The Lost Clipper: The Strange Case of Captain Leo Terletzky

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The Hawaii Clipper (NC14714) was the last of Glenn Martin’s Ocean Transports (aka Sunchasers aka China Clippers aka M-130s, aka MOTs) to emerge from his Baltimore factory, and it was the first to have completed the transpacific passenger circuit in 1936. In April of 1938, it became the flying boat that made Pan American’s 100^th flight from Alameda to Manila and back again to the popping of champagne corks in the Cloud Club. FAM 14, the Auckland route, may have been in suspension but the “Orient Express” was running straight and true. 

Captain Leo Terletzsky

Ed Musick was gone, but Pan American Airways still had a stable of gifted pilots. One whom Ed considered among the most gifted was Captain Leo Terletzky, a Russian émigré from Samara, whom, Ed admitted to Andre Priester, was every bit as technically accomplished as any pilot Ed had ever flown with. Terletzsky had begun his career in competition and stunt flying, and had early on opted to join Pan Am. He became a left-seat pilot with the airline in 1930, and he was modestly famous in the aviation community for having flown the Cuban Secretary of State, Dr. Orestes Ferrara and his family to safety in Miami during a coup attempt in Havana in 1933. The Clipper (unnamed in the contemporary Press) was riddled with gunfire as it departed Havana, but Terletzky made it to Dinner Key without further incident (oddly, Dr. Ferarra was challenged to a duel shortly after arriving in Miami).

Terletzky was a bookish man who enjoyed chess. He was something of a Quiet Man type, much like Ed Musick, at least until he downed a few vodkas. Liquor made him garrulous. As a raconteur he was much admired, and his tendency to pepper his endless fund of flying stories with lessons for less experienced pilots made him invaluable to the airline. But he was never considered for the position of Chief Pilot or the rating of Master of Ocean Flying Boats. 

 

The reason was simple. Leo Terletzky hated airplanes.

The Hawaii Clipper

On the ground, he was known to be more meticulous than Meticulous Musick. He pored over his Clippers’ maintenance logs looking for any irregularities at all and interrogated the ground crews about every aspect of a ship’s behavior, right down to the condition of nuts and bolts and rivets. During preflight checks he tested every toggle, flipped every switch, tapped every gauge, and pulled every lever before pronouncing himself satisfied. On flying days he spent extra time making sure that cargoes were lashed down, that passengers were securely seated, and that everything was as perfect as he could make it. In the passenger cabin his attention to detail won him accolades.

On paper, he was the best of the airline’s pilots, a man with 9,000 hours in aircraft of all types, 1,600 in the M-130 alone, and he was considered the best “sailor” in the Pan Am fleet, meaning he could handle a flying boat better on the water than anybody.

Throttles

On the flight deck everything was fine too, at least until Terletzky called for a startup on Number One engine. The moment the big prop showed the inclination to turn, Terletzky would melt down. His hand would grip the fire control handle so tight his knuckles would be bloodless. His eyes would dart nervously over his instrument panel. He’d jump in his seat at every new sound.

The Pan Am ground crew and one of the flight officers greet passengers as they board the Hawaii Clipper probably in Hawaii

Once in the air Terletzky’s flying was flawless, but he muttered to himself endlessly in Russian and English, and swore ‘til the cabin air turned blue. Air pockets made his eyes go wide. Cloudy weather upset him. Sunny weather was too glaring for him. The slightest unusual sound made him shake. 

One of the Clipper’s radial engines

He handled the yokes well, but with an air that suggested that he and the aircraft were mortal enemies, that he was dealing not with a machine but with a wild animal made momentarily quiescent.

It scared his crews. It scared them enough that they all complained to Andre Priester who had Ed Musick take Terletzky up for a series of check rides. Ed saw nothing odd, but the complaints continued to flow from the flight deck. Finally, Terletzky admitted to Ed that he was simply frightened to death in the air. Somehow, he had convinced himself that every airplane was on the verge of imminent mechanical failure.

The China Clipper  on its cradle in “drydock” for repairs. In 1937 Glenn Martin, the plane’s obsessive-compulsive designer, had become fixated on potential weaknesses in the sponson struts that connected the lower seawings to the upper air wings. He announced publicly that they could fail with overuse, and suggested an expensive redesign that would have taken all three planes out of service for months and cost tens of thousands of dollars each. To restore public confidence in the China Clippers Pan Am ran its own tests and dismissed Martin’s warnings of metal fatigue as unwarranted. A furious Juan Trippe, who had gotten the three M-130s at a bargain price, was convinced that Martin was trying to both punish the airline and recoup some of his cost overruns by making changes to the planes. Trippe had no desire to line Martin’s pockets --- plus, suspension of its Pacific service would have bankrupted Pan Am --- and nobody knows to this day if the sponson struts were flawed or not

A modern flight surgeon probably would have grounded him permanently, but Pan Am accommodated him by assigning a fully-rated pilot to sit in the right-hand seat on every one of Terletzky’s flights. Priester considered it insurance in case Terletzky really did go cloud-happy up there, and it was also an indication of Pan American’s respect for Terletzky’s piloting skills. Once Terletzky knew there was another Captain aboard his angst disappeared and he flew calmly, though he never relaxed or let down his guard. He just knew an airplane would kill him someday. 

The USAT (United States Army Transport) General Meigs searched for the missing Hawaii Clipper

Someday came on July 29, 1938. Terletzky was piloting the Hawaii Clipper between Guam and Manila on the outward voyage. His co-pilot, Mark “Tex” Walker had 1,900 hours in flying boats. Even the Steward, Ivan Parker Jr. had ridden the Orient Express 25 times before.

The relative locations of Japanese-held Saipan and American Guam. At the end of World War II, the Enola Gay lifted off from Tinian to drop the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Before the war the Japanese routinely objected to Clipper flights near Saipan. Rumor has it that Amelia Earhart, Fred Noonan, and the people on the Hawaii Clipper were all executed on Saipan 

The plane lifted off from Guam at 11:33 A.M. local time. It was a “light” flight. Most of the passengers had disembarked at Honolulu. A few others, Pan American employees mostly, had deplaned at Midway and Wake and Guam. Only six passengers remained on board for Manila. They were outnumbered by the crew of nine. Among the passengers were a leprosy specialist, Dr. Earl B. McKinley, the dean of George Washington University Medical School, who was carrying a new serum to Manila, and Fred Meier, an epidemiologist. Also aboard was Major Howard C. French USAAC, who had been despatched as a military observer of Japanese aggression in China. Watson Choy, an American restauranteur, was carrying $3,000,000 in gold ingots for China Relief (worth about $50 million today). Edward Wyman of Curtiss-Wright was interested in selling warplanes to China. Pan Am’s own Kenneth Kennedy was heading out to confer with CNAC.

Around the time Steward Parker served a luncheon of consommé, tuna on toast, and fruit cup, the Hawaii Clipper announced it was bucking moderate headwinds and rain, the fat drops of which pinged off the fuselage. The Hawaii Clipper sent a message, “Stand by,” and nothing was ever heard or seen of her again.

The ensuing search for the M-130 involved 14 warships and covered 160,000 square miles. In terms of ships and men assigned it dwarfed the search for the Flying Laboratory. Not a thing was ever found of her. She vanished as completely as had Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan just the year before.

Although not as well-known as the Amelia Earhart event, speculation goes on today as to the fate of “The Lost Clipper”

Theories about the disappearance, some plausible, some less so, abounded. One of the most basic was that the Clipper was struck by lightning. But Clippers were designed to withstand lightning strikes and had survived them before. A few Pan Am pilots opined that Terletzky had finally flipped his noodle in the cockpit and crashed the plane into the sea. Another theory was that the plane was blown up with a bomb smuggled aboard by a Japanese agent at one of its staging stops. Yet another was that the plane was shot down by Japanese fighter planes or forced down on Saipan to have its occupants executed. Ideas about stowed-away Japanese hijackers were also bruited about.

Just like Earhart’s Electra, not a molecule of evidence exists to support any one theory, but the utter disappearance of two American-flagged aircraft in close proximity to hostile Japanese territory (the nightglow of Saipan could be seen from Guam on a clear night and vice-versa) within a year of one another at a time of mounting tensions gives some credence to the idea that these were not two separate and random events. 

Particularly in the case of the Hawaii Clipper the Japanese had reason to want the ship gone --- Japan repeatedly damned the hated China Clippers as spy planes. This Clipper in particular was passengered on this hop almost entirely with experts dedicated to halting Japanese aggression in China. The loss of the gold was a particularly immediate blow to China’s defensive capabilities, the sale of warplanes and the availability of American military advice to China was delayed, CNAC operations were briefly hobbled, and even the health of China’s people was potentially impacted by the loss of just these six passengers, not to mention the injury done to Pan American Airways with its obnoxious message of freedom and international cooperation. Certainly, and in any event, the flying boat’s sudden disappearance was remarkably convenient for Japan.

The “thick oil” turned out to be bilge sludge from a passing ship. No trace of the Hawaii Clipper was ever found

It’s likely, eighty years on, that no one will ever know the reality of it all. The Hawaii Clipper, unlike the Flying Laboratory, has mostly been forgotten, though solving the mystery of Amelia Earhart might go far toward solving the mystery of Leo Terletzky.