The Stink of It

CLXXVII

The four letter tirade started the moment Ed Musick opened the crew cabin hatchway.

The Pan American Clipper II at Auckland, NZ, on March 30, 1937

It was the morning of March 17, 1937, only six days after Pan American had received the official word that the New Zealand government had agreed to a postal airmail treaty. FAM 14 was a go. The Pan American Clipper II  had been readied from the moment that Juan Trippe had seen New Zealand on a map, but only now was the flight ready to take off.

Maybe.

The reek of gasoline that flooded out of the fuselage of the Pan American Clipper II when Ed unbolted the door had started his nerves jangling. He backed away from the hatch, turned, and shouted for everyone to drop their cigarettes now. He ordered the ground crew to lay down all their tools. He feared that the slightest frictional spark from a wrench slipping on a nut could transform the ship, and its ground crew and flight crew and anybody else in the immediate vicinity into a sudden and fatal fireball. 

As soon as the tools were put aside, he ordered all crewmen --- ground and flight both --- into the ship to open every vent, every window and every hatch they could access within the flying boat in order to get the stench out. But he warned them to be careful: “If anything sticks leave it be.” 

   

As soon as that was done, he cleared the cabin, and made sure they cleared the area for at least an hour. “And if it’s a 75-minute hour, that’s all the better.”

He glumly led his flight crew away from the Flying Gas Tank. They had coffee. They smoked, as men do. And they talked.

“We should be doing pre-flight checks right now,” Vic Wright his Flight Engineer said. 

“#@% on preflight checks,” Ed responded dourly. “No one is getting on that [obscenity] plane until we can breathe the air in that cabin. And as soon as we can, I’m sending the ground crew aboard to check every pipe weld, solder connection, valve fitting and hose toggle on all that fuel system plumbing. I want to find out if some idiot didn’t twist his cock tight enough before they fueled up that &^$@% plane. That smell is coming from somewhere, god[obscenity] and I intend to find out where before we blow ourselves up trying to check the cabin lights.”

“I wasn’t arguing,” Wright responded. “Just saying.”

   

Ed grunted. The Flight Crew knew he wasn’t happy. Once he’d been assigned to test fly FAM 14 he’d hand-picked each of them for his crew, and so he had a more-than-usual concern about their well-being. It weighed heavily on him, especially considering the ill-advised route and the ill-considered modifications to the plane.

Ed took a gulp of coffee.

The crew knew that Ed was also unhappy because he missed his friend, the crackerjack navigator Fred Noonan who’d been lured away from Pan Am by the promise of fortune and glory. Right now, Fred was preparing for an impressive flying circumnavigation with Amelia Earhart. Privately, Ed wondered if he’d see Fred again or if the Flying Gas Tank would write finis to their friendship.  

Ed thought hard about canceling the flight. He knew he had that authority, but that authority depended entirely upon whether the ground crew found anything wrong aboard the Pan American Clipper II when they finally did go aboard. If they found even the smallest glitch Ed could pull the plug, at least for a day or two while they fixed the bugs, but still, in the end, he knew he’d be flying the route. 

What was really troubling him, Ed realized as he stared moodily into his coffee cup, was the spit-and-baling wire aspect of the flight. Pan American had barely just conquered the mid-Pacific. It had taken the airline a good long time to do so, the staging areas like Midway and Wake and Guam had been well-prepared beforehand, and everything had gone well. That’s how you conquer a new world, Ed thought to himself, in an orderly and, well, a meticulous fashion.  

The paint on Midway’s Gooneyville Lodge sign was barely dry.  Why was Mr. Trippe so driven to fly south to New Zealand, essentially a dead-end route, so soon? The trans-Pacific route was 10,000 miles long from Alameda to Hong Kong, and it had taken months and multiple flights to survey. Add in the Alameda-to-Honolulu leg, and the flight to Auckland was just as long, but the crew was being asked to survey it in one trip --- and the staging areas were a rock sticking up out of the water in the middle of nowhere, and a harbor shaped like a butter knife --- all to be flown in an S-42B brimming full of aviation fuel. A plane not initially designed that way.

Why couldn’t he at least have had one of the brand-new M-130s instead of this hastily-modified put-up job of a plane? He had his suspicions. And he didn’t like what they told him.  

It all seemed a little crazy. A little careless. And Ed was anything but careless.  
“OK,” he said shortly. “Let’s get back.”

When they returned to the Pan American Clipper II the odor of gasoline had dissipated. Ed sent the ground crew aboard to check for leaks.

Long before he’d hoped, the Ground Chief approached him. “We couldn’t find any leaks, Captain. I think that smell came from the plane being shut up all night after fueling.”

“So we’re good to go?”

The Chief looked at the big flying boat. “Yeah,” he nodded.  

“OK. We go.”

Once inside the cabin, Ed was more than usually careful. It seemed to take a long time before he asked for a power start on Number One engine. He looked at the crew. They looked back. He exhaled softly . . . 

The crew of the Pan American Clipper II upon arrival at Mechanics’ Bay, the Auckland flying boat depot on March 29, 1937. The dark-haired man with Ed Musick is Harold Gatty, Pan Am’s New Zealand regional President

And a few minutes later, the four engines of the Pan American Clipper II were roaring. He let them have their head for awhile, burning off some fuel, lightening the plane moment by moment. And then he gave the order to cast off . . .