Flight 7 Is Missing Read online

  Page two is a full-page advertisement urging passengers to look at the Pan Am timetable inside their seat pouches and dream of exploring the new horizons in eighty-one countries on all the continents—“all within the spread of Pan Am’s wings.”

  Other passengers read “Flying Clipper Wise,” Pan Am’s brochure designed especially for the Stratocruiser. The brochure assures passengers that Pan Am is not only the most experienced airline in the world, but also one of the world’s safest, and today’s plane has “at least two direction finders” that will provide “continuous two-way communication with ground stations, ships and other planes.” It also offers this comforting statement: “And on trans-Pacific hops, LORAN [a long-range radio navigation system] gives us an immediate radio fix at any point in the flight.”

  In midafternoon, the stewardesses make their way up the aisle with silver trays overflowing with freshly cut pineapple, honeydew melon, grapes, other assorted fruits, and cheeses for the pampered passengers. In the downstairs, horseshoe-shaped lounge, purser Crosthwaite dutifully pours free cocktails and listens to the melodious banter of passenger small talk before heading back up to the main cabin deck to assist with the evening meal.

  Shortly before 5 p.m. an elegant seven-course dinner is being prepared in the galley ovens, and the tantalizing smell of prime rib begins drifting into the passenger cabin from the “highest flying kitchen in the world.” A call chime is occasionally heard, and one of the stewardesses rushes to see what the passenger wants, always with a smile on her face, always eager to please. The Pan Am way.

  As the Stratocruiser glides across the Pacific skies and chases the setting western sun, the cockpit crew momentarily relaxes and prepares for the second half of the journey. Soon stewardesses McGrath and Alexander tie on their aprons as they prepare to serve dinner, first to the passengers in first class, then working their way up the aisle to economy.

  So far, the flight from San Francisco has been uneventful. Captain Brown and his able crew understand that the Jet Age is on the horizon, but for now the celebrated, but expensive-to-operate, piston-engine Stratocruiser is still master of the skies.

  Brown looks out the wide cockpit windows to the blue-green sea far below him and the horizon ahead and concentrates on getting his plane and passengers safely into Honolulu. The crew knows full well that the giant Stratocruisers have had problems during the past couple of years. But so far this year the giant airships have been safe.

  In addition to the two near disasters that made the news, there was a close call just four months ago that didn’t make headlines when fifty-eight passengers aboard a Honolulu-to-Wake-Island Stratocruiser were warned to be ready to “ditch at any moment.” Captain Fred Walts had radioed for help after one engine died and another momentarily lost power. He immediately ordered passengers to don life jackets and to take off their shoes as a precaution, but the Stratocruiser miraculously made it to Wake Island and landed safely.

  But that flight doesn’t cross Captain Brown’s mind as he prepares to make a routine radio report a few minutes from now.

  In many ways this has been a banner year for Pan Am, with record-breaking passenger loads and increased cargo driving revenues up. A Pan Am Clipper lands or takes off somewhere in the world every two and a half minutes, and more people fly Pan Am internationally than any other airliner in the world. President and founder Juan Trippe, always the optimist, says the best is yet to come.

  However, in reality operating costs are outpacing revenue and squeezing Pan Am’s profitability. Aviation Week reports that profits have declined every quarter for the past two years, and earnings are likely to be 50 percent less than two years earlier. This trend cannot continue if Pan American is to remain number one in worldwide commercial aviation.

  The net operating income of the Pacific-Alaska Division is expected to drop from $3.6 million in 1956 to $2.8 million this year. The Civil Aeronautics Board has rejected requested fare increases since the end of the war, and Pan Am is hard-pressed to find new sources of capital to buy high-priced jetliners—the future of aviation. Less than two weeks earlier the first 707 rolled out of Boeing’s factory in Seattle. It will be Pan American’s first jet, and the first jet in commercial aviation, but Pan Am must find ways to simultaneously increase revenue and decrease operating costs in order to remain first in commercial aviation—and to pay for the new jet fleet.

  Nowhere is the financial pinch felt more than in the Pacific-Alaska Division, where Pan Am has been cutting corners, particularly in the maintenance and inspection of its flying fleet, a move that mechanics and the Transportation Workers Union claim is putting passengers’ lives at risk. Pan Am officials reject the claims as “union talk.”

  5 P.M.

  About midway in the Pacific between Honolulu and San Francisco, the USS Minnetonka, a 225-foot-long US Coast Guard cutter, is on duty as Ocean Station November. Positioned about 1,200 miles from either city, the ship is one of five Coast Guard cutters that are alternately assigned for three weeks at a time to provide weather observations and serve as a position checkpoint for airline traffic. The crew also is available for search-and-rescue duties if needed.

  It is normally a boring assignment, but the crewmen understand the importance of their mission.

  The Combat Information Center (CIC) is the focus of the cutter, and it is here that the monotony of life at sea is broken by crewmen keeping an eye on radar, plotting contacts, and communicating via radio with every aircraft that passes in the skies above them. The CIC crew calculates the course, speed, and position of the passing planes and relays that information to the pilots. The contact with the airplanes is a welcome break from the humdrum of normal duty on the sea.

  These are the days long before satellites and sophisticated mapping-and-tracking technology, and both the crew in the air and the crew on the sea welcome the contact with each other. The crew in the air is always grateful that the Coast Guard is down there.

  It is 5:04 p.m. Pacific time and Romance of the Skies is flying just a few miles west of the location that pilots call the point of no return, where the plane must proceed to its destination because it does not have enough fuel to return to its point of departure. Captain Brown radios the floating Minnetonka and asks for a routine radar fix to confirm the plane’s exact location.

  “This is Clipper Nine-Four-Four on 121.5. Over.”

  “This is Ocean Station November. Read you loud and clear. Standing by to copy flight information.”

  “This is Nine-Four-Four. Departed San Francisco at 1915Z. Estimate Honolulu 0549Z. Cruising 10,000. On track 245. True ground speed 212. Air speed 225. Fuel remaining eight hours.”

  Captain Brown then asks the ship’s radioman for a continuous radio beacon, radar fix, and ground-speed check.

  “You are forty-three miles west of Grid Oscar Juliet. We have you tracking on a course of two-four-four degrees true, making good a ground speed of two-one-five knots. Did you copy? Over.”

  “Roger, November. Copied it OK. Thank you. Nine-Four-Four listening out,” Brown replies.

  “Roger, Nine-Four-Four. If there is nothing more we can do for you this afternoon, wishing you a pleasant flight on into Honolulu. This is station November listening out, Nine-Four-Four.”

  It is 5:05 p.m. and Flight 7 is about twelve miles ahead of schedule.

  The Coast Guard radioman carefully notes the time in his log, but doesn’t realize until later that he is the last person on earth to talk to anyone aboard Romance of the Skies.

  The radio report complete, Captain Brown relinquishes control of the cockpit to First Officer Wygant and begins to put on his hat and uniform coat to make the customary PR walk through the cabin before dinner is served.

  We may never know for certain what happens during the next twenty minutes, but Captain Brown and the crew are well trained, and they know that the first thing they must do if anything goes wrong is to send a radio message to Pan Am and to Ocean Station November. Survival after a forced landi
ng at sea depends to a great extent on rapid rescue, and the captain knows that it’s absolutely critical that all stations be advised as soon as any incident occurs that might develop into an actual emergency. Pilots know they may not have time to send an SOS after an emergency develops and are encouraged—even when in doubt—to call it an emergency, in an overabundance of caution.

  There is no doubt about what is happening now on Flight 7; this an emergency of the worst kind.

  Smoke slowly begins to fill the passenger cabin, and the Stratocruiser suddenly careens left, right, out of control at 10,000 feet, and quickly begins an accelerating descent to the ocean swells below. Even before the flight crew has time to notify the cabin crew, apron-clad stewardesses Alexander and McGrath realize that something is desperately wrong and immediately prepare the passengers for the trouble ahead.

  Passengers are ordered to remove their shoes and any sharp objects and to put out any cigarettes.

  “Loosen your belts and neckties. Tighten your seatbelts and put on your life jackets.”

  Brown has now rushed back into the pilot’s seat, and he struggles with the flight controls to keep the crippled Stratocruiser in the air. He sets his altimeter and considers dropping fuel from the Stratocruiser, but there isn’t time. There isn’t even enough time for him to put on his life jacket, and Wygant is too consumed with the emergency to think of saving his own life.

  The pilots brace their bodies against their seatbacks for stability and strength as they fight to keep Romance of the Skies from crashing into the Pacific. Brown locks his fingers around the control wheel as a cold sweat begins to drip on his face. An ocean ditching now seems the only option, because the plane is quickly losing altitude and Brown’s feverish attempts to keep it in the air are failing. He forces the plane slightly to the right and the descent accelerates.

  Brown glances to the left and below the cockpit and sees widely spaced, eight-foot ocean swells coming from the southwest. He convinces himself that if he can put the plane down in the middle of those swells he might have a chance to save some of the souls aboard. He remembers that the radioman on Ocean Station November had reported just a few minutes earlier that some of the waves were coming as far as thirteen seconds apart, and that gives him hope.

  But reality quickly gobbles up hope, and as the seconds tick by, the sinking airplane seems to have a mind of its own, acting like an out-of-control rocket. Captain Brown realizes that the afternoon sun setting in his face is creating a glare and will make an ocean ditching even more risky and complicated.

  But there is no alternative.

  “We’ve got no choice; we’re going in!” he shouts.

  Captain Brown speaks into his microphone the words that no pilot ever wants to utter:

  “AM DITCHING FLIGHT!”

  Engineer Pinataro is horrified. He studies his main instrument panel gauges and shouts the desperate situation to the pilots, who already are painfully aware that the plane is going down and there is little they can do about it. Pinataro turns on the plane’s emergency lights and begins to depressurize the aircraft.

  Fortenberry’s face turns pale, his body consumed by waves of fear. He prays for a miracle as the plane bounces up and down on its race to the ocean. It leans sharply. Left, then right. Vibrating violently now.

  Vacationing Pan Am pilot Robert Alexander is one of the first to notice the impending catastrophe. He attempts to rush from the rear of the plane to the cockpit to see if there is anything he can do to assist his colleagues.

  He staggers for balance, grabbing seat backs for support, and alerts his family and passengers along the way to prepare for ditching.

  “Tighten your belts! Put your heads in the pillows! It looks like we’re going down.”

  He never makes it to the cockpit.

  Stewardesses Alexander and McGrath, who have been trying to keep panic from spreading throughout the passenger cabin, know that their words have brought little reassurance to anyone, including themselves. Training is one thing. Real life is another.

  “If we are given the order to ditch, lean forward, put your head in your hands.”

  Passengers in the first-class section of the plane—in the rear of the aircraft—rush to put on their life jackets, but the task is nearly impossible, as the cabin has become an airborne roller coaster.

  In the forward, tourist section, Louis Rodriguez, who has been thinking about his dear mother and her impending funeral, now realizes his own life may be about to end. A life jacket is the last thing on his mind.

  “Holy Mary!” he shouts, but he is drowned out by those around him.

  He sinks his head, makes the sign of the cross, reaches into his pocket, and pulls out his crucifix. He kisses it, then holds it tightly as he closes his eyes and prays softly:

  “Please forgive me, Lord, for all I have done . . . To you, Lord, I lift up my soul. . . . Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. . . .” He repeats the words again and again as his seatmate, Commander Joseph Jones, tightens his safety belt and refuses to give in. He’s been in tough situations before—nothing like this, of course—but he tries to convey confidence.

  “We’re going to make it,” he tries to reassure Rodriguez. “We’re going to be OK.”

  Rodriguez smiles the slightest of grateful smiles but knows in his soul that the end is near—so near in fact that before he takes another breath the seventy-ton airliner plows into the brick-hard Pacific with such incredible force that only tiny bits of mangled metal and broken, ripped bodies remain.

  What’s left of Romance of the Skies gurgles to the bottom of the ocean.

  It is 6:04 p.m. and Flight 7 should be making a position report to Aeronautical Radio, Inc. (AIRINC), a communications network maintained by the scheduled airlines, but there is no word from the plane. Despite several attempts, AIRINC is unable to contact the crew, and informs Air Traffic Control in Honolulu:

  “For your information, we haven’t been able to raise Clipper Nine Four Four. His last contact time was at 5:04.”

  Air Traffic Control in Honolulu isn’t particularly concerned, because airplane crews occasionally get busy with other chores and check in a bit late. Nevertheless, ATC notes that a Japan Air DC-6B is near 944’s flight path and asks AIRINC to see if the pilot can make contact on VHF. While ground-to-air communications sometimes fail, plane-to-plane communications nearly always are successful.

  The pilot of Japan Air 23 tries to reach 944. Again and again. Nothing. He advises AIRINC, which dutifully notifies Pan American operations in Honolulu that 944 is overdue in making its position report.

  At 6:35 p.m.—about ninety minutes after the Coast Guard radioman had wished the Flight 7 crew a “pleasant flight” on into Honolulu—air traffic control sends out an urgent alert notice through Honolulu International Air Traffic Communications:

  “Clipper Nine Four Four, a Stratocruiser en route from San Francisco to Honolulu, last heard Honolulu AIRINC position two-nine-two north, one-four-one-three-five west 5:04. Primary frequency one-seven-nine-zero-six-point-five, secondary one-three-three-four-zero-four-point-five AB.”

  The alert notice goes out to all aircraft and all Navy, Air Force, and Coast Guard communications. Planes flying near Flight 7’s last reported position are asked to try to contact the missing plane on emergency frequencies. Approximately forty other aircraft are en route both ways between San Francisco and Honolulu and six are in the general radio range of Romance of the Skies. All are immediately asked by San Francisco and Honolulu ground stations for their assistance in locating the missing airliner.

  By now, everyone is keenly aware that something is wrong. This is no longer the case of a careless flight crew forgetting to make a position report. This is trouble.

  Still, there is no panic. The plane could be having radio problems, rendering it unable to transmit messages. If that is the case it won’t be long before all air traffic in Honolulu is shut down to clear airspace for a disabled aircraft.

  US Coast Guard reservi
st Dick Ferguson is on the mess deck of the Minnetonka playing cards with about ten other crewmembers when the men are ordered to the bridge and informed that N90944 has disappeared and that Honolulu has been unable to establish radio contact. Ferguson and several others are given binoculars and ordered to search the horizon for flares, but the only thing they spot is the Russian Sputnik crossing the early night sky.

  At 8:50 p.m. a Pan American dispatcher at Honolulu Airport passes word of the missing airliner over the company radio. His voice is calm and matter-of-fact:

  “Pan American Flight Seven is missing and overdue on a flight from San Francisco, California. There has been no radio contact with the pilot since 3 p.m., but the plane carries enough fuel to last until 1 a.m.”

  Ticket agents and ground crew at the Honolulu airport quietly circulate among those who have been patiently waiting at the gate for the arrival of Flight 7. Friends and family are calmly and professionally notified about what they already know: the flight is overdue, but they are encouraged not to worry. These things happen sometimes. Strangely, there is no immediate panic. No tears. No crying. But smiles fade instantly into tight faces, and worry grips everyone in the gate area. Within minutes the tenseness will turn to utter fear and then into dread and helplessness.

  About the same time, the phone rings in our Santa Clara home, where my mother has just gone to bed but is not yet asleep.

  Reluctantly, she picks it up and instinctively knows who is on the other end.

  “This is Pan Am calling, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is, Mrs. Fortenberry, it is. I’m afraid that Bill’s plane is overdue in Honolulu. It may be nothing but a radio problem, but I wanted to let you know.”

  “Oh my God! I felt like something was going to go wrong all day.”