WWII Clipper's Hard Way Home
Source: Aviation History Magazine C.V. Glines 12 December 2018
spotted by a fighter pilot.”
“They were still suspicious and followed us right into the bay,” Poindexter reported. “When we hit the water they sailed right over us and on into the airport. As we slowed down, a speedboat zigzagged out to our position. Capt. Ford put the Clipper in a tight turn to stop our forward progress. The boat approached and we were instructed by bullhorn to follow close behind to our mooring. Then the voice told us why: ‘The harbor is mined!’”
The Clipper had arrived in Java on 18 December and was detained while the military authorities contacted their headquarters in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) for permission to release it. Meanwhile, the 10 crew members were given inoculations against typhus and cholera, and several of them became quite ill. The plane needed 100-octane fuel, but not enough was available, so automobile fuel had to be used. Ford decided to depart as soon as their release was approved and took off early on 21 December for Trincomalee, Ceylon. The four engines, spitting and popping, let the crew know that they did not enjoy running on low octane gasoline.
The Clipper crew stayed there until 24 December and departed for Karachi, India (now Pakistan). An hour after takeoff, the studs on a cylinder head of the No. 3 engine snapped and Ford had to feather the engine. He decided to return to Trincomalee, where engine repairs were made by “Swede” Rothe and John B. “Jocko” Parish, the Clipper’s flight engineers. They fashioned a tool in the blacksmith shop of a British warship anchored in the harbor and attached the studs to complete the repair. Two days later, the Clipper flew across southern India to Karachi’s harbor.
Ford thought it best not to dally. After refueling and a night’s rest for the crew, the Clipper left for Bahrain, in the Persian Gulf on the eastern shore of Saudi Arabia. Again, only automobile fuel was available, but Ford had to make do. He pushed on to a landing in the Nile River at Khartoum, Sudan’s capital city. Ford wanted to refuel quickly, but he received a “vital military affairs” message asking him to wait for unidentified VIP passengers who would arrive via BOAC. “We waited for two days,” Steers reported. “The VIPs were the publisher of a Chicago newspaper, his wife and sister-in-law.” However, the BOAC aircraft flying them from Cairo had to make a forced landing because of engine trouble. When the passengers didn’t show up, Capt. Ford was authorized to proceed without them.
On the takeoff from Khartoum on New Year’s Day for Leopoldville (later Kinshasa), in the Belgian Congo, one of the Clipper’s engines blew off an exhaust stack, which made it not only noisy but a fire hazard. But after landing at Leopoldville, with no exhaust parts available, Ford decided to take the risk. He ordered a full load of more than 5,100 gallons of aviation fuel to make the long crossing of the South Atlantic to Natal, Brazil.
The takeoff was risky in the blistering heat. It took full engine power on the four Wright Cyclone 14-cylinder engines for a full three minutes to take off and climb. The plane was on the edge of a stall, and Ford
later reported that he found the overloaded condition made the aileron controls seem frozen when he tried to bank. He cautiously nursed the giant seaplane westward. The 3,583-mile flight was completed in 23 1/2 hours, the longest nonstop flight by a Pan Am aircraft up to that time. John Steers said that Second Officer Roderick N. Brown had constructed a Mercator projection of 10 degrees of latitude on a strip of paper. “This served as our chart from Leopoldville to Natal,” he explained. “At night over water, we dropped flares and with our drift sight we checked drift and ground speed. During daylight we dropped smoke bombs.”
Steers continued: “We stayed at Natal about four hours, gassing and putting the exhaust stack that had blown off at Khartoum back together again. This time we put part of a Consolidated PBY Navy twin-engine flying boat part on it, wrapped a tin can around it, and wired the whole business with bailing wire. We left Natal on 3 January and headed for Port-of-Spain, Trinidad. The exhaust stack blew off during the takeoff from Natal so the engine hammered all the way to Trinidad.”
The B-314 made the final leg of the trip from the balmy Caribbean to freezing New York in 13 hours. The crew and three Pan Am passengers, all Californians, were exhausted and unprepared for the cold January weather when the Pacific Clipper touched down in the harbor off LaGuardia. “The water splashed up on the sea wings and froze solid,” Steers recalled. “The hawser on the buoy was like a chunk of ice.”
After the crew members were questioned intensively about the trip by military intelligence officers, they learned from Pan Am officials that they and the plane were being transferred to the Atlantic division and would not return to San Francisco to complete a full circumnavigation.
The flight of the Pacific Clipper had taken one month and four days after leaving San Francisco. It had touched down in the waters off five of the world’s seven continents, crossed three oceans and made 18 stops under the flags of 12 different nations and spent 209 1/2 hours in the air, the first plane to follow such a route. And it had flown more than 6,000 miles over desert and jungle, where a forced landing would have been disastrous for a flying boat.
The flight had been made without adequate navigation charts over territory never before flown by Pan Am and without advance weather reports and information about possible landing sites. And the crew never knew with any certainty whether they would be able to get fuel and maintenance supplies at any of the stops. They had proceeded under a radio blackout through and around the war zones.
Pan Am management decided to give the flight as much publicity as possible under wartime restrictions. The January 1942 issue of New Horizons, the company magazine, boasted, “As a test of ingenuity, self-reliance, and resourcefulness, it proved sensationally that Pan American’s multiple crews, operating techniques, and technicians could meet any possible situation that might arise in long distance flying.”