The Heart of a Whale

CCLIV

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt christens the Boeing 314 Yankee Clipper at the Washington Navy Yard, March 3, 1939. as Juan Trippe looks on in obvious pleasure. The bottle contained “Water From The Seven Seas”. When the China Clipper was christened by Mrs. Roosevelt in Hawaii, the bottle had contained coconut water; when the Clipper Rio de Janeiro had been christened by Mrs, Hoover, the bottle had contained soda water in keeping with the Prohibition Era

No sooner had the Sunchasers begun their service than Juan Trippe had begun searching for the next generation of Clippers. Igor Sikorsky still had the model he called the S-44. He’d built three of them in anticipation that Pan Am would order them up as the logical successor to the S-42, but he’d been stunned when Pan Am turned down the design and went with the Martin M-130s.

The Sikorsky VS-44

Glenn Martin presumed that the order for three M-130s would be the beginning of a long term relationship with Pan Am just as Sikorsky had had. Believing this to be the case, Martin had poured more money than was sensible into the M-130, making it as luxurious as he knew how, and then sold them to the airline at a loss. His calculus was that Pan Am would order more M-130s (the airline didn’t) and that they would upgrade to the larger M-156 (they didn’t).

The Martin M-130

Only one M-156 was ever built. A disappointed Glenn Martin sold the twin-boom flying boat to the Soviet Union during World War II, and so it became known as “the Russian Clipper”

Instead, Pan American contracted with Boeing Aircraft Corporation of Seattle. It was a relationship that would last for the rest of Pan Am’s time, and it almost didn’t happen. Boeing barely got their bid in before the deadline, and their design was so different from the beloved M-130s that the company calculated its chances of winning the $50,000.00 acceptance bonus as nil. Although Boeing had submitted its bid and a preliminary design and had gotten the contract in June 1938, it was Juan Trippe’s participation in the October Millionaire’s Flight on the Hindenburg that informed Trippe’s expectations of what the new clipper would be.

 

The Boeing 314 would be the largest commercial fixed-wing aircraft ever built until the introduction of the Boeing 747.  Its wingspan would be 75% that of the 747.

 

It would rely on Boeing’s cantilevered wing, making external spars and struts obsolete. The Boeing cantilevered wing design dated back to the Boeing Monomail and the Boeing 247 airliner of the early 1930s. The basic wing design had been perfected for use in large wings with the design of the XB-15 bomber “Old Grandpappy,” and it was the same wing that would later be used in the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress and the Boeing B-29 Superfortress of World War II fame.

The Boeing XB-15 experimental bomber. One-of-a-kind, it was beloved as “Old Grandpappy”

The Y-B17A, the first of a series of heavy bombers that would evolve into the B-17G

The exigencies of war caused changes to the B-17. The G variant had a forward chin turret, a ball turret in the belly, and tail guns. About 12,000 B-17s were built between 1935 and 1945

The B-29 Very Heavy Bomber was a massive long-range aircraft. It remains the only aircraft to have dropped atomic bombs

The 314, though the same in design would be different in execution. Instead of the slim cylindrical fuselage of a land plane, it had a heavy shiplike body that resembled nothing so much as a flying whale.

The California Clipper in flight. There were two variants of these Clippers, the 314 and the 314A, which had a larger fuel capacity, higher ceiling, and greater range. Six of each were built

The gargantuan proportions of the Boeing 314 can be seen in this photograph of its triple empennage of the California Clipper. The Length Overall (LOA) of the aircraft was 106 feet. The maximum gross weight of a Boeing 314A was 84,000 pounds; it’s service ceiling was 19,600 feet