She was without doubt the most famous—and romantic—single commercial
aircraft ever to take wing, an icon of a shrinking world, and an honest-to-god movie star in
her own right. It all began on November
22, 1935 when the Pan American World
Airways China Clipper lifted out of the water off of Alameda, California with a cargo of airmail bound for Manila in
the Philippines.
Heavily
laden with cargo and fuel the
mighty four-engine Martin M-130 struggled
to gain altitude. A scheduled
loop around San Francisco for
the benefit of an eager press and newsreel cameras had to be scrubbed and pilot Edwin Musick realized he could not get over San Francisco-Oakland Bridge, then still under construction, so he dramatically flew under the span. It was a rocky
start, but the plane was on her way.
It was epic, arduous and took seven days with lay-overs for fuel and to rest the crew at Honolulu, Midway Island,
Wake Island, and Guam.
Setting down in Manila Bay
with her cargo of 110,000 pieces of mail was cause for national celebration. The Clipper was soon in regular scheduled service and also carrying passengers.
Pan Am President Juan Trippe charts out trans-oceanic routes for his flying boats. |
The flight was a long time coming. It was the vision of Pan Am founder and President
Juan Trippe, a swashbuckling Wall
Street investor turned aviation
entrepreneur. After earlier forays into the infant industry, Trippe founded the Aviation Corporation of the Americas
which opened Latin American air mail
service with a flight from Key West to
Havana in 1927 with Musick at the
controls. He saw the future of international commercial aviation was
in flying boats and put Pan Am’s resources
into helping develop and put them in operation. With planes like the Sikorsky S-42 which made trans-Atlantic
service feasible. With well-established routes to South America, Africa, and Europe,
which made Pan Am the unofficial United States flag carrier, Trippe
turned his gaze east.
But Asia was far away and regular service would require a new, larger, and more
powerful aircraft. Trippe commissioned a new plane from the Glenn L. Martin Company of Baltimore, Maryland. The builder designated the new planes as the M-30 Martin Ocean Transports, all-metal
flying boats with streamlined
aerodynamics and four powerful Pratt
& Whitney radial engines. The
planes could accommodate 36 day or
18 overnight sleeper passengers and
carried a flight crew of 7 plus cabin attendants for passenger
service. Three were built for Pan Am.
The China Clipper was first built and was test flown on December 30, 1934.
It was delivered to the Pan Am fleet on October 9, 1944. Her sister ships were the Philippine
Clipper and the Hawaii Clipper.
Meanwhile Trippe sent Musick, now
Pan Am’s chief pilot on two flights
in a Sikorsky S-42 to scout routes to the Philippines and from Manila to
China. Musick was then one of the most famous aviators in the world holding more than 10 records for long distance and flying boats.
He was also, by far, the most
experienced pilot in the world having racked up nearly 2 million
trans-oceanic air miles.
Pan Am Chief Pilot Captain Edwin Musick, the most experienced aviator in the world, mapped out the Trans-Pacific route and flew the inaugural service of the China Clipper.
With the route laid out, Musick was the easy choice for senior captain on the inaugural flight of the China Clipper. The rest of the crew were also respected veterans and included First Officer R.O.D. Sullivan and navigator Fred Noonan, later famed for doing the same duty on Amelia Earhart’s doomed round the world flight.
Weekly
passenger flights across the Pacific began in October
1936 with Hawaii Clipper. Connecting service from Manila to Hong Kong began in 1937 using S-42’s
with the Clipper class Martins taking
over that leg of the route a year later.
All three of the Martins flew these routes, but in the public’s eye they
were all the China Clipper.
A lobby card for Warner Bros. 1936 China Clipper starring Pat O'Brien, Humphrey Bogart, Henry B. Walthall, Ross Alexander and, of course, The China Clipper herself.
Public fascination with the Clipper was so high that Warner Bros./First National Pictures rushed
into production with a film China Clipper starring Pat O’Brian as a thinly disguised Trippe single
minded and ruthless in his aim to establish trans-Pacific service no matter
the cost. The turgid melodrama is noted for an early non-gangster role for Humphrey
Bogart as a safety conscious pilot
at odds with O’Brian who eventually saves the day by flying the plane safely
through a storm and into a mail contract. The film used much newsreel and stock footage
of the real China Clipper, including
dramatic footage of passing under the Bay Bridge.
The China Clipper was featured in other films including 1937 comedy Fly-Away
Baby and the 1939 adventure film Secret Service of the Air and
referenced in several others. Later Alec Baldwin would play Juan Trippe in
the bio-flick of his rival Howard Hughes in The
Aviator starring Leonardo
DiCaprio. It also figured in radio
serials and popular pulp fiction.
The China Clipper and her sister ships as well as the famous pilot of
that first flight all met disastrous
ends, a reminder of how dangerous
long distance air travel still was even in the most advanced aircraft.
On January 28, 1938 Musick and his
crew of six died in the crash of the S-42 Samoan Clipper near Pago Pago, American Samoa, on a cargo and survey flight to Auckland, New Zealand. A few months later in July the Hawaii Clipper disappeared between Guam and Manila with the loss of nine crew and
six passengers.
The Philippine Clipper survived a Japanese
air raid on Wake Island, an
event depicted in the 1942 film Wake Island. Pressed into wartime service for the Navy
along with the China Clipper, she was
lost in January 1943 between Ukiah
and Boonville, California on a
flight from Honolulu killing Pacific
submarine force commander Admiral Robert H. English and 18
others.
That left the original China Clipper the sole survivor of the
fleet. Released from Navy service she was assigned to the inaugural flight of Pan Am service
between Miami and Leopoldville in the Belgian Congo via Rio de Janeiro. The plane
was attempting to touch down at Port of
Spain, Trinidad with an inexperienced
pilot at the controls but under the supervision
of a veteran pilot. After aborting one approach the pilot misjudged
his altitude and came in nose down
hundreds of yards short of his designated
landing zone. The plane hull smashed on impact, took
water, and quickly sank. All 28 on board
were killed.
Trippe would go on to lead Pan Am
for decades introducing new innovations
like the Boing 747, workhorse of international aviation. He died in 1981 at the age of 81. Mercifully he did not live to see the ignominious failure of what had been
one of the world’s premier airlines
a decade later.
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