“Sabotage Or Aerial Piracy”

CCL

 

After the back-to-back losses of the Samoan Clipper and the Hawaii Clipper Pan American’s Pacific service was suspended to New Zealand and significantly reduced through to Manila. With only two M-130s left on the route Juan Trippe was forced to shepherd them, making the passage bi-monthly rather than weekly. It cut badly into Pan American’s revenues.

Publicly Trippe avowed full confidence in his China Clippers. Privately, he was concerned that the loss of another Clipper would doom Pan Am.* 

It was at this precise moment that Glenn Martin came forward with his theory about metal fatigue in the sponson struts of the M-130s. The timing was terrible for Pan Am, and it was deliberate on Martin’s part. Martin was still enraged that Trippe had lowballed him on the price of the China Clippers. He’d gotten less than half of his original asking price, but he’d eaten the loss assuming that Trippe would order up more M-130s. Trippe didn’t, and he rejected Martin’s prototype M-156, a larger version of the M-130, out of hand. ** Trippe ordered tests on the sponson struts and then published his own results, which showed the China Clippers to be totally safe and dependable.***

 

The China Clipper in wartime livery

Trippe took every sensible precaution. He specified that the air crews and the ground crews both were mandated to report anything out of the ordinary. And he quietly encouraged the spreading rumors that the loss of the Clippers was due to Japanese sabotage.****

It may well have been the truth. The night before the China Clipper lifted off from Alameda for the very first time, two persons, who were later described as “self-confessed Japanese saboteurs” were caught damaging Alameda’s Adcock array. Without the Adcock, the China Clipper would have had no radio signal to navigate by. 

On November 22, 1935, “China Clipper Day” itself, the small motorboat sent out to clear obstructions from the big plane’s liftoff path found a block of wood with a railroad spike driven through it floating awash in the bay, anchored in place with a length of chain. No prank this, it was a clear and well thought-out attempt to wreck the plane. The railroad spike would have torn through the ship’s duralumin hull like a knife through soft butter destroying her before she left the bay.

The FBI encouraged American citizens to report anything suspicious to their Special Agents. This wartime anxiety led to the Red paranoia of the 1950s and to self-described “patriots” becoming informers, often on spurious evidence

On a much later trip, a mechanic investigating a fuel flow problem with the auxiliary fuel tank discovered a small cork wedged in a fuel line. There was no way such an object could have found its way into the flying boat’s fuel system unless it had been deliberately placed there. And it had to have been placed there by someone with access to the aircraft and knowledge of its workings --- in short, one of Pan Am’s own mechanics. 

Its intent was clear. The cork would have cut off fuel flow to the plane’s engines if the crew had tapped the aux tank, as might have happened toward the end of a flight. A flight just like the Hawaii Clipper’s last passage. A flight where the plane simply vanished a mere 300 miles from Manila.

Juan Trippe was amazed and furious and alarmed all together. One of his own employees a saboteur?  He had his ground crews vetted by Naval Intelligence. There were some firings, but whether there was any evidence of wrongdoing or whether the Navy discovered the perpetrator’s identity is still unknown. 

And, of course, there were the constant objections of the Japanese government, which lodged a formal protest with Washington every time a Clipper left Hawaii. The Japanese still considered that they had a claim on Wake, and Guam was even more problematic. After World War I, Japan (then a member of the Allies and Associated Powers) was granted a League of Nations Mandate over the Mariana Islands which had been a German colony. The Mandate excluded Guam, the largest of the Marianas, which had been a Spanish colony until 1898, when Spain ceded it to the United States. Guam was a regular stop on the Orient Express, and Japan insisted that the Clippers not pass through the airspace of the Japanese Mandate while flying there, a virtual impossibility. They asserted that the Clippers were being used as spy planes, a charge the United States hotly denied, but which was true. 

Perhaps it was no coincidence that Amelia Earhart had vanished along with Fred Noonan, the former Chief Navigator of the airline, the year before.

 

The China Clipper

When the Hawaii Clipper vanished on July 29, 1938, the Commerce Bureau convened the first meeting of the new Air Safety Board (a precursor to the National Transportation Safety Board). The Board’s findings were inconclusive:

In conclusion, it appears that the only definite facts established up to the present time, are that between 0411 and 0412 G.C.T on July 29, 1938 was a failure of communication between the ground and the Clippers; Communication was not thereafter reestablished; and that no trace of the flying boat has since been discovered. A number of theories have been advanced as to the possible basic cause of or reason for the disappearance of the Clipper. The Board has considered each of them. Some have not been disproved, either or have been contradicted by the known facts. However, the Investigating Board feels that this report cannot properly include a discussion of conjection unsupported by developed facts. The Board, therefore, respectfully submit this report with the thought that additional evidence may yet be discovered and the investigation completed at that time.

The Hawaii Clipper

Walter Fitzmaurice, an International News Syndicate reporter followed up on the mystery of the Hawaii Clipper the day after it vanished. On July 30, 1938, he wrote a piece that betrayed the very clear impressions of the investigators before even a second question was asked:

Leo Terletzky’s 1933 logbook

The Bureau of Air Commerce dispatched its crack inspector to Alameda, Cal., to launch a federal investigation immediately upon establishment of the Hawaiian Clipper’s fate, Bureau officials said once the navy search of Philippine waters has confirmed mounting fears the $450.000 Pan-American flying boat is sunk. The federal probe, “ as a matter of course,” will be brought to bear on the possibility of sabotage. Present among the 15 persons aboard was Wah Sun-Choy, Chinese restaurant owner of Jersey City, N. J., which raised the question whether his reported mission of money carrier for the Chinese nationalist government may have provoked the first suspected case of transoceanic air piracy. Federal agents reported they were instructed to determine, first, what Sun Wah was carrying, and second who, if anyone, outside the circle of Chinese said to have contributed it knew he was carrying it back to China on the clipper.

A bureau official said the thought of killing 14 wholly innocent persons to thwart Wah’s supposed mission “seemed incredible,” but added that “war breeds ghastly expedients.” The reported fund presumably was raised to help China fight the Japanese. The routine final entry on the clipper’s radio log. Containing the operator’s matter-of-fact report of its position, altitude and 12-mile an hour ground speed, led officials to believe the disaster, if there was one, came without warning. Pan-American crews, officials pointed out, have strict orders instantly to report mechanical trouble; leading them to believe the operator would have shouted a few hasty words into his wireless telephone had engine or structural failure brought the craft down.

Watson Choy

The words “transoceanic air piracy” had never been seen in print before, but one of the first issues the Board tackled was why the Hawaii Clipper had taken an extra twenty seconds to become airborne. Experienced observers at Guam had noted that the plane seemed tail-heavy as it left the water. Tests, admittedly crude, were run, showing that the delay might be due to an extra weight in the tail, perhaps stowaways in the baggage room, or perhaps it was just the weight of all the gold Watson Choy***** had been carrying.

Clipper Maid of The Seas, the ill-fated plane that was destroyed over Lockerbie, Scotland

Almost ten years earlier, Pan American had been the victim of the world’s very first hijacking, when a Panagra passenger had commandeered one of the airline’s Ford Trimotors. It was considered a freak event, and there had been no similar problems in the sky since. There had been accidents --- the Clipper General Machado had ditched at sea costing one passenger his life, and the Puerto Rico Clipper had struck a fishing boat and overturned drowning some of the people aboard --- but overall Pan American Airways had the best safety record in the business. The China Clippers alone had made 223 flights without even a major mechanical problem, much less a plane taken hostage. But with the loss of the Hawaii Clipper had Pan American just suffered the dubious distinction of introducing the world to airborne terrorism?

The tragic remains of the nose section of Clipper Maid of The Seas lie in a field outside Lockerbie. The colored tarpaulins cover the bodies of victims

*Trippe’s worst fears were borne out long after his own death. On December 21, 1988, the Clipper Maid of the Seas was destroyed by a terrorist bomb which detonated over Lockerbie, Scotland. 270 people were killed, including the entirety of the passengers and crew and eleven people on the ground who were crushed by flaming wreckage falling from altitude. The airline, which had been struggling financially in the 1980s, never recovered from the event. The Lockerbie Disaster is seen as the proximate cause of Pan Am’s eventual business failure.

**Martin’s petulance was well-founded. Martin had gambled on Trippe ordering at least three more M-130s and following that up with an order for the M-156. Martin Aircraft was nearly ruined by the losses inflicted by Pan Am, and was only saved by massive orders from the U.S. Government during World War II. Igor Sikorsky was also bitterly disappointed by Trippe. Sikorsky had built all of Pan American’s planes beginning with the S-34, most on spec, and Trippe had abandoned Sikorsky to go to Martin. Of the three planes Sikorsky built in expectation of its next Pan Am order, the planes, designated VS-44s were eventually sold to American Export Airlines (AEA), an upstart competitor to Pan Am. Sikorsky was angry, but unlike Martin he remained professional and outwardly cordial to Trippe.

***The tests on the sponson struts were conducted by Pan Am and not independently verified. They found that:

(1)     The struts on the China Clipper and the Philippine Clipper showed no tendency to stress microfractures

(2)     Some of the struts in Pan Am’s spare parts inventory showed such a tendency. Some did not.

(3)     A reconfigured strut from Martin’s factory (obtained via industrial espionage) showed microfracturing

Trippe had the first set of findings published but not the second or third for obvious reasons (though undoubtedly Trippe would have wanted to embarrass Glenn Martin with the third). The question remains whether the first set of findings weren’t sanitized for public consumption.

****It was not always so. Incidences of Clipper sabotage are difficult to assess because they were usually written off as "mechanical failures" or as something else. In one instance, a Clipper reported to have hit a floating log was found to have six gouges like claw marks in its hull when it was beached for repairs. Afterward, Pan Am began the practice of sending a launch to inspect the Clipper's liftoff path prior to any departure.

*****Choy was born in America and used the name “Watson” though his family name was Sun Wah. His brother Frank was a pilot in the Nationalist Chinese Air Force built with the aid of Claire Chennault of Flying Tigers fame.Watson Choy owned two restaurants named The China Clipper and one named The Tea Room.