"Here There Be Dragons"

CLX

It turned out to be a lovely day for flying. At a moderate altitude, the crew was able to open the cockpit windows and feel the South Seas air as it filled the flight deck. Almost an hour after leaving Kure, the China Clipper was directly on course for Wake.  Ed Musick had the yokes when he noticed a dark spot on the ocean far off to port. By the second it grew larger, and soon the crew could see the house burghee painted on the ship’s main stack.  It was a Matson Liner heading back toward Hawaii, most likely from the China Clipper’s ultimate destination, Manila.

Musick was about to wag the clipper’s wings when the skipper of the big liner sounded three deep blasts on the ship’s whistles by way of greeting. Ed, who had gotten into flying as a showman, let that hidden side of himself emerge for just a few moments. He changed course and circled low over the steamship, wing-wagging like an excited puppy. The crew could see passengers on the deck of the liner waving wildly. The ship responded with another happy blast of its horns, and, the amenities having been observed, the past and the future parted ways. A few minutes later, Ed asked Rod Sullivan to take the controls while he grabbed a cup of coffee and a quick snack. 

Perhaps two hours later, Rod’s voice caught Ed’s attention. Ed heard it immediately. Pilots call it “The Tone,” and The Tone means trouble. He was immediately back in his seat. 

“Did you ever see anything like that?” Rod asked. The rest of the flight crew looked forward --- and looked again. 

“That” seemed to be a billowing white wall of cloud that lay directly across the flight path of the China Clipper. It hung there in front of them, its tops in the Heavens and its feet in the Deeps, a huge impenetrable curtain behind which lay --- what?

 

Ed Musick knew he only had a few minutes to make some quick decisions. The cloud wall didn’t look particularly threatening on the surface --- at least there were no hints of lightning within, no evidence of blue-black clouds, nothing that would indicate a boiling tempest. But who knew what was hidden inside? 

“Can we turn back toward Midway?” Ed asked the Flight Engineer. It wasn’t a cowardly question, nor a suggestion, but Ed was weighing his options. If he could help it, he’d find a way to avoid the weirdly solid thing in front of them.

The answer came back a definite no. “We passed the PNR about sixty minutes ago.”

The PNR --- The Point of No Return --- was Pan Am-speak for that moment in a voyage when a flying boat no longer had any option but to move on toward its intended destination. In short, there wasn’t enough fuel to get back to Midway. Eventually, “the Point of No Return” was a term adopted by all aviators, and in the early 1960s the U.S. military would tweak it to “the Point of Safe Return” or “PSR,” a term less doom-laden. 

Ed wasn’t even sure that if he turned back he could outrun the huge weather cell. That left several options. He could climb over it --- though the top of the clouds seemed higher than the M-130’s service ceiling --- or fly under it --- though he suspected it really did reach down to the wave tops --- or he could change course to fly around it. A quick glance port and starboard disabused him of that notion. The thing stretched for miles --- maybe hundreds of miles --- in either direction, north to south, losing its ends in a blue haze as far as straining eyes could see. What if he chose to go south and the nearer end was north? Or vice-versa? He could burn up all the China Clipper’s fuel veering far off course in a vain attempt to avoid a cloud.   

He knew an ugly moment when it occurred to him that the skipper of the Matson Liner might have been warning him, not greeting him. But the Matson ship had looked none the worse for wear, the passengers happy. And if the maritime skipper had had any warnings he could have radioed the plane. Ed was suddenly angry with himself. He should have radioed the ship as a precaution. For one of the very few times in his career he’d made a mistake, and he promised himself that such a mistake would never happen again --- however this all turned out.

Thought turned to action.  “Can you raise that ship?” At least he could figure out how thick the cloud wall was, two miles, ten, fifty, a thousand. And what, if anything, was going on inside. He turned to order Fred Noonan to take a sun sight before they reached the cloud, but Fred was already working his way back down through the Navigator’s Hatch. “Send this too,” Fred told the radioman, handing him the China Clipper’s latest position.

“Captain Musick? No joy on that ship. Either she is out of range or she just doesn’t hear us.”

“Can you reach Wake?”

Wake heard them. “The weather here is clear.” Wake’s Navy Sparks sounded surprised to hear of bad weather. At least that was a relief. 

“Fred,” Musick said to his friend and trusted navigator, “You just got us a good fix. The Adcock is working well. I can’t guarantee that once we get in among that that the Adcock will keep working. Looks like it's DR from here on out.”

Noonan grunted. He didn’t think much of Leuteritz and his invention, anyway. It would be just like the thing to quit under pressure. Like his friend Harold Gatty, Fred Noonan had come up as a navigator in sailing ships, and he trusted his sextant, his sight-reduction tables, and the math he could do in his head far more than any whiz-kid’s newfangled electrical gizmo. 

“So, we go.”  It was a question. It was a statement.

Noonan grunted again. 

Ed Musick committed his men and his ship to flying through the rapidly-approaching cloud wall. In the words of the old Negro spiritual, “It was so big you can’t go over it, so big you can’t go under it, so big you can’t go around it. So you have to go in at the door.” Before going through that door, Ed put the China Clipper into a steep climb. He wanted plenty of air room under her keel if she was going to get lifted and dropped by updrafts and downdrafts. 

Flying into the cloud wall was disorienting. One moment there was bright blue sky and sparkling sea. The next moment there was nothing but a pearlescent whiteness that left condensation on the windows. The crew could make out the non-reflective black paint on the nose of the Sunchaser, but beyond that, visibility was measured in inches. Even the sound of the engines seemed muted in the thick air. Future polar pilots would develop a name for it:  Whiteout.  

The stretch of ocean they were traversing had its own strange reality. Somewhere inside this cloud bank Monday would turn to Tuesday as they crossed the invisible International Date Line. Time had to be told by the Greenwich Mean, or GMT. The Adcock signal wavered as Midway’s faded out and Wake’s faded in. It was the place on antique maps that cartographers had inscribed the words Here There Be Dragons.  

It was all enough to unnerve a man, and the whiteness added its own set of anxieties. It took an icy professionalism just to stay on course and not yank the yokes upward or from side to side in a vain attempt to avoid looming dangers that weren’t there --- the Everest-sized mountain that suddenly threatened to appear out of the fog, or the man-headed iron-hoofed beast that stood sixty stories tall and was reaching out clawed hands to grasp the ship and rend her and her crew into bits of metal and meat.  

Except of course, they weren’t just flying straight and true. Fred Noonan had them moving forward based on his dead reckoning skills. Using dead reckoning meant thar the pilots were faced with the necessity to pay especial attention to the myriad details of flying. At least their minds were less apt to wander the harder they worked. 

Although “dead reckoning” (usually called DR) has the same doomed tone as “Point of No Return” it really means “deduced reckoning.”  In basic dead reckoning, the usual formula for calculations is “Distance = Speed x Time” with adjustments made (via a wind triangle) for drift and other factors.  

In the white murk Noonan was using a somewhat more complex method called “aiming off,” during which the China Clipper was describing a zigzag pattern rather than a straight line along its course. On a straight line there was always a chance the plane could miss Wake; on a zigzag, the plane would eventually intersect Wake’s meridian, and could then be flown directly to the island. Ed Musick had bet Noonan that one of the zigs (or zags) would bring them directly over Wake. 

Meanwhile, it was seeming madness to veer back and forth blindly in the midst of nothingness. They did eventually raise Wake, and the log of the China Clipper is silent as to any strange conditions the flying boat might have encountered. When she broke out of the cloud, the sky was just as blue, the sun just as golden, and the sea just as wine-dark as it had always been.