They approached the harbor at Darwin late in the afternoon. Any emergency would force them to belly land the airplane onto the desert, and their flight would be over. During the entire flight to Darwin the crew didn't see a river big enough to set down the big flying boat should anything go wrong. Spinnifex and gum trees covered the landscape to the horizon. The next day, as they droned into the tropical morning the coastal jungle gradually gave way to great arid stretches of grassland and sand dunes. That $500 financed the rest of the trip all the way to New York."įord planned to take off and head straight northwest, across the Queensland desert for Darwin, and then fly across the Timor Sea to the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), hoping that Java and Sumatra remained in friendly hands. Since Rod Brown, our navigator, was the only one with a lock box and a key we put him in charge of the money. He said, 'I'll probably be shot for this,' but he went down to his bank on a Saturday morning, opened the vault and handed me five hundred American dollars. In Gladstone a young man who was a banker came up to me and out of the blue said, 'How are you fixed for money?' 'Well, we're broke!' I said. We had money enough for a trip to Auckland and back to San Francisco, but this was a different story. Captain Ford recounted, "I was wondering how we were going to pay for everything we were going to need on this trip. After offloading their bewildered passengers, the crew set about seeing to their primary responsibility, the Pacific Clipper. It was late in the afternoon when the dark green smudge of the Queensland coast appeared in the windscreen, and Ford began a gentle descent for landing in the harbor at Gladstone. The crew set to work fuelling the airplane, and exactly two hours later, fully fuelled and carrying a barrel of engine oil, the Clipper took off and pointed her nose south for Australia. Ford went ashore and sought out the Pan Am Station Manager. They maintained radio silence, landing in the harbor just as the sun was coming up. Late on the evening of December 16th, the blacked out flying boat lifted off from Auckland harbor and headed northwest through the night toward Noumea. They were to pick up the Pan American station personnel there, and then deliver them to safety in Australia. Their first assignment was to return to Noumea, back the way they had come over a week earlier. Facing a journey of over 30,000 miles, over oceans and lands that none of them had ever seen, they would have to do all their own planning and servicing, scrounging whatever supplies and equipment they needed all this in the face of an erupting World War in which political alliances and loyalties in many parts of the world were uncertain at best. For Ford and his crew, it was a daunting assignment. Finally they received word - they were to try and make it back to the United States the long way: around the world westbound. The crew haunted the overwhelmed communications room at the US Embassy in Auckland every day for a week waiting for a message from Pan Am headquarters in New York. ![]() Two hours later, the Pacific Clipper touched down smoothly on the waters of Auckland harbor. Ford ordered radio silence, and then posted lookouts in the navigator's blister. They realized that their route back to California was irrevocably cut, and there was no going back. The stunned crew looked at each other as the implications of the message began to dawn. ![]() Pearl Harbor had been attacked by Japanese war planes and had suffered heavy losses the United States was at war. His eyes widened as he quickly wrote the characters on the pad in front of him. Radio Operator John Poindexter clamped the headset to his ears as he deciphered the coded message. The calm serenity of the flight deck early on this spring morning was suddenly shattered by the crackling of the radio. With veteran captain Robert Ford in command, the Pacific Clipper, carrying 12 passengers and a crew of ten was just a few hours from landing in the harbor at Auckland, New Zealand. Six days out of her home port of San Francisco, the Boeing 314 was part of Pan American Airways' growing new service that linked the far corners of the Pacific Ocean. The first blush of dawn tinged the eastern sky and sent its rosy fingers creeping onto the flight deck of the huge triple-tailed flying boat as she cruised high above the South Pacific. Pan Am's Pacific Clipper Journey in World War 2 ( written 1999): The 'Round The World Saga of the "Pacific Clipper" by John A.
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