When we last left the intrepid crew of Pan American World Airways' Pacific Clipper on Christmas Eve in 1941, they had lost their Number Three engine shortly after taking off from Ceylon. That compelled them to return to the harbor after less than an hour in flight. One of the engine's eighteen cylinders had failed, wrenching itself loose from its mount, and while the repair was not particularly complex, it was tedious and time-consuming. The repairs to the engine took the rest of Christmas Eve and all of Christmas Day. Finally, early in the morning of December 26th, they took off from Ceylon for the second time. All day they droned across the lush carpet of the Indian sub continent, and then cut across the northeastern corner of the Arabian Sea to their landing site in Karachi, Pakistan, touching down in mid-afternoon.
The following day, bathed and refreshed, they took off and flew westward across the Gulf of Oman toward Arabia. After just a bit over eight routine hours of flying, they landed in Bahrain, where they found a welcome British garrison. While stopped in Bahrain, the crew were warned not to fly over Arabia, but they ignored that advice. Luckily the Pacific Clipper first flew over cloud cover for several hours. When those clouds dispersed however, the plane was right over the mosque at Mecca, where overflights were strictly prohibited. Suddenly, Captain Ford saw people streaming from a mosque and firing guns up at the plane. “At least they didn’t have any anti-aircraft,” he later recalled and eventually, set the behemoth flying boat down on the Nile River near Khartoum.
The Pacific Clipper was refueled and back in the air on New Year’s Day, 1942. Next stop: the Congo River in West Africa. Departures and arrivals were two of the most difficult maneuvers on a flying boat, which required more than a thousand yards of calm, clear water for smooth flight to begin or end. At seaports, channels were carefully maintained and checked for debris just before touchdown or liftoff. “A flying boat doesn’t land — it alights on water,” explains F. Robert van der Linden, curator of Air Transportation and Special Purpose Aircraft at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. “Coming down on a river was a lot harder than it sounds. You didn't know what was in that river. When you consider the amount of fallen trees that must've been in the Congo, in particular, it’s amazing. When you were coming down at over 100 miles per hour and you hit something, you'd sink.”
The crew was nervous as the plane approached Léopoldville, now Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The river ran fast and featured cataracts in several areas. These are a type of waterfall with a large, single vertical drop. Plus, the abutting jungle was thick with overgrown trees jutting into the water. Captain Ford set the giant Boeing gently down onto the river, and immediately realized the strength of the current. He powered the ship into the mooring, and the crew finally stepped ashore. It was like stepping into a sauna. The heat was the most oppressive they had yet encountered and it descended on them like a cloak, sapping what energy they had left. A pleasant surprise awaited them however, when two familiar faces greeted them at the dock. A Pan American Airport Manager and a Radio Officer had been dispatched to meet them, and Ford was handed a cold beer. "That was one of the high points of the whole trip,” he later recalled.
After a night ashore they went to the airplane the next morning prepared for the long over-water leg that would take them back to the Western Hemisphere. Their airplane was now performing better than they had any right to expect, and after their next long ocean leg they'd be back in the hemisphere from which they'd started their journey nearly a month before. But, the interior of the airplane that had been home to them for so many days was beginning to wear rather thin. They were sick of the endless hours spent droning westward, tired of the apprehension of the unknown and frustrated by the lack of any real meaningful news about what was happening in a world besieged by war. They just wanted to get home. After flying for over twenty hours, just before noon, they landed in the harbor at Natal, capital city of the state of Rio Grande do Norte on Brazil’s northeastern tip.. While they were waiting for the necessary immigration formalities to be completed, the Brazilian authorities insisted the crew disembark while the interior of the airplane was sprayed for yellow fever. Two men in rubber suits and masks boarded and fumigated the airplane. Later that same afternoon, they took off for Trinidad, following the Brazilian coast as it curved around to the northwest. Some time after their departure though, the crew made an unpleasant discovery. Most of their personal papers and money were missing, along with a military chart that had been entrusted to the navigator by the US military attaché in Leopoldville. They had obviously been stolen by the Brazilian fumigators.
The sun was setting as they crossed the mouth of the Amazon, nearly a hundred miles wide where it joins the Atlantic Ocean. Across the Guianas in the dark they droned, and finally at 3:00 AM the following morning, they landed at Trinidad. There was a Pan Am station at Port of Spain, and they happily delivered themselves and their weary aircraft into friendly hands. The final leg to New York was almost anti-climactic. Just before six on the bitter-cold morning of January 6th, the control officer in the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia Airport was startled to hear his radio crackle to life with the words, "Pacific Clipper, inbound from Auckland, New Zealand. Captain Ford reporting. Overhead in five minutes."
In a final bit of irony, after over thirty thousand miles and two hundred hours of flying on their epic journey, the aircraft had to circle for nearly an hour, because no landings were permitted in the harbor until official sunrise. They finally touched down just before seven, the spray from their landing freezing as it hit the hull. No matter -- the Pacific Clipper had made it home. The significance of the flight is best illustrated by the records that were set by Ford and his crew. It was the first round-the-world flight by a commercial airliner, as well as the longest continuous flight by a commercial plane, and was the first circumnavigation following a route near the Equator (they crossed the Equator four times.) They touched all but two of the world's seven continents, flew 31,500 miles in 209 hours and made 18 stops under the flags of 12 different nations. They also made the longest non-stop flight in Pan American's history, a 3,583 mile crossing of the South Atlantic from Africa to Brazil. Aviation experts called the flight the first commercial circumnavigation of the globe because the aircraft made it back to its country of origin.
And they did it all in the early 1940s, decades before GPS, without the aid of charts or radio contact, using only celestial navigation and an atlas obtained from a library in New Zealand. Now that’s incredible!
Until next time…safe travels.
Excellent story and storytelling - incredible feat of endurance and skill.