Sojourners of the Sky (20 page)

“We just passed sixty-one north, seventeen degrees west, and we’re on course to the Gomup intersection. Here are the times and ETAs, John,” announced Ed. “We’re going to be a little too far west to see the Shetland Islands, but the Faeroe Islands are practically off our left wing now. I’ve got the beacon at Belfast tuned up. You can crosscheck that with the Benbecula beacon on the number two radio to identify Gomup when we get closer. And don’t forget to call Prestwick.”

“Thank you, Ed,” said John. “I’m tuning them in on the number one radio as we speak.”

“Now in case you guys didn’t know, I am a vampire. Therefore, since the sun is up, I shall lay down on one of these bunks and take a nap. If you get lost, don’t call me,” joked Ed.

Lars stood to allow Ed to pass and said, “Captain, I’m going to take a bathroom break. I’ll be right back.”

“Take your time, Lars. If something bad happens, I’ll wake G.R.,” said Charles.

The shot hit Lars right in the back. He knew he hadn’t heard the last of all the mistakes he’d made on this trip. Whether Charles intended to have a heart-to-heart with him later or simply turn him in to the front office was uncertain. All he could do was to wait and see. He closed the cockpit door behind him, but had to stop for a second to allow his eyes to adjust to the darkness. With most of the window shades in the cabin closed, the rays of the sun had not yet reached their passengers.

The sun rose rapidly in the sky. And with the sun in Charles’s eyes, he felt newly invigorated. He took the remnants of his newspaper and stuck the pages in the front window to block the glare. He wasn’t the least bit concerned with covering his windshield since there were virtually no other airplanes in the vicinity…that he knew of.

Charles spent the next few minutes staring out his side window, studying the treeless rocks known as the Faroe Islands. He tried to imagine what life would be like living on one of those wind-swept, grass covered dots in the middle of the ocean. He momentarily allowed himself to feel grateful for what he had.

For John, seeing the sun made him feel even more tired, especially since his chance for a nap never came. He told himself to stay alert, knowing that he simply could not afford any more screw-ups. John was aware that he was skating on thin ice--he just didn’t know how thin.

Moments after the islands passed off to their stern, Charles decided that it was a good time to contemplate the events of the flight and organize his thoughts.

“You have the airplane, John. I’m going to close my eyes to ready myself for our arrival,” stated Charles.

“Sure thing, Charles,” said John, while thinking that he too could use a little nap.

Charles sat in the left seat of his DC6 with his arms folded and his eyes closed. Though he may have appeared to his copilot to be fast asleep, he was actually deep in thought. He shook his head slightly, acknowledging that there was no way he would accept all of the blame for everything that went wrong during the flight: climbing to the wrong altitude, having an underling strike a passenger, taking off from Iceland without a clearance and then losing three engines on climb-out. Not to mention having one of the pilots go nuts, run off the airplane and disappear into a blizzard. Of course, the only reason they were in Iceland in the first place was to offload a dead passenger. Those were the things he was aware of; he had no idea what else there might be. The business with Lars forgetting to dilute the oil was an oversight, he knew that. Yes, it was a major oversight, but he’d been in the airline business long enough to know that people make mistakes, especially when they’re tired. A stern warning seemed like the best course of action in regard to their new flight engineer. As far as John was concerned, well, that was a different matter.

Charles knew that all he had to do was pin the blame on John for most of the unusual events and his probationary copilot would be history. It was the easiest course to follow. And since retirement was edging ever closer, he preferred to keep his job and his retirement plan intact: no fuss, no muss. At the same time, John and his son had been close friends. And as a result of that friendship, he’d known John for many years. Yes, John did seem to get some tough breaks since leaving high school, but that is not in any way unusual. Of course, he knew John didn’t see it that way. It was clear that John had chosen to view himself as a victim. Charles didn’t want to be the one to ruin the young man’s career, but at the same time he certainly wasn’t willing to take the fall. Charles was well-aware that when the plane landed in London there would be phone calls, yelling, threats and the gnashing of teeth. But ultimately, he knew that he had to be the one who came out on top. That, he concluded, was non-negotiable.

It wasn’t all that many years earlier when Charles himself was a new hire at Pan Am. After training, he found himself assigned to one of the new flying boats. Back then, the pilots didn’t wear stripes on their sleeves. Those fancy gold braids didn’t come along until after the war. He smiled, thinking about how spiffy he looked in his dark jacket and white hat. He was the envy of all. Charles then allowed his mind to slip back to his second trip across the Atlantic. And that dreadful memory instantly brought a frown to his tired face.

Boeing 314

Pan Am’s Capetown Clipper

Courtesy of the John Wegg Collection

Pan Am Boeing 314

Courtesy of the John Wegg Collection

Twenty

The Capetown Clipper

I
t was the winter of 1942, a few weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The United States was rapidly transforming into a nation at war and Charles William Pratt was a new hire with Pan American World Airways. Too young for the Great War and gainfully employed with an airline at the start of World War II, Charles served his time as the third officer on board one of Pan Am’s ocean-crossing flying boats.

The war department enlisted many of Pan Am’s long range flying boats during the war, along with some of their pilots. Rather than take a leave of absence to join the fighting, Charles and numerous others were allowed to complete their military service as employees of Pan Am. With a nine-year-old son at home, Charles was more than happy to accept his honorary rank of lieutenant junior grade in the United States Navy.

In 1942 things moved rapidly, much to the benefit of Charles Pratt. His first assignment after completion of initial training was as a crew member on board the Boeing 314, the largest flying boat in Pan Am’s fleet.

The Boeing Model 314 was equipped with four Wright 1600 horsepower engines. It was 106 feet long and had a wingspan of 152 feet. Built to carry as many as seventy-five paying passengers on the shorter routes, the airplane could carry forty passengers and a crew of ten on a flight leg of just over 3,600 miles. With a cruise speed of one hundred and eighty miles per hour, the B314 was a modern-day marvel. Widely accepted as the queen of the air, the giant Boeing was a true spectacle of mankind’s accomplishments.

As a third officer, Charles was considered a pilot in training. When he wasn’t busy performing menial tasks, he was expected to practice navigation under the tutelage of the second officer. His very first trip across the Atlantic Ocean from New York to Lisbon, Portugal was like a dream come true. The three-legged journey could not have gone smoother. Treated like royalty on his layovers in Bermuda and the Azores, he felt like he’d died and gone to heaven. His second trip, however, did not go quite as well.

The eastbound flight went much like his trip the previous month, with stopovers in Bermuda and the Port of Horta in the Azores, before continuing on to Lisbon. This time, however, due to the strong winter winds, the westbound flight was scheduled to depart Lisbon and then fly south to Bolama, Guinea, on the west coast of Africa. Then after a brief layover, they would continue west to Trinidad, an island off the coast of Venezuela, before turning north to New York.

After alighting in a river and docking in the sheltered lagoon at Bolama, Charles and the crew spent the night trying to sleep under mosquito netting in hot, unventilated hotel rooms. By the next morning their second officer, Robert Lange, had become quite ill with fever and chills. They found out much later that what they all suspected was true: He’d contracted malaria. The crew decided that the safest thing to do was to have him stay with the airplane and seek medical help in Port of Spain, Trinidad. It would be up to the novice, Charles Pratt, to navigate the flight across the mid-Atlantic.

At a distance of just over three thousand miles, it was at the time an unheard of distance to fly non-stop. Even some seasoned Pan Am crews considered the route to be too long, especially since the entire leg was over open ocean.

The Capetown Clipper departed a few minutes after sunup. The giant flying boat climbed to eight thousand feet and headed west. The flight plan indicated that they would pass a few hundred miles south of the Cape Verde Islands. They would never see the Cape Verdes of course, so when the coast of Portuguese Guinea passed beneath their wings, they would not sight land again until the four-engine Boeing approached the Windward Islands of the Caribbean. It would be a difficult leg to navigate for any man, but especially so for someone as new to trans-ocean navigation as Charles.

With one less crew member, everyone was forced to remain at their positions without a break for multiple hours at a time. Captain Lorenson allowed each pilot, flight engineer and radio operator to take a short break every four hours, but because Charles was so new he could not be left unsupervised at any position other than as a fill-in radio operator. Since his main job was to serve as the ship’s navigator, and Third Officer Pratt was much too inexperienced to be fully-trusted with such an all-important task, the two remaining pilots double-checked his work every few hours.

The navigator’s station on the B314 was located a few yards behind the captain’s seat on the upper deck. The cockpit was indeed immense, quite well lit and surprisingly quiet. It was so tranquil, cockpit communications could usually be conducted using a normal tone of voice. It was also big enough that each work station was somewhat isolated from the others. This gave Charles a feeling of autonomy, allowing him to do things as he saw fit.

Though the Capetown Clipper’s flight plan kept them relatively close to the equator, the headwinds turned out to be much higher than expected. The flight plan specified that they would be airborne for a little over seventeen hours, but with the wind fighting their progress, they were forced to accept a significant decrease in their planned speed across the ground. Nine hours into the flight, Charles was forced to give the captain and copilot the bad news: They would not arrive in Trinidad until after nightfall. Though the Boeing 314 was capable of landing at night, Pan Am generally planned for their over-water flights to takeoff and land during daylight hours for safety’s sake.

Owing to the fact that their third officer had proved to be quite adept at aerial navigation, a little over twelve hours into their long, arduous journey, the other pilots began to let their guard down. It proved to be a mistake.

The Capetown Clipper was a few hundred miles northeast of the Brazilian coastline when darkness finally overtook them. The pilots watched with silent apprehension as the sun ducked below the horizon, each aware of the risks that lay ahead. An hour and a half later, the Purser came to the cockpit to inform the captain that Robert Lange had taken a turn for the worse; their second officer was unconscious and in need of immediate medical attention.

Captain Lorenson instantly turned toward Charles and yelled, “Charles, plot us a course from our present position direct to San Juan, Puerto Rico, and do it right now! I’m going to start a turn in that direction.” He then informed the flight engineer that he was going to full power and wanted a fuel update every fifteen minutes.

Charles had of course been trained to navigate by the stars, but he had yet to actually do any of it in real life. His previous flights had all been during the day. Daylight navigation involved computing the winds, then adding or subtracting the magnetic variation to derive a heading for the pilots to fly. To determine their position, Charles would measure the sun’s inclination above the horizon to calculate their line of latitude, and then use time and speed to compute their longitudinal location. It was mostly drawing lines on a chart and consulting graphs and tables, but celestial navigation was an entirely different proposition.

Charles did the best he could. He sighted three stars, and then after consulting a book of predicted star locations for the various times of day, month and year, he drew some lines on a chart. The intersection of the lines on the map would pinpoint their location. The neophyte navigator’s problem was that he could not get all three lines to intersect. More of a word man than a numbers man, Charles, though good at math, had never really mastered the decimal system.

After repeatedly looking through the small glass dome in the ceiling of the airplane and sighting three known stars with his bubble octant, he still had no idea where they were. He simply could not translate what he was seeing onto paper. Hoping he would eventually figure out what he was doing wrong, Charles used their previous course and winds as a guide to plot any new heading changes. Unfortunately, an all-important fact that Charles failed to notice was that the wind speed had increased significantly out of the west. The novice to celestial navigation never realized that the strong winds were pushing the Capetown Clipper further and further out to sea!

As the junior flight officer paced the cockpit scouring his brain for answers, he was hoping no one would notice that his armpits were dripping wet with anxiety. Regardless of what he tried, Charles simply could not figure out where he kept going wrong. He knew everyone was counting on him to help them find San Juan, yet he was reluctant to tell the captain that he was confused. The other pilots had come to trust him; they had faith that he would find the right path. His colleagues had come to rely on his skill and he liked how that felt. He just could not bring himself to admit that he’d let them down. He knew his job would be at risk if he told anyone that he had single-handedly managed to get them lost over the Atlantic Ocean. He wanted to fess up, but he couldn’t. His ego had him in a stranglehold.

Charles continued to update the heading every quarter hour by adding or subtracting a few degrees from their previous heading, hoping that that would be enough. It wasn’t until the radio operator picked up the radio beacon at Pointe-A-Pitre, Guadeloupe that Charles was forced to come clean.

The radio operator called Charles over and pointed to the needle saying, “This needle should be pointing a little to the left of our nose, but as you can see it’s pointing practically off our left wing. This heading we’re on looks like it’s taking us toward Bermuda. I suppose it might also take us to New York, but we’d be out of gas long before we got there.”

“Could it be night-time effect?” asked Charles, suggesting a common phenomenon known to make radio compass bearings unreliable.

“Not with this signal strength. Look, it’s not wavering at all and I can hear a strong ID in my headphones. I suggest you recheck your math, Charles,” he said.

Charles stood over the navigators’ table anguishing over what to do. When he overheard the Purser providing the captain with another update regarding Second Officer Lange’s condition, he was finally convinced that the jig was up. “Captain,” he uttered with a quivering voice, “I think I need some help here.”

*

It still pained Charles to contemplate the memory. He was a fool and allowed his self-esteem to put everyone at risk. They were indeed far off course and it took the skill of every man in the cockpit to get them safely to San Juan.

He recalled watching Captain Lorenson biting his lip as he reduced power on the flying boat’s four engines to begin their final descent into the low-hanging clouds. The air in the cockpit was so silently tense--other than the flight engineer announcing how little fuel was remaining--Charles could practically hear a pin drop.

Charles watched his captain’s every move, and every nuance in his facial expression. He studied the altimeter as it unwound, quietly advising the pilots that the surface of the water was approaching. He knew his captain was timing their descent in his mind. Only he would know when the boundary of safety was behind them and that the time had come to go around. Except, even Charles was aware that going around was not an option. It was then that he fully realized just how badly he’d failed.

Charles couldn’t remember exactly, but he knew the airplane was less than fifty feet above the waves when it finally broke clear of the clouds. As focused as Charles was, he never even saw the water as it drew near, but he felt it as Captain Lorenson set the Capetown Clipper down as if he’d done it a thousand times just like that.

The flight landed in the dark of night with engines that were practically running on fumes. Charles knew that it was the skill of others that enabled Robert Lange to survive. Though he feared the worst, neither Second Officer Lange nor any of the other crew members seemed to harbor any ill feelings toward their bubble-headed third officer.

With his eyes still closed and his head back, Charles shook his head, lamenting his younger self and his giant sense of self-worth. He then recalled the next day. During their layover in Puerto Rico when no one else was around, his captain gave him a full dressing down. Charles had never heard a man swear so much. When the screaming and cursing was over, Captain Lorenson’s tone softened.

Captain Lorenson’s words echoed in Charles’s mind as he contemplated his own problems with John Tacker. “We are often far from home with no one to look after us. All we have is each other. Every one of us has a duty to watch everyone else’s back, whether we are on the airplane or the layover. When we are at work, we are a family. And as such, you have an obligation to each and every one of us sharing the airplane with you. We must always work as one.” Then when he was almost done talking, he added softly, “I forgive you. And I suspect that one day you will no doubt be called upon to do the same for a fellow crew member as I have done for you. See that you do. As far as I’m concerned, the matter is closed and I will not speak of it again. If I hear anything, I will bear the brunt. This was my fault and my responsibility.”

Charles attended Captain Lorenson’s retirement party a number of years later and thanked him in private for teaching him what being part of a crew really meant. The guidance he received from his superior also taught him what kind of captain he wanted to be when the time came.