Flight 7 Is Missing

by Ken H. Fortenberry

  The Nash-Fortenberry case is considered today to be one of the classic UFO sightings of all time.

  Nash retired in 1977 after thirty-six years with Pan American and spent much of the rest of his life tirelessly studying UFO phenomena, with a keen interest in artificial gravity fields and the possibility that unidentified spacecraft are able to flip on a dime, change direction, and fly at incredible speeds because both the craft and their occupants (if any) are not subject to the law of gravity as we know it. He died March 13, 2019, at his home in Florida. He was 101 years old.

  In 1964, the respected UFO research group The National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena published a summary of UFO reports from the 1950s through 1963 that included a study of nearly 100 electromagnetic-interference cases. NICAP came up with several possible theories for electromagnetic interference, including Russian and American nuclear testing, as well as the purely speculative notion that nuclear-powered UFOs might have been rendering planes, automobiles, and electrical systems powerless during deliberate and selective tests and experiments.

  The report warned against simpleminded explanations of the phenomenon:

  “It is false logic for a scientist to deny observations (about electromagnetic effects) on the grounds that we cannot fully explain them. Taken in association with the other accumulated evidence about UFOs, the fact that we have difficulty explaining the electromagnetic effects could also mean that we are dealing with a superior technology about which we know very little.”

  A March 1977 incident involving a commercial airliner and a UFO lends additional credence to the remote possibility that electromagnetic interference may have caused the unexplained loss of Romance of the Skies.

  While piloting a United Airlines DC-10 en route from Boston to San Francisco, Captain Neil Daniels was startled by a round, brilliant light off a wingtip. Daniels, who had more than 30,000 flying hours and a US Air Force Distinguished Flying Cross for his combat experience in World War II, was not alone. His copilot and his flight engineer saw the same unidentified flying object about 1,000 yards away from the jet, which was flying on autopilot.

  Suddenly, the plane was forced into a sharp left turn, and all three compasses showed different readings. The plane’s unusual shift prompted Boston air controllers to ask:

  “United 94, where are you going?”

  “Well, let me figure this out. I’ll let you know,” Daniels replied.

  The crew turned off the autopilot, and the saucer light followed alongside the jet for several minutes before rapidly disappearing. The plane’s instruments returned to normal after the UFO vanished.

  Fearful of ridicule or blowback from United Airlines, the crew did not report the incident.

  Daniels later said the UFO raced away so swiftly that it could not have been a man-made, or human-occupied, machine. Whatever it was, “it did cause a disruption in the magnetic field around the aircraft to the point where it pulled the aircraft off course.”

  Today, airline passengers are routinely ordered to turn off all portable electronic devices before departure or landing. Why? Airline safety officials have determined that electromagnetic interference from the devices can have a critical effect on an aircraft’s systems and put everyone on board in peril.

  While technology has advanced by leaps and bounds in the sixty-three years since Flight 7 went missing, the notion that electromagnetic interference from a UFO back in 1957 might have somehow caused the crash should not be written off as impossible. After all, there once was a time—not so long ago—that the very idea of creating artificial gravity or putting a man on the moon was scoffed at by the most renowned scientists. Today, we routinely produce artificial gravity, and even our concept of life itself is being transformed daily.

  Someone once said that unbelief grows out of ignorance and that skepticism is born of intelligence.

  Consider this: We used to think that the world was flat.

  Boeing’s 377 Stratocruisers may have been the largest, most luxurious, and most sophisticated commercial aircraft of the time, but they had troubling safety issues, particularly with engines and propellers. While I continued to focus on suspects Payne and Crosthwaite, I had no clue that another person was also deeply involved in trying to solve the mysterious crash, and this sleuth was focusing on mechanical failure.

  Rarely during the search for my father’s killer did something good just happen, but on August 21, 1998, it did. I had been posting messages on various internet boards for many years asking if anyone had any knowledge or interest in the crash, but had had very little success. That changed one morning when I received an email from a fellow I had never heard of: Dr. Gregg Herken, an accomplished nonfiction author and history professor and then-curator at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum in Washington. We ended up developing a friendship and a researching-and-writing relationship that has continued for more than twenty years.

  Gregg told me he had lived in San Mateo as a youngster, that Marie McGrath, one of the stewardesses on Flight 7, had been one of his favorite substitute fourth-grade teachers, and that their families had known each other. Gregg said he had deeply felt her loss as a child and was stunned when his class was told that the plane had simply vanished. We formed an instant bond, and over the next few months shared everything we had learned about the loss of the airliner. Both of us had a burning desire to solve the case, and when Gregg visited my office in North Carolina sometime later we were both amazed to learn the wealth of information we had between us.

  Luckily for both of us, what I had learned through the years, Gregg hadn’t. What Gregg had learned, I hadn’t. Gregg, who understands technical and mechanical things far better than I do, concentrated on that end of our probe while I continued to work on the human factors. Our informal researching partnership ultimately resulted in two coauthored stories, the first of which, “The Mystery of the Lost Clipper,” was published in the October-November 2004 issue of Air and Space magazine.

  Our story concentrated on the prop-and-engine angle as the possible cause of the crash, and we reported some new findings that strengthened that argument, primarily our discovery that the CAB report had completely ignored an incident a few months before N90944 crashed in which a runaway prop had nearly brought the plane down.

  “A runaway, or ‘over-speeding,’ propeller was a nightmare for any flight crew,” we reported. “If the variable-pitch propeller could not be feathered—its blade pitch changed to point the leading edges in the direction of flight—centrifugal force wrenched the blades to the lowest pitch stop. The resulting drag was equivalent to that produced by a solid disk the diameter of the propeller in front of the wing. At that pitch, even if the prop simply wind-milled, there was a danger that it would fly apart and pieces could tear into the cabin.”

  We also determined that a runaway prop could occur virtually without warning and leave pilots only seconds to react. A sudden change in propeller noise, from the normal dull throbbing to a rapidly ascending, blood-curdling whine, was sometimes the only warning, and by then the problem was a full-blown emergency.

  We pointed out that just a year before N90944 crashed, an overspeeding prop and engine failure had forced down its sister ship, N90943, Sovereign of the Skies, on its flight from Hawaii to San Francisco at nearly the same spot Romance of the Skies had disappeared. Sovereign ditched next to a Coast Guard weather station, the USS Pontchartrain, and all thirty-one passengers and crew safely evacuated the airplane before it sank to the bottom of the ocean.

  The final CAB report on Flight 7 paid no attention to earlier Stratocruiser overspeeds and claimed that N90944 had never experienced an overspeeding incident. That was another bald-faced CAB lie, and a telephone call from one of our sources proved it.

  A former Pan Am Stratocruiser pilot named Clancy Mead told Gregg that he had been piloting N90944 in June 1957 when the plane experienced a runaway propeller on a flight to Hawaii. That was only about five months before Romance of the Skies disappe
ared. Mead said that he was unable to feather the prop on the number three engine and was losing altitude at a rate of 100 feet per minute, even with the remaining engines at full power. Captain Mead turned N90944 around and headed back to San Francisco. He said that he miraculously cleared the mountains along the California coast by only about 500 feet before safely landing the plane at the airport.

  Nothing of that was mentioned in the CAB report, and I have subsequently determined that for whatever reason, investigators went back only about three months when asking flight crews about any incidents with the aircraft. Whether that was standard operating procedure or not I don’t know, but it is interesting when you consider that Pan Am had successfully lobbied the CAB to essentially bury information about mechanical and maintenance issues in its final report.

  We also reported that veteran Pan Am pilot Frank Garcia Jr., the flight engineer on Sovereign of the Skies when it successfully ditched, had said he suspected the cause of his plane’s runaway prop was a small part in the engine-nose case that moves oil to the prop dome.

  “A failure of the oil transfer tube or the bearing connecting it to the dome would make it impossible to feather the blades on that propeller,” we reported, but noted that conclusive proof of Garcia’s theory remained inaccessible, on the ocean floor with the wreckage of Sovereign of the Skies.

  We also disclosed that Tony Vasko, retired director of overhaul at Eastern Air Lines and an expert on aircraft engines and propellers, found evidence that Pan Am, the manufacturers, and the Federal Aviation Administration had recognized by the time of N90944’s accident that the transfer tube, which had been brazed rather than bolted in place, represented a potentially fatal flaw on Stratocruisers.

  An emergency airworthiness directive, issued by the FAA in early 1957, warned: “As a result of propeller shaft oil transfer bearing failures, several cases of loss of propeller control occurred which make it impossible to feather the affected propellers.” The directive ordered that the brazed joint be inspected on every engine and either replaced or repaired “not later than May 31, 1957.”

  That date was particularly noteworthy because Captain Mead’s prop runaway incident had occurred on June 18, 1957—more than two weeks after the compliance date had passed. Did this confirm claims by some that maintenance standards had slipped at Pan Am? More importantly, we wondered if the joint had been repaired or replaced before Romance of the Skies took off on its final flight five months later. Surely Pan Am had fixed that simple, inexpensive issue after Mead’s midair incident?

  We’ll never know for certain.

  Our magazine report concluded with questions about garbled tape recordings of possible radio transmissions from Romance of the Skies in its final minutes in the air. To this day, despite dozens of inquiries to every conceivable source of information, we have been unable to find a copy of the recordings. We believe that if a copy can be found, today’s technology might be able to decipher what the experts couldn’t in 1958 and provide us with some important information about the last minutes of Flight 7.

  November 2007

  A favorite childhood poem of mine, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost, is always in the back of my mind. The last words have been both an inspiration and a haunting burden throughout my life and frequently remind me of the promise I made back in 1965 to find out what had happened to Romance of the Skies.

  “. . . but I have promises to keep,

  And miles to go before I sleep.

  And miles to go before I sleep.”

  I had that poem on my mind as November 8, 2007, approached. I still had promises to keep.

  It had been fifty years. Fifty years since I had heard my father’s voice, held his hand, and watched him carry his luggage and confidently walk away from our Ford into the Pan Am terminal at San Francisco International Airport.

  Always searching for new information and new sources, I contacted the San Francisco Chronicle as the anniversary date neared and pitched a story about the crash and my investigation, hoping the paper would publish what I call a “fetch ’em story” so that someone might surface with new information.

  Reporter Kevin Fagan embraced the idea, and on Sunday, November 4, 2007, the front page of the Chronicle recounted the crash and the investigation Dr. Herken and I had been conducting:

  Romance of the Skies Plane Crash Haunts Pair 50 Years Later

  “Somewhere below the ocean waves, probably about 2,000 miles west of the Golden Gate Bridge and 15,000 feet deep, lies a pile of cold metal that may yield answers to a mystery that has agonized two men for most of their lives.

  “That pile is the wreckage of the Romance of the Skies, a Pan Am luxury airliner that left San Francisco International Airport 50 years ago this week en route to Hawaii—and vanished.

  “Investigators eventually found a handful of bodies and a few bits of wreckage floating a hundred miles north of the flight path—but nobody has ever figured out why the plane crashed, exactly where it crashed, or even whether all 44 people who were booked for the flight were actually on board that day.

  “What the disappearance left behind is a whodunit worthy of Agatha Christie, only real.

  “It involves two suspected onboard bombers, the possibility that the propeller assembly was so bad it shattered, and a missing flight tape recording—which, if found, could be processed through modern machinery to finally reveal what manner of chaos was going on in those final moments before death.

  “Did fire bring down the Romance? Mechanical malfunction? Sabotage by bomb or poison gas? All are possibilities.

  “The questions haunt Ken Fortenberry, 56, and Gregg Herken, 60. They are determined to never rest until they get answers.”

  The coverage was more than I could ever have hoped for, and within days my brothers and I were winging our way to San Francisco to memorialize our father and remember the others who had perished. We arrived on different flights and met late one evening at a motel near Santa Clara. We didn’t talk much about the crash or our mission. It was more like a brotherly reunion, but in the back of minds was the curiosity of what we might see, what emotions might surface, and whether it was worth a costly trip all the way across the country.

  In the morning we drove by our old house in San Mateo, parked the rental car along Sharon Place, where we had once lived, got out, and looked around. It was still very much as we remembered it, and memories flowed. A few minutes after we parked the car a gentleman walked out of our old house and came over to greet us with a welcoming smile.

  “We’ve been expecting you,” he said, catching us all by surprise. Ronald Hall explained that he had lived in the house since we moved out back in 1956 and had read in the newspaper about our impending visit to the Bay Area. Without our asking, he invited us to walk inside the house and take a look around. Jerry silently took it all in, and I wondered what was going on inside his head. Craig, who had been a baby when we lived there, was curious and a good sport, and I had a strange but comfortable feeling as I walked inside and stepped back into yesterday.

  Our next stop was a few blocks away at Shoreview Methodist Church, where I slowly walked down the aisle and sat in the same pew as I had on the day of my father’s memorial service in December 1957. It seemed like only yesterday. We asked a church volunteer if something called the Book of Remembrances still existed. A pastor had told Mom after Daddy’s death that a book had been bought in his name and he would be the first person memorialized in it. We were pleasantly surprised when we were ushered to the back of the sanctuary, where the huge, dusty old book sat on a glass table. I opened it, and just as we had been told fifty years earlier, the name of William Holland Fortenberry was the first entry.

  I thought I would die right there.

  Later we drove north again, this time a short distance to San Francisco International Airport, where museum director John Hill had graciously arranged our visit. After guiding us on our tour, John led us up into the old control tower and then onto an
observation deck, where my brothers and I stood in silence at 11:51 a.m.—exactly the moment fifty years earlier that Romance of the Skies had lifted off the runway heading west on its fatal flight to Honolulu. I whispered, “Goodbye, Daddy,” and fought back tears as an airliner roared down the runway and sailed into the misty California sky, headed for parts unknown.

  A few minutes later John persuaded officials in the ground control tower to allow my brothers and me to take a short but unforgettable journey down the same runway. Our driver turned left off the tarmac, slowed the vehicle, lined it up on Runway 28R, and then gunned the engine. He raced down the runway, faster and faster, and for a moment it seemed as if I were in the cockpit of Daddy’s plane on that fateful November morning.

  It was a morning I will cherish until my last breath.

  Afterward we drove south to Santa Clara, where George Heeg allowed us to visit our old house on Loyola Drive. As I walked into the kitchen, I could almost see the nameless, worried faces that I remembered from that sad Saturday morning after Daddy’s plane had disappeared.

  Then we headed to Millikin Elementary, where I had attended kindergarten and, for a short time before we moved to Miami, first grade. I got out of the car and walked the last few blocks along the same route I had walked as a child. I remembered that Jerry and I always brought our lunch from home in little brown paper sacks, and we were often surprised to open them at lunchtime and read an encouraging note from Daddy, usually on a day he would be departing for one of his long trips before we got home from school.