned the mooring compartment and handled the lines.
Anston chimed in, ‘What’s it like for you Pan Am guys flying for Lufthansa?’
The pilot and first officer remained pointedly silent, so I said, ‘We got into this business because we like to fly. Who we fly for doesn’t matter as much as what we fly. And flying a beautiful big bird like this? Let’s just say that up here, who owns her doesn’t matter as much as who flies her.’
A silence fell over the group as the meditated upon my profundity, aided by moonlit clouds gliding past in a serene parade. The soundproofing reduced the engines to a hypnotic hum, which seemed to cast a spell on the group.
After a while, Bauer politely cleared his throat and said. ‘I must say being up here on a night like this, it is hard to believe that we are a world at war.’
‘America sure as hell is not,’ I said without thinking.
‘Not for now, perhaps. But your Uncle Sam will not sleep forever. Sooner or later he will wake up and fight.’
‘Not with atom bombs hanging over his head.’
‘Perhaps you are right.’
I stifled a yawn and Ziggy said, ‘Is it the time or the company’?
‘Neither. I need to rest before our shift goes back on watch.’
‘Where do you sleep?’
I pointed to the baggage hatch on the bulkhead directly behind Captain Fatt. ‘We’ve got crew cots back there past the luggage cages. Not as fancy as yours and a little cramped, but they do the job. Now then, may I escort you gentlemen back to your staterooms?’
Ziggy waved me off, ‘Forget it. We know our way back, don’t we, boys?’
They rumbled their thanks and threaded their way down the spiral staircase. I swung the hatch closed on their good natured chatter and the sound of their voices cut off like a knife. Freed from our gawking audience, the flight crew quickly resumed its state of calm teamwork.
Sparks handed Fatt the latest met report from Horta. Instead of the overcast breaking the way they had predicted during the night, it had worsened and so had the winds. Fatt groaned and got up from his station and stretched.
‘Jeeves, would you mind turning down my bed?’ he said to me.
‘Let me draw your bath first, sir.’
He smiled and led the parade through the door leading to our cramped crew quarters. True to form, within minutes of hitting his narrow canvas cot, Fatt was snoring like a buzz saw. In contrast, I lay on my cot in the windowless dark, listening to each of the engines go slightly in and out of synchronization as the relief flight engineer ran through a ritualistic fine- tuning of fuel mixture and prop pitch that only he could appreciate. From the cot beside mine, Mason grumbled, ‘Why doesn’t he leave well enough alone? I left them running sweet.’
‘Want me to tell him ‘hands off’?’ I said.
‘A lot of good that would do. You know how flight engineers are.’
‘Used to be one myself, briefly.’
‘Why didn’t you stay at it?’
‘Pan Am’s different than the navy. It’s one long ladder you’re always climbing from apprentice pilot to master of flying boats. Every other job you do along the way is just one more rung.’
‘Hell of a way to run a business.’
‘It is, but when everything starts going to hell, it’s nice to know everybody on board can fly.’
‘Too many cooks can spoil the broth,’ he warned.
‘That’s for soup. Too many cooks can save a dying plane.’
He rolled over with a grunt and that was that. He had a point of course. Most companies and organizations hire specialists to achieve the greatest efficiencies. But Juan Tripp and Andre Preister embraced the apprentice- master approach from the very beginning. And they were right to do so. It’s one thing for a Master of Flying Boats to call for more power from his engines, and quite another to know what that requires of the aircraft at that particular moment, unless he himself has sat and squirmed and sweated in the flight engineer’s seat while staring at instrument readings that said what the captain was asking for was impossible – and found the courage to tell him.
Mason was right, too, though, about overly-fussing with the engines.
He had tuned the clipper’s engines to a state of perfection that I’d rarely encountered in Pan Am flight engineers. These navy guys were meticulous specialists, or General Patton wouldn’t have secured them for the mission. Too bad not all of them could fly, which put the pressure on Fatt and me and our relief pilots as the only qualified crew. But, I reminded myself again, this was no ordinary flight, and the weather seemed to sense it by going from bad to worse.
Two hours later, rested and refreshed, Fatt took over for landing at Horta. Instead of puffy cumulous clouds and blue skies bathing an azure-colored ocean as forecast, we slugged our way through dense cloud cover, glued to our instruments and putting more faith in what they indicated than any god up above who might help us.
‘What are they reporting now?’ Fatt said.
Sparks, his voice still heavy with sleep despite two cups of coffee said, ‘Four hundred feet, visibility half-mile, winds two-two-zero at fifteen.’
‘That won’t last long,’ he grumbled. ‘And if the winds maroon us in Horta, our scientist pal will be in deep trouble. That conference only lasts three days. And it started yesterday.’
‘So?’
‘So, when the party’s over, everybody goes straight home to Germany, including the good Herr Doktor, or they’ll get suspicious.’
‘The Gestapo, you mean?’
‘They’re watching those eggheads like a hawk. Portugal’s neutral. Any one of them could hightail it to an embassy and defect.’
‘They’d just storm the place and grab him.’
‘Maybe yes, maybe no. The Nazis are dumb, but they aren’t stupid.
That would make egg-on-your-face headlines.’
‘What’s the plan if we don’t make it in time?’
‘None that I know of. But I sure hope there is one. They don’t tell me everything, you know - Sparks, get me the latest.’
‘Aye, cap.’
Fatt switched off the autopilot and took the yoke. ‘Time to earn our pay.’
Then he wiggled it slightly. ‘You have the aircraft, captain.’
‘C’mon, don’t you ever fly anymore?’
He grinned. ‘Not if I can help it. Besides, you’ve got to learn how to make love to this fat lady.’
‘I’m getting there.’
‘Getting there is not the same thing as arriving, as we both know from long experience.’
‘With planes or women?’
‘Both. Get to work.’
And that was that, so I pulled back the throttles ever so slightly to begin a gradual descent, Then I reduced the manifold pressure slowly so as to avoid ‘cold shocking’ the engines, which would send Mason through the roof, and rightly so. Tens of thousands of carefully machined and lubricated engine parts had been doing their job perfectly well for the past fifteen hours. Chopping the throttles would be like choking a person to death.
I keyed the steward’s intercom. Nawrocki answered instantly. The man never slept. ‘Aye, sir?’
‘Prepare passengers for landing.’
‘Already doing so, sir.’
I keyed the navigator’s station. ‘Touchdown estimate?’
‘Coming up on ten miles out,’ Stone said.
‘That was fast.’ I retarded the throttles even more to increase our rate of descent.
‘Tail winds picking up,’ he explained.
Not good. Wind across a runway was
one thing to worry about, but at least on the ground a runway stayed put. The wind made waves and the faster it blew, the higher the waves and deeper the swells, and onto that same water I had to plunk sixty-eight thousand pounds of flying metal filled with tired people.
‘Watch your airspeed,’ Fatt said quietly, his voice as steady as the rate-of-climb indicator showing us in a five hundred feet-per-minute descent.
‘She loves it nice and steady, right up to the finish.’
‘Don’t they all?’
Fatt chuckled but said nothing.
I risked a quick glimpse out the window. Nothing but a dark grey void.
‘Where’s the bottom of this mud?’ I said.
‘Four hundred and dropping.’
The altimeter hands were unwinding to thirteen hundred feet. ‘Cabeço Gordo’s at a thousand feet,’ I said to remind myself of the island’s volcano. No need to smash into Horta’s familiar landmark on the way down.
A lighter streak of grey, then another, and another as the overcast began thinning. I advanced the fuel mixture to full rich and banked slightly to enter the downwind leg of the landing pattern. So far so good. Because of the clipper’s immense size, she was slow to respond to control input forces, but when she did, she did so solid and sure. The airspeed needle continued its slow retreat from one hundred-ten knots as I began a one-minute turn to port that would bring us onto final approach.
Still no sight of water or land or anything but milky grey. But the instruments told me I was on course and doing fine. Even so, I sure would have loved a little glimpse of ocean to let me know I was still on the planet earth and not in some dream world.
The curtain rings screeched as Fatt yanked them back and shouted,
‘You boys gonna’ love Horta. Any of you ever been there? ‘
‘Do you mind?’ I snapped.
‘Sorry, got a little carried away.’
‘Flaps ten.’
‘Roger, flaps ten.’
I rolled in more nose-down trim to counteract the added lift, and kept my airspeed pegged at ninety knots, just as Fatt shouted, ‘Land ho, mateys!’
The clouds surrendered their vice grip on my world to reveal the grey- green, white-capped tossed surface of the sea three hundred feet below. Land it wasn’t but it felt great to see it nonetheless. Faial island lay two miles dead ahead and the striking difference in the water conditions of its wind-sheltered cove versus the open sea was striking as we drew nearer and nearer.
Pan Am had chosen this tiny speck of volcanic land in the middle of the southern Atlantic Ocean for the very feature I now observed. The city of Horta, located in the southeastern most part of the island, has a narrow spit of land curving up and around it like a fishhook that creates shelter from the wind and also functions as a perfect breakwater.
But not so much that I dared let her land by herself. The wind was coming from south and kicking up whitecaps and major swells. That same wind was blowing across the bay too, creating a smaller version of what I would call a less than ideal situation, but better than nothing.
I couldn’t land into the wind like I normally would because that would slam her hull down across the wave crests and we’d end up cracking something, most likely our sponsons. Mike Kennedy had done that during a survey flight to Horta and caught hell from Preister and every Boeing engineer that had ever worked on the plane. And they were right to be angry. Every plane has its limits, and it’s a captain’s job to know exactly what that limit is, and exactly how far beyond he can press his luck. Kennedy’s luck ran out. Would mine?
‘Your rate of descent stinks,’ Fatt said.
I applied throttle and she slowly ballooned up.
‘Flaps thirty,’ I said.
‘Thirty you got.’
From then on things happened quickly, as they always do during those final seconds between being airborne and waterborne. Now at eighty knots, she was starting to be a real handful as the slower moving air made her control surfaces sluggish and I had to twist and tug the wheel in larger and larger motions as Fatt called out our altitude and airspeed, while I concentrated on the touchdown spot of two, brightly-painted buoys with flashing lights that marked the beginning of the seaway. The wave action bobbed and jerked them around, which helped me judge that perfect moment when the swell would pass and I could touch down her hull on the backside of the wave like a phonograph needle slipping into that first groove of a Benny Goodman record - without skipping, of course.
That’s what I wanted to do. What she wanted to do was a different story, but one that had a happy ending, too. After two sharp, slapping skips over the waves her hull dug in and she became a ship again, wallowing in the swells as I taxied toward the boarding ramp.
Fatt peered out the window at the skies and growled something unintelligible.
‘What do you think?’ I said.
‘Getting worse, I think.’
‘Can we re-fuel and take off in time?’
He shook his head. ‘Don’t want to risk it. We’re stuck here, damn it.’
Sparks handed him a slip of paper. He quickly scanned its contents and raised his bushy eyebrows. ‘Kind of good news. Met says the front’s moving fast. Conceivably we could get out of here first thing in the morning.’
‘Conceivably.’
He crumpled the paper. ‘Make that definitely, because I’ll be at the wheel.’
‘What about me?’
‘You’ll be too tired from playing nicey-nice with our Nazi storm troopers when they find out they ain’t going nowhere and start stomping their hobnail boots on your pretty little toes.’
The backbone of surprise is fusing speed with secrecy.
- Carl von Clausewitz
Faial Island in the Azores is like a life preserver.
Without its bounty of food, water and supplies, countless clipper ships would have never made it across the South Atlantic. Today the Yankee Clipper’s needs were much the same as the sailing ships of old, as the ground crew serviced her in Horta’s sheltered harbor.
While this was taking place, passengers and crew, via a conga line of taxicabs, made their way up the steep hillside dotted with scrub trees and sparse vegetation, heading for what had been called the Pan Am Club, before Trippe’s deal with Lufthansa.
Deplaning had gone off without a hitch. No broken bones on the bobbing and heaving sponson, but plenty of frowns and pursed lips from the compliance officers as they navigated the slippery walkway leading to shore. God only knows what kind of information those jokers were lugging around inside their black leather briefcases. But from the way Hitler had deployed these people to industries all across the United States, supposedly to ‘observe, note and report’ any deviations from the neutrality agreement, I figured they were doing a bang-up job of industrial espionage while they were at it.
And why not? On the surface, they were in America to make sure we weren’t building bombers for Britain on the sly, or tanks for Russia on the cheap. But while they were doing so, it became the perfect opportunity to cherry-pick our latest manufacturing processes and haul them back to Germany. Forget about the fox being in the henhouse. These guys were wolves. And that guy Bauer? The more ordinary and simple he acted the more suspicious I got. I had to admire his easy-going, off-putting style, but I shudder to think how many poor suckers fell for it only to discover they were trapped in his sticky, Gestapo web.
I was having these thoughts for a good reason, because by luck of the taxi draw, the detective sat beside me, wet shoulder to wet shoulder, as our cab waited in line to let us out at the white painted, single-story club. Sheets of rain buffeted its arched glass entrance while scores of attentive, umbrella-toting doormen appeared as if by magic to escort the passengers and crew inside.
‘Hear they’ve got a nice breakfast spread,’ I said amiably as the rain thundered on our roof like gravel.
Bauer chuckled and patted his stomach. ‘I am still full from last night.’
‘How did you sleep?’
‘Sorry to hear that.’
He grinned like a little boy. ‘Actually, I was too excited to sleep. I’ve never flown on a clipper before.’
‘How do you normally travel?’
He closed his eyes and shuddered. ‘They send me on catapult mail ships. One minute we’re motionless, the next...BANG!’ He smacked his hands together, ‘We’re in the air flying. It’s miserable.’
‘I thought they didn’t use those anymore, now that you’ve got planes that can fly to America non-stop.’
‘The Luftwaffe is using them for military operations. All that remains are those loathsome catapult planes and your beautiful Boeing clippers to do the job.’ He shrugged. ‘But, as Berlin reminds us all the time, compliance officers have priority seating over the Gestapo. We’re just the sheep dogs, they’re the owners.’
‘And we’re the sheep.’
He laughed. ‘I’d hardly call Americans sheep. You have too many sharp teeth for that.’
‘If so, then the Gestapo’s the dentist.’
He sat back and gave me a long stare. ‘Why this constant nipping at my heels? Why is it impossible for us to get along?’
‘You tell me.’
He shook his head. ‘The war is over, my friend. We won. Can we start from there?’
Our taxi pulled forward and stopped again. Other taxi doors ahead of us were opening and slamming shut, people getting out and dashing for shelter. I wanted to slug this guy so badly I could feel my fist itch. I scratched it instead.
‘The war is not over, and you definitely haven’t won yet.’
‘A mere technicality. A few more weeks, a month at the most.’Again that gentle, maddening smile of his. The superior Nazi holding all the cards.