Pop Musick and The Sunchasers

CLI

It wasn’t Ed Musick who flew the Pan Am Clipper from Midway to Wake and then from Wake to Guam, it was his First Officer, R.O.D. “Rod” Sullivan, belatedly but deservedly promoted to the left-hand seat. Musick himself was on the mainland, involved in the preliminaries for the official roll-out of the long-awaited and long-overdue M-130. 

Captain Robert Oliver Daniel Sullivan

And so it wasn’t Musick who had the opportunity to complain, harshly, about the landing conditions at Wake. The lagoon “landing strip” turned out to be much too narrow and too short for the S-42. 

Coming in, Rod could see coral heads flashing past him, too close for comfort to the port and starboard freeboards of his ship. All that was needed was one errant crosswind to shove the Clipper out of its approach line, and the ship’s metal hull would have been ripped open by the coral.  And that didn’t even allow for an accident, a waterloop, or a forced landing. 

There were also the stumps of coral heads visible underwater, just beneath his ship’s keel. The stunted projections were waiting for a neap tide to tear the guts out of the belly of the Clipper. Rod shuddered to think what might have happened this time if the ship had been fully laden. 

And then there was the “landing strip.” It was a mile long --- too short, as it turned out.  On his first approach, Rod had to wave off because he just didn’t have the space to land.

An NOAA chart for Wake Island. The dark green represents the reef, the khaki the land surface, and the light blue the lagoon

There were a few minutes of worry. If Rod couldn’t get the S-42 down in the lagoon he would have to make an open-sea landing beyond the reef, and the seas were too choppy that day for a safe landing. It had to be the lagoon. The other option meant to lose the ship, and likely the crew. And if the S-42 couldn’t land at Wake, the M-130 certainly couldn’t. The whole project hung on Rod Sullivan’s piloting skills. 

Rod came around again, put the Pan American Clipper down picture-perfect in the middle of the cleared area, but nearly ran the plane up on the beach before his screaming engines and straining flaps could bring her to a full stop.

 

The M-130 “on the step”

The Welcome party didn’t happen. Instead, Rod, who would not have been Pilot on this flight if he hadn’t been unflappable, spent most of the rest of his day excoriating the airport manager and the engineers. The shouting was so loud that it echoed all the way back to Lexington Avenue. The word came down from Juan Trippe’s aerie in New York: Do it right.   

Within an hour after the Pan American Clipper landed, Bill Mullahey was back out on the lagoon, setting charges.

China Clipper “Sweet Sixteen” being serviced. Note that she is up on a cradle

While the rats huddled and the birds squawked at the sounds of dynamite blasting on Wake, Ed Musick was testing the M-130 in Baltimore harbor. She was a good ship --- powerful and fast and maneuverable --- but she had a few problems. She was heavy, and took much longer to get up “on the step” --- that moment just as she broke free of the water --- than anyone anticipated. She needed longer runways. It was a good thing that Rod Sullivan had had problems landing the S-42. Her engines also ran hot --- not especially so, but Ed was concerned about overheating on the long flights the M-130 would perforce be making. If she was to suffer engine failures or fires in flight over the trackless Pacific they would lead to utter disaster. He pronounced himself dissatisfied with the aircraft. That was enough to convene the joint Martin-Pan American engineering team.

Glenn Martin (wearing a straw boater) and Charles Lindbergh

Nobody could do anything about the structural weight of the plane or its liftoff characteristic, but the engines were another matter. The propeller spinner design, it was found, tended to draw cooling air away from the engines; the spinners would be replaced in the course of routine maintenance In the meantime, a short-term solution was found by making cowl flap adjustments. The 830 horsepower Pratt & Whitneys were scheduled to be replaced by upgraded 950 hp models when they came off the production line. After these tweaks, Pan Am’s Master of Ocean Flying Boats gave the ship his cautious approval.

 

San Francisco was both a major destination and an embarkation point for the China Clippers of old, especially during the Gold Rush of 1849. The new China Clipper could cross the seas in six days

The three new Clippers were handed over to Pan American Airways on October 9, 1935, at Baltimore, the home of the original seagoing clippers. Juan Trippe was present, but Glenn Martin was conspicuously absent, having pleaded illness. The flying boats rolled out of the factory backward, the latest-built first. In a broadcast radio special appropriate remarks were made regarding, “this great flying boat, the largest airliner ever developed in America.” Trippe himself spoke of commerce: “This flying boat will be named the China Clipper after her famous predecessor that carried the American flag and crossed the Pacific one hundred years ago.” 

Although there doesn’t seem to have been a 19^th Century sailing vessel specifically named China Clipper (the term was generic), Juan Trippe invoked it romantically when he named his huge new flying boat. There may have been some politics to it too. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s mother, Sara Delano, was descended from the Aspinwall family on her mother’s side, and the Aspinwalls (like the Trippes) had owned clippers. The President liked to say that his mother had “visited China as a child aboard the China Clipper” and naming the plane for the Aspinwalls’ mystery ship was a gesture in President Roosevelt’s direction 

So China Clipper she became, though her crews called her Sweet Sixteen after the last two digits of her registration number NC14716. She was destined to become the most famous flying boat of all time. Her sisters, Numbers '14 and '15, were named Hawaii Clipper and Philippine Clipper respectively.  

Juan Trippe made much of Charles Lindbergh’s involvement with the M-130 project, in part because Lindbergh was standing beside him on the podium and in part because the very mention of Lindbergh’s name gave the new ships their proper cachet. 

While it was a sound public relations move, it irritated many people involved with the project, not the least of which was Lindbergh himself. In truth, Lindbergh had had almost nothing to do with the M-130 other than uttering the truism that Pan Am was going to need a larger aircraft than the S-42 to conquer the Pacific. He had also once visited the Martin factory.

 

The Philippine Clipper (’15) undergoing maintenance

Hawaii Clipper (’14) at Alameda, 1935

Perhaps Lindbergh would not have been so annoyed with Trippe if things had been different in the famous aviator’s life, but by the end of 1935, Charles Lindbergh was very much at the end of his tether. He and Anne had suffered through Charles Jr.’s abduction and murder, and then suffered again through the trial of the convicted killer, Bruno Richard Hauptmann. He was planning to exile himself to Britain where he, Anne, and their toddler son Jon, could live unobtrusively. The very last thing Lindbergh wanted was another excuse for reporters to hound him, especially about a flying machine with which he was barely acquainted. He was becoming vile-tempered and, as it would soon be seen, increasingly irrational. But he still had enough self-possession to treat his old friend kindly that November. Just a few days after the roll-out, Lindbergh returned his monthly Pan Am stipend check to Trippe uncashed with a polite note:

Whatever time I have spent on company business for the period this check covers I have been glad to spend both because of past association and because of the interest I will always have in Pan American.  

  

It would not be the end of Lindbergh’s ties to the airline, but the two men would never again be so close.

The M-156 differed from the M-130 in wingspan, length, engine size, tail assembly, range, and interior appointments, but it was essentially the M-130 perfected. Only one was built. After Pan Am refused it, Glenn Martin sold it to Aeroflot. It became known in the West as the Russian Clipper. Meant to be the first of many Soviet flying boats of the type, Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 forced the cancellation of the project, but by then Martin Aircraft had recovered economically as the U.S. began to arm for war

 

Andre Priester, Pan Am’s Chief Engineer and effective Head of Operations, was also irritated at Trippe’s remarks. He had worked closely with a combined Pan American-Martin team to develop the M-130, and he knew that scores of people had been responsible for the new line of ships. Priester, who often acted as Juan Trippe’s conscience vis-à-vis the airline's employees, felt that Juan’s not atypical but in this case supremely demoralizing failure to acknowledge their hard work was a serious breach of faith. Priester rarely spoke, and what he said or didn’t say to Juan Trippe on the subject is not recorded. But there was open grumbling in the ranks about Lindbergh getting the credit for something he didn’t do, and it was Priester’s task, both professionally and ethically, to address it.

 

The China Clipper at Wake, 1936

Glenn Martin lived to regret his decision not to make an appearance that November day. Another taciturn man, he was bitterly disappointed that Trippe hadn’t mentioned Martin Aircraft Corporation in his remarks. It wasn’t a matter of ego --- Martin was not egotistical --- but he wanted his fiscally struggling company to be actively associated in the public mind with Pan American Airways just as Sikorsky Aircraft had been associated with Pan Am for years. Martin had worsened his company’s economic health by building the three Clippers for $200,000.00 under cost and then going over cost in adding refinements. Each plane --- for which he was paid approximately $400,000.00 --- cost him $700,000.00. It was a huge loss to bear, especially because the company was already in trouble, but Martin risked it, believing that other airlines would want the planes Pan Am used, and that Pan Am would order more, and enhanced, M-130s. Martin even built one enhanced M-130, which he called the M-156. If the M-130 was a Cadillac, then the M-156 was a Duesenberg.  

 

“Sunchaser”

But as it turned out, Juan Trippe wasn’t interested in the M-156, or any more M-130s, or any relationship with Martin Aircraft at all. He had, in fact through inference and empty talk, cheated Glenn Martin out of hundreds of thousands of dollars during a devastating Depression with a callousness and amorality that even Trippe’s own friends found troubling --- to say nothing of his enemies. And, eventually, as much as it cost Glenn Martin, it would cost Juan Trippe even more. 

Trippe didn’t even call the M-130 by the name Martin had given it, the rather prosaic title of “Martin Ocean Transport.” Instead, he called his new flying boats (which were still “Clippers” since all Pan Am planes were “Clippers”) the "Sunchaser Series." It was far more poetic, and it erased the name Martin from people’s memories. And it fit the bill since the new planes literally followed the path of the sun in the sky. However, just like Martin Ocean Transport the name Sunchaser would vanish too, as Juan would soon find out. 

An M-130 over Hong Kong harbor

Least annoyed that day was Ed Musick. In truth, Ed didn’t care a lick for all the hoopla around the new aircraft. He thought the radio addresses, the speeches, the christenings, all were silly. Did the thing fly, and how well? That was all Ed Musick cared about.

With Lindbergh’s slow withdrawal from Pan American Airways, Ed’s career, which had always been shadowed by the wings of the Lone Eagle, began to come into its own. Ed would win the Harmon Trophy for traversing the Pacific Ocean in the China Clipper, but the fame that came with the award rankled him. After all, he was no “Lone Eagle,” he was one of a crew. He was more interested in seeing the entire crew get thanks --- but the media focused on him, and Mr. Trippe thanked only who he wanted to. 

 

Pan Am’s Public Relations Department wouldn’t leave him alone either. He was constantly asked to spend time “in the barrel,” pilot-speak for attendance at company functions. He was dressed up as the company Santa Claus at Christmas. Ed hated it. He liked kids and he liked Christmas and he liked presents, but being Santa? --- why him?  He went to white tie dinners to accept awards because he thought his wife Cleo liked attending them, and then stopped going when Cleo told him that she was unhappy at how uncomfortable he was. He disliked having cameras and microphones shoved in his face. He hated answering inane questions. Were you scared? seemed to be a favorite, and Jesus Christ, but no pilot worth his wings would ever say Yes. 

2d Lt. Edwin C. Musick USMC

So he got a reputation as a sphinx, and that made him happy. He really did like to talk shop with other pilots and ground crews. A bit older and more experienced than most --- he had long since exceeded the 10,000 air hours a man needed to be considered an expert flier --- the younger men called him “Pop Musick,” and not for his artistic predilections. When Pop spoke, and he spoke seldom, you listened and you listened well, to every word, every tone, every nuance. It could save your life and the lives of your passengers. He was, in fact, a sage, the first of those men who would later be called “Skygods.” But landlubbers puzzled him. If they didn't fly themselves then what the hell were they so interested in? 

 

Hawaii Clipper “on the step”

One day, he’d had enough. He presented himself at Andre Priester’s office without an appointment, looked hard at the little Dutchman, and said succinctly, “I don’t know what to tell them. I’m not a newspaperman,” and walked out. 

Priester was shaken. No conversationalist himself, he realized that what he had just experienced was the full and icy blast of Ed Musick’s anger. He quickly called Public Relations. Ed was henceforth to be excused from any and all such functions that did not bear directly on his job as Chief Pilot of the airline. Public Relations, which had struggled unsuccessfully to mold Musick into another “shy” but microphone-savvy Lindbergh, was secretly relieved. 

Henceforth, Captain Musick would personify that acme of 20^th Century American manhood, the strong, silent type. No more time in the barrel for Pop Musick.

 

China Clipper before liftoff with its accompanying squadron circling above

The official inaugural transpacific flight of the China Clipper began on November 22, 1935. Loaded with extra fuel, 120,000 pieces of mail,  a seven-man crew and Thanksgiving fixin’s for Midway and Wake (but no passengers), the M-130 took too long to get up over the step in San Francisco Bay. Concerned he couldn’t gain the altitude to overfly the still-under-construction San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, Ed Musick flew her under the span and through dangling wires and construction cables. The flight of accompanying planes, thinking this was part of the ceremony, followed. Nobody crashed. The crowd thought it was a neat stunt. Juan Trippe had his heart in his mouth