Trailblazer: The "Pan American Clipper"

CXLV

The Pacific

It was a little premature when the San Francisco newspapers announced on March 31, 1935 that the Pan American Clipper had arrived in town to inaugurate transpacific mail and passenger service, but the hoopla was all Pan Am’s. After a routine flight from Miami, the specially modified S-42 watertaxied up to her mooring at Alameda and the crew disembarked to the popping of flashbulbs. Microphones were thrust in their faces, but the Captain, Ed Musick, characteristically had little to say. 

The Pan American Clipper at Alameda

After uttering a few syllables and taking a few City Fathers on a tour of his ship, “Meticulous Musick” and his crew got right down to work. The Pan American Clipper was drydocked, and mechanics went over every inch of her duralumin hull, repairing every ding, bang, bump and dent on the ship’s skin.

Note the dents on the hull of the Hawaii Clipper

 Described on one Youtube page as a stunt landing, other pages describe this as a dangerous accidental waterloop caused when the plane hit a floating log. The aircraft was badly damaged

Flying boats were notoriously prone to damage. A hard landing on a choppy bay could bang up the relatively soft metal of the hull. A hard enough landing could split the hull open like a watermelon. Rough water might catch at a wingtip or a sponson throwing the ship askew. The ship might “waterloop” in an uncontrollable spin, or it might cartwheel. Either could destroy a ship. In such instances, passengers and crew could be injured, and were sometimes killed. It took an extraordinary captain to avoid accidents. It took a Master of Ocean Flying Boats. Fortunately, Pan Am had one, truly, in Ed Musick. His “meticulousness” was not mere fussiness or, worse yet, obsession-compulsion, it was care, and Ed Musick wanted to make sure that nobody died on his watch.  That was all that mattered to him. The Harmon Trophy he would win for flying to Hawaii was merely a bauble.

Ed Musick disliked the public eye, but his ship was heroic nonetheless. Here, the Pan American Clipper, in “drydock,” is refueled by a “bowser” (1930s-speak for a gasoline truck)

So he tried as best he could to ignore the la-di-das of the Press, the public, and of Pan Am’s Public Relations Department. He said little, and what he said was strictly professional. There was no romanticism in Ed Musick or in his crew as regarded their work. Musick had the engines pulled off the wings and given a complete overhaul. He had the fuel lines flushed. He had corroded and electrolysized bolts removed. The ship had not long before come off the factory floor after its refit and there was hardly a dull cast on a nut, but Musick wasn’t taking any chances. Pan American had only one chance to make this survey flight work, and Ed and his crew each had only one life to risk. He wanted to reduce the risks as much as possible.

Someone (probably Fred Noonan trying to take a sun sight) took this spectacular photograph of the Pan American Clipper in flight

The crew of the Pan Am Clipper began an extended series of test flights just off the California coast, familiarizing themselves with the coastline and its various idiosyncratic points and bays. While they flew they calibrated the instruments and tested and re-tested and tested again the Adcock Array as if their lives depended on it, which they did.  

A series of commemorative stamps celebrating the accomplishment of the Pan American Clipper

On April 15^th, a full two weeks after arriving at Alameda, the Pan American Clipper was certified fit to fly. The next day, Juan Trippe arrived in town (via railroad) in the midst of an apocalyptic rainstorm. That night he closeted himself not with Ed Musick but with Hugo Leuteritz:

“Is the equipment good to go?” Juan asked, looking out the window at the blazes of lightning that flashed across the sky.

“Yes,” Leuteritz said confidently.

“Are you certain?”

“Yes.”

“Then, weather permitting, tomorrow we go.”

The name Pan American Clipper is clearly visible on her bows

They went the next morning, the seventeenth, a bright clear morning, guided by the invisible lines of force that reached out hands from California and Hawaii and met in the middle. The flight took eighteen hours and 37 minutes, and was described by Musick upon his April 18^th arrival as “routine,” the highest realistic praise he could give the plane, the crew, and the equipment. 

A First Officer’s briefcase, 1935

Honolulu went mad with celebration, but after a congratulatory dinner with the Mayor and the Territorial Governor both, the crew of the Pan American Clipper lifted off for Alameda, carrying 14,000 letters. 

The crew of the Pan American Clipper: Captain Ed Musick, First Officer R.O.D. “Rod” Sullivan, Navigator Fred Noonan, Second Officer Harry Canaday, Engineering Officer Vic Wright, and Radio Office Wilson Jarboe, Jr. are welcomed to Honolulu where a fete awaited them

 

The return flight on the 22^nd was problematic. Crippling headwinds slowed the ship’s ground speed to less than 100 knots. Trying to escape the headwinds, Musick strayed north and south of their intended track, losing the Adcock signal. Clouds made it difficult for Fred Noonan to get a sextant fix. They were, in fact, lost, and their fuel was being consumed at a far faster rate than anticipated fighting the winds. The crew began to watch the clock. The Pan American Clipper was rated for 24 Hours of flight. As Hour Twenty Three ticked away, the crew worried and Juan Trippe worried. Then, a break. The California coast appeared through a hole in the clouds, and Musick got his bearings. When the Pan American Clipper tied off at Alameda she had been aloft for Twenty Three Hours and Forty One Minutes. She was flying very nearly on fumes.

The near-disaster was hushed up. Ed Musick explained to an anxious Press that there had been no delay, only that he was testing variant tracks in the event of poor weather or mechanical difficulty.  “I’ll be ready to do it again tomorrow,” he assured reporters in what amounted to a soliloquy for him.

The Pan American Clipper with engines roaring

Hugo Leuteritz was quietly but forcefully ordered to boost the Adcock’s signal strength. There would be no more drop-outs. For public consumption, Juan Trippe announced “an early inauguration of service to the Far East.”

This 1935 Pan American ad presages the contemplation “What Kind of Man Reads Playboy”