"The Flying Gas Tank"

CLXXIV

A Master of Ocean Flying Boats might be expected to have as salty a vocabulary as anyone who went to sea and had earned the title “Master” of anything. Ed Musick certainly did. The newspapers, looking for some color in the man they described as “strong” and “silent” gleefully reported the fact that Ed was fluent in Blue; it went along well with the masculine image they had created for him.

It was true, indeed, but not quite as true as they said. For the most part Ed was polite and gentlemanly, especially around ladies and around passengers, but when frustrated he could let loose oaths with a proficiency that could shock a pirate. 

When Ed was told he would be piloting the survey flight from Honolulu to New Zealand, he had exploded with invective, and the echoes reverberated all the way to Andre Priester’s office, and maybe even reached the ears of Juan Trippe. 

Ed was genuinely angry. He didn’t like FAM 14. After eight decades it is hard to say why, and Ed left not a word to posterity explaining his reasons. He had just won the Harmon Trophy, and was considered the greatest flier in the world. He certainly was the most famous, excepting the self-exiled Charles Lindbergh. Perhaps he thought that the dead-end mail run was a demotion, a loss of status, after having groused about the difficult scheduling of the Manila hop some months back. Maybe he was quietly considering some of the offers that were pouring across his desk, with an eye toward an honorable retirement from Pan American. Or, probably, it wasn’t a question of ego.  Knowing Ed, he was fuming because the flight seemed just plain stupid. “Meticulous Musick” might have wondered if Pan Am was trying to get him killed. 

First and foremost, there was the plane. For this survey flight he and his crew had been assigned to an S-42B named the Pan American Clipper II. Ed had hopped all the way across the breadth of the Pacific Ocean in the S-42B Pan American Clipper, of course, but they had flown several staged flights --- first from Alameda to Hawaii, then to Hawaii and on to Midway, and then to Hawaii to Midway to Wake, and then to Hawaii to Midway to Wake to Guam --- the series of staged flights had taken the better part of a year, and the crew --- and Ed --- had become intimately familiar with the idiosyncrasies of the Pan American Clipper over all those months. The Pan American Clipper II was a different plane, and they were being asked to fly the full 7,000 miles in a single survey flight. The plane wasn’t new and it wasn’t untested, but the performance demands put on the plane during the flight would be rigorous to say the least. 

Ed also did not like the fact that to allow the Pan American Clipper II the range to make the flight, the plane had been stripped down to its bare metal fuselage and the fuselage had been filled with fuel tanks and bladders. The Pan American Clipper II acquired an unwelcome nickname among the men who worked on her and flew her: “The Flying Gas Tank.”

Ed hated the idea of piloting a flying bomb across a stretch of ocean he was utterly unfamiliar with. It didn’t help that the landing and refueling site at Kingman Reef required an open-ocean landing near a moored supply ship in proximity to a drowned reef. By the time the Pan American Clipper II reached Kingman Reef it would be flying on fumes and fumes were actually more combustible than liquid fuel.  A rough landing in the open ocean could mean ending his career in a very sudden manner. And then there was the landing site at Pago Pago in American Samoa. What little he knew about it was that it was a narrow, tight, rocky harbor that would require another death-defying landing --- and takeoff. The S-42B had a nasty habit of coasting through the water for an indecently long time once it set down. In a short space such as Pago Pago Harbor, the plane could pile up on the rocks before he’d be able to stop it --- leading to another appointment with disaster. 

To address Ed Musick’s surprisingly vociferous objections to “The Flying Gas Tank,” the Pan Am Clipper II was outfitted with special fuel dumping valves on the wings. It seemed like a commonsense safety precaution and all the S-42Bs were likewise outfitted.

Ed was less afraid of dying than of throwing his life --- and the lives of his crew --- away for a few dozen bags of mail destined for New Zealand.  And on this initial flight, the irony was that the Pan American Clipper II wouldn’t even be carrying mail. Ed had to wonder why he was flying so far to bring not so much as a postcard to the Prime Minister of New Zealand. Why wasn't there even a token bit of mail on board? Why wasn’t the airline taking the same safer “staged” approach to New Zealand as it had to Manila?  

Why was Mr. Trippe rushing everything?