The Friendly Isle

CLVII

As the China Clipper droned on through the November night toward its Pearl City berth in Honolulu, the lights burned late in the Chrysler Building. Andre Priester was hunched over a shortwave radio tuned into the China Clipper’s frequency. Priester and Hugo Leuteritz were conversing in Dutch, Leuteritz working a big plot board with the planned path of the big flying boat highlighted in red tape. Occasionally, one of the two would advance a pinback model of the plane along the tape. Then they’d call up Juan Trippe, who was still in San Francisco to report what they knew. Forty two people were engaged in tracking the China Clipper as it moved across the far face of the Earth. 

The row of holes that was starting to punctuate the tape was reassuring. If the plane strayed from the tape, that would be bad. If the holes stopped appearing in the tape, that would be far worse. 

The men gathered in Pan Am’s skyscraper offices were, though they wouldn’t admit it, frightened. The big beautiful China Clipper was a big ugly question mark to them. The hastily-repaired sabotage to Alameda’s Adcock Array was worrisome. Had the damage been fully and properly repaired? Was there more damage they weren’t aware of?  The two saboteurs had been given the Third Degree by the FBI in the best of 1930s Hat Squad fashion, but who knew what they didn’t say? What they couldn’t say?

Fears about the Adcock in California had raised fears about the Adcock in Hawaii, now under twenty-four hour guard. A quick inspection had uncovered no tampering, but . . . 

And then, the China Clipper herself. After the Alameda Adcock had been messed with, the plane had been swept (as casually as possible) for a bomb, and its instrumentation had been tested (as routinely as possible) for dysfunctions. Nothing had been found in either case, but if the China Clipper disappeared somewhere along her track, they might never know why. 

After all, the flight of the China Clipper was only the third California-to-Hawaii flight in history, and the first with a virtually untested plane. Unlike the Navy seaplane that had made the first flight and the S-42B that had made the second, the China Clipper had no service record at all. Not being an amphibian, and too big for most lake or river landings, she had been freighted, not flown, from Baltimore to California. No one knew how she’d handle on the long flight to Hawaii, or if her engines would fail. There were those in the U.S.P.S. and in Pan American itself who were doomsayers, and the bookies were giving bad odds. 

So Ed Musick and Rod Sullivan were given explicit orders to report their position every thirty minutes on the half hour. Every thirty minutes on the quarter-hour Fred Noonan would take a sight through his navigator’s sextant.

A sextant and case belonging to Fred Noonan

The flight crew hated the procedure, none more than Noonan, who was dressed in a heavy flight suit with lined gloves and boots and a leather flying helmet for the sight. Beneath the flight suit he wore a red flannel union suit for warmth. And every first and third quarter-hour he would open the M-130’s overhead hatch, wiggle his way halfway out, and take a sight of sun or star. It was a job that could frost a man. The ambient air temperature at sea level in November wasn’t exactly balmy, even in the South Seas, but above 10,000 feet where the China Clipper lived, it was icy, and subjecting oneself to the slipstream of the aircraft as it traveled at 160 miles per hour made it far worse yet. 

Fred Noonan demonstrating a bubble sextant

Technically, Noonan didn’t have to suffer. The overhead hatch of the Martin Ocean Transport had been built with a sighting porthole, but Noonan didn’t trust it. There was too much of a chance that light refraction could throw off the reading.  Rather than risk dying, he risked exposure.

After every sight, Noonan would calculate the ship’s position, hand it to the Radio Officer, Will Jarboe, and crawl onto his cot trying to get warm. By the time he did, it was time for another sight. The China Clipper stayed on course as if that red tapeline had been painted on the ocean. 

There were three tracks within that broad band, and Ed Musick kept to the southernmost, skirting huge cumulus clouds that contained filthy weather. The China Clipper lost itself for awhile in between layers of fleece drifting like ghosts in the dark sky. The crew kept a collective ear cocked for an odd sound from the engines, but the droning, a mild constant in the well-insulated cockpit, kept on without a variance, without a miss, a confident and steady sound.

 

When the sun rose, it blazed from stern to stem of the big winged boat, casting a shadow below and before her. Ahead of the China Clipper there was nothing but blue sea and blue sky and a blue line betwixt them. The motion of the China Clipper above and the motion of the sea below seemed synchronized, so that the plane seemed suspended, unmoving in a vast scape of blue. It was disconcerting, and Musick and Sullivan scanned their instruments instinctively. Rationally, they knew they had to be moving forward, else they’d fall, but their senses were fooled, adrift in a world of ripples and whorls and endless blueness with just glints of gold and white.  

It was not long after two bells that a shadow appeared in the distance, growing closer and larger every moment. Landfall. Dark and verdant, it resolved itself into an island. Time passed, and finally someone said, “That's Molokai.” 

Molokai. The Friendly Isle. They were still 200 miles off her beam, a trace further from Honolulu. Ed Musick checked his gauges. “Gentlemen, we’re not even into the reserve.” 

There was a sudden, subtle lessening of tension aboard the China Clipper. Everyone remembered the almost-fatal flight of the Pan American Clipper just months before, when the “bottom of the tanks were just about damp.” Musick hadn’t even risked banking the S-42B to line up for landing on that trip, fearing that the tilt of the plane would starve the lee engines, but today he put the China Clipper into a graceful, swooping bank. “We can just about walk ashore from here,” he joked dryly.

Ed Musick receiving the traditional Hawaiian welcome

The landing at Honolulu was an event. The inevitable podium. The bunting. The speeches. The quarrying for a comment. Ed made his escape as soon as he could manage it without reflecting badly on the company (for it never paid to reflect badly on the company). There was much to do, and so, with nods, he shouldered his way through the crowds, his crew tracing his steps like iron filings following a magnet.

His crew needed rest, and they needed a little R & R (this was Hawaii, after all). And they needed to work. Hard. In less than 24 hours, the China Clipper was bound for Midway, and she needed to have her Hawaii-bound cargo offloaded, and her Midway-Wake cargoes reloaded and rebalanced (this time with cases of cranberry sauce and trays of prepared foods for the Pan Am staff members who would be spending their first Thanksgiving holidays at the atolls).  It was the first time the Honolulu ground crew would be working with the M-130, and Musick wanted every eye he could spare overseeing the preparations for her next flight. The hop to Midway was the easiest leg, but he wasn’t going to be lazy just because it was easy. The ocean was still far, far greater than the plane, which could disappear in a twinkling. The China Clipper needed to be refueled. “Meticulous Musick” wanted her fluids topped off, and her spark plugs checked, and her fuel lines flushed, and her engines adjusted. If she'd had tires he'd have kicked them. He had a long list of little tweaks, some of which only he would have worried about, but he wanted it all done, and done right and within the limited time they had. 

The floodlights blazed at Pearl City all night long.