Fantastic Trippe

[DaveLTB 48]

I wonder if you'll be able to find Pan Am posters for the whole voyage... We shall see :-)

I really look forward to them.

 

Dave Britzius

(Cape Town)

[MM 137]

Thanks for the interest, Dave. Maybe not everywhere...but close.

[MM 137]

RTW80 Leg 13. Singapore to Saigon. WSAP-VVTS.
2017-11-01

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We leave Singapore and fly over the South China Sea, with our destination Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City or HCMC but often referred to as Saigon). In the late 1950s, Saigon was the capital of the Republic of Vietnam. For a few years, it was more-or-less at peace.

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Over the South China Sea

For a thousand years, the northern part of Vietnam had been ruled by China. But in 938 Ngo Quyen defeated the Chinese to free Vietnam and usher in a golden era of dynasties and the flowering of Buddhism. Eventually, the Vietnamese dynasties extended control southward with one set of lords ruling the north and another set the south.

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Rice paddies of the Mekong Delta. We're not in Kansas anymore...

During a series of nineteenth century wars, France colonized Vietnam which, combined with former Siamese territories Cambodia and Laos, became French Indochina. Throughout the colonial era, nationalists resisted with several uprisings. After World War II that nationalist movement in the form of the Viet Minh lead by Ho Chi Minh, eventually defeated the French, with the endpoint marked by famous battle of Dien BIen Phu in 1954.

The country was divided with the north governed by Ho Chi Minh's northern nationalists, allied with China and the USSR, and the south governed by Ngo Dinh Diem's non-communist nationalist forces, allied with the United States. So during the time slice of our Pan Am flight, Saigon would have been the capital of a newly independent nation that was trying to find its way.

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On finals for Tan Son Nhut

After the Geneva convention, Saigon's population swelled with refugees from the north. (Catholics, especially, feared reprisals as tens of thousands had been killed in previous uprisings.) The population was about 500,000 after WWII and 1,400,000 in 1960.

French influence is apparent in the spacious layout of the town, which looks more European than Asiatic. The boulevards are lined with magnificent trees whose branches, meeting overhead, form a leafy tunnel. There are many squares and parks…including the botanical and zoological gardens.
 — N.V.P. in Britannica 1964.

To get a feel for that time, you might enjoy this set of rare amateur film clips from the 1940s and 1950s. And in addition you might like this photographic collection of Saigon life during 1960-1961.

Shortly afterwards, in 1959, Ho Chi Minh actively initiated the Viet Cong guerilla insurrection aimed at unseating the Diem government and unifying Vietnam under one government. By the mid-1960s, the United states sent troops in force to buttress the Republic of Vietnam – in a strategic move to contain the spread of Soviet and Chinese communism. The second Indochina War was a complicated matter with lots to understand about how the two sides waged war. In the end, in 1975, the North Vietnamese prevailed – their victory probably due to their far superior commitment to the goal of unification.

After the war, up to 300,000 southerners were sent to "reeducation camps" with the associated torture, disease and starvation. The new government pursued a textbook communist program including a planned economy as well as collectivized farms and factories. Overall, the result was social chaos, triple digit inflation, and economic stagnation.

In 1986, the old guard gave way to a new generation that implemented as set of free-market reforms termed Doi Moi. The goal was a "socialist-oriented market economy." (This move paralleled Den Xiaoping's turn to market-economics in late-1970s China.) Almost immediately, "street-level" capitalists sprung up in the urban areas. Deeper structural change came more slowly, but eventually Vietnam started to develop its economy. Growth in both agricultural and industrial production yielded exports and it attracted incoming foreign investment. (Just as in China.)

Vietnam is a nation of 93 million (comparable to Germany's 82 million) who generated a 2016 GDP per capita of US$2,185. (For Ho Chi Minh City, the 2014 GDP per capita was $5,100.) While these absolute levels remain low for Asia's developing economies, various forecasts see the economy growing quickly over the next decade. As one might expect, this rapid growth has produced an increase in inequality as some people prosper and others get left behind. However, the Vietnamese socialist philosophy has minimized the incidence of real poverty so that the overall consequences have not been quite so unequal as is often the case at this stage of economic development.

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Saigon on the move

An interesting symbol of this rise in the standard of living is the mode of personal transport in Saigon (and elsewhere in Vietnam). As recently as the 1990s, this was a city of bicycles. Today there are a few Rolls-Royces (a number of millionaires have profited from the opening of the economy). And there are increasing numbers of compact automobiles. But most noticeable is the swarm of motorcycles or scooters that characterizes Saigon in motion.

Totally mesmerizing to watch, they buzz about their business, inches apart; streaming down avenues, weaving, wending, intertwining their way across town and performing hair’s breadth manoeuvres at every cross-road.  Young women wearing peaked helmets sit straight-backed at the traffic lights. Families ride pillion – four up plus baby.  A wardrobe passes by.  The blasting of horns and the screech of brakes is constant, the air is fume-filled and the traffic relentless. But it’s fascinating.
 – Suzanne Jones, The Travelbunny

Today the city has about 8.5 million residents for whom the local press reports something like 7.4 million motorbikes. Officials understand that these numbers generate real problems but they also realize that regulation is not likely because people need and love their bikes. The good news is that fatalities have decreased in recent years. (Watch the videos and see if you understand why.) People may aspire to owning an automobile, but they realistically aim to own a Vietnam-built 150cc Honda Winner machine.

These scooters are ubiquitous – and they are used in many different transportation roles. Here are some photographs of the varied ways in which the "scooter" is put to use. Only in Vietnam – SCOOTERS (2:08).

I would highly recommend watching a few minutes of this live "you-are-there" Scooter ride in Vietnam, Saigon (HCMC). The actual ride starts at about 2:00 because the driver has trouble starting the bike. The entire video is long (31:15) but watching a few minutes gives a good feel for the experience of everyday life on the streets of contemporary HCMC. (Full screen, sound high!)

Or you might prefer Home to Work (14:19) from 2011. A rather faster ride with a different feel. The fellow at the handlebars knows how to handle the traffic and aims to show his skill. (The workplace destination is the Vietnam campus of Australia's prestigious Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.) And you will be pleased to note that the filmmaker survived long enough to make this update Work to Home (16:53) three years later (2014). [He now has grey streaks in his beard.] Note the increased incidence of actual traffic lights. And note also that HCMC's number of motorcycles has increased about 25 percent since the first film report. If you have the interest, this is terrific stuff!

And perhaps this film of a more gentle across town trip that features an American visitor's informative commentary on motorcycles in Vietnam. (Not quite the same immediacy of experience, but lots of facts on the industry in Vietnam.) Alternatively, for an entertaining production that is vaguely about biking in Vietnam, you might enjoy the Top Gear Vietnam Special (1:08:34). If you are thinking about getting started, recommended would be a semi-automatic Honda Blade here and a few tips here.

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Lots of interesting people at the mid-century Tan Son Nhut passenger terminal

We land at Tan Son Nhut (or, after 1975, Tan Son Nhat). The original airport, little more than a landing strip, was built by the French in the 1920’s near the village of Tan Son Nhat far outside of the city limits. It was then adapted as a commercial airport to connect with France and the rest of Southeast Asia – the first Air France service to Paris began in 1933. The field was militarized during WWII and then used by the French colonial forces for transports such as the Douglas C-47 and Beech Model 18. By the mid-1950s, the airport featured a runway measuring 7,220 feet and became the leading airport for South Vietnam. Tan Son Nhut served both commercial traffic and the military aircraft of the Republic of Vietnam.

Later, during the height of the American involvement here, a second concrete runway and a radar-equipped tower were added. By the mid-1960s, Tan Son Nhut was one of the world's busiest airports with a chaotic mix of military and civilian traffic.

After the "American War", the airport was converted back to civilian use and, over the years, has received major restorations (2000 and 2007) that have established a revamped Domestic Terminal and a new multi-story International Terminal. Tan Son Nhat International Airport is the busiest in Vietnam, handling over 32 million passengers a year (well above the official 25 million capacity). By the early 2020's, Ho Chi Minh City is planned to add a new international airport at Long Thanh that will double and then triple the overall capacity of the airport system.

[Thanks to Mike Stevens for his "Indochina 1962" package that includes this historic version of Tan Son Nhut.]

Summary:
Date: 2017-11-02
Route: WSAP-VVTS
Aircraft: L-049 [A2A]
Leg Distance: 591nm
Flight Time: 2:27
Total Distance: 9193nm
Total Flight Time: 33:33

[MM 137]

RTW80 Leg 14. Saigon to Hong Kong. VVTS-VHHX.
2017-11-04

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On to Hong Kong. (This poster was shown over the Pan Am desk at Paya Lebar, Singapore, in the 1957 documentary Singapore, the Lion City. Continuity!)

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Departing through stormy weather out of Saigon

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Above dark clouds and the South China Sea

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Macau in the distance as well as the Hapag Lloyd container ship Hong Kong Express that we saw at Suez

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At the Checkerboard, we initiate the famous right turn into Rwy 13

We land at Hong Kong Kai Tak on the IGS Approach to Rwy 13. This is the classic approach that real world (and simulation) pilots play back in their minds. Here is a slide show with comments by a long time Hong Kong pilot, "you never forgot your arrival." These are a few of the classic films: classic cockpit view, Cathay Pacific hometown confidence, clear view, a crosswind landing, and the British Airways Concorde. For some great historic film of the airport, go to the RTW80 post of our flying colleague Jeff.

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Flaps down with Kowloon and Hong Kong in the background

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Door open and ready for servicing. HAECO in the background is Kai Tak's huge multi-story cargo facility.

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Here is the Martin M-130 China Clipper in 1939. It was in the harbor alongside Kai Tak that the grand Pan American flying boats landed to connect San Francisco and the United States with Hong Kong and Asia. More on this in a subsequent flight.

Hong Kong is a relatively small and beautiful location, with a spectacular central city and harbor surrounded by forest-covered islands. The people are imaginative and facile with technology. Ah…Drones. Here are two short takes, each with a different style: Hong Kong Aerial Shot by Drone and Drone View of Different Hong Kong. Cool artistic view of fast paced big city metropolis, Hong Kong Timelapse.

For a full length and beautifully filmed promotional "documentary" about Hong Kong, see Hong Kong Star of China.

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A romantic memory of Hong Kong in this Pan Am poster

Hong Kong has gone through many twists and turns in its rise to the top rank of the world's greatest cities. The 1841 British insistence on selling opium to the Chinese generated the two Opium Wars that made Hong Kong a colony – and also sparked the Chinese to develop a nationalist commitment toward contemporary ideas and modernization. Through the next century, Chinese families came to Hong Kong and eventually flourished in the free trade environment created by the British. Many subsequently built enormous fortunes in commerce and finance. The Japanese occupation that devastated Hong Kong (and cut its population by two-thirds) indirectly led to a norm of equality that served the city well. The 1949 Communist revolution took the Chinese market from Hong Kong but Shanghai's displaced workers and industrialists moved to Hong Kong to create a manufacturing miracle. And the great Chinese economic revolution of the last quarter century, felt most intimately in the explosive growth in nearby Shenzhen, eliminated Hong Kong as a manufacturing dynamo. But Hong Kong has become rich as a financial and commercial facilitator of that same Chinese growth. If you are interested, here is an excellent hour-long History of Hong Kong 1841 to 1997.

Hong Kong is relatively small and short of space. The society has gone "upwards" with most people living in high rise apartment buildings. For a feel for what this means for ordinary people, see this two-bedroom apartment and then a couple of micro-apartments. You might prefer something with better views or with a touch of elegance. Of course, Hong Kong is one of the World's top millionaires-per-capita cities.

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Our passengers deserve the very best. They will stay at the classic Peninsula Hotel. A James Bond standard where you can still get High Tea. Not quite the dominant hotel in the city, it nevertheless promises something special, including local transportation, and perhaps the Peninsula Suite.

[Hong Kong Kai Tak is FlyTampa's beautiful rendition in P3D. This represents a relatively recent time slice of Hong Kong, rather that of the 1950s. Terrific work.)


Summary:
Date: 2017-11-04
Route: VVTS-VHHX
Aircraft: L-049 [A2A]
Leg Distance: 815nm
Flight Time: 3:31
Total Distance: 8998 nm
Total Flight Time: 37:04

[Jeff W 112]

Great selection of drone videos, I particularly like the time lapse.  The Peninsula Hotel does indeed look special.  Very classy.  Nice airport shuttle service too.

[MM 137]

RTW80 Leg 15. Hong Kong to Shanghai. VHHX-ZSAM-ZSFZ-ZSSS.
2017-11-09

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On to Shanghai.

We shall take this opportunity to tip our cap to Pan American's role in the rise of Chinese aviation. We shall fly a CNAC (China National Aviation Corporation) liveried DC-2 along the coast from Hong Kong to Shanghai via Xiamen and Fuzhou (Amoy and Foochow in the 1930s). CNAC formed in the late 1920s as a partnership between the Chinese government (55 percent ownership) and Curtiss Aircraft (45 percent) as part of the post-Lindbergh boom throughout the world.

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Say goodbye to Hong Kong

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Passing Bias Bay, the home of piracy through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In early 1933, Pan American bought the Curtiss interest as part of Juan Trippe's overall strategy to span the Pacific Ocean. He already had in motion plans to purchase powerful seaplanes (Martin's M-130 and Boeing's B314) and build island bases (at Midway, Wake Island, and Guam). But he knew that the ultimate Asian destination had to be Shanghai – then the "Paris of the East" and the financial capital of Asia. So he had to gain access to China for his effort to succeed.

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34-year-old Juan Trippe on the Time magazine cover in 1933. Equally young Time publisher Henry Luce was a strong proponent of Chiang Kai-shek with whose government Trippe owned CNAC.

A partnership with the government-owned CNAC seemed an obvious tactic. The matter was made more difficult because (by treaty) any Chinese concession to an American firm for landing rights in China would have to be made available to Japan as well. And, Japan having invaded China, the Chinese government would not comply. In the end, Trippe's team (including Harold Bixby who was instrumental in funding Charles Lindbergh's flight) obtained Pan Am and CNAC landing rights in British Hong Kong. This was the final link that allowed Trippe to transport passengers and airmail from San Francisco to Shanghai and thus realize his Trans-Pacific dream.

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Landing at the island city Xiamen, the ancestral home of many overseas Chinese

Our route along the coast traces the very first route that Pan Am pilots flew in 1934 (in a CNAC liveried Sikorsky S-38). This route made the CNAC partnership a key for Pan American's success.

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Over the mountains of Zhejiang province. Historically, these mountains and hills divided the northern and central provinces from the far south and east of Canton and Xiamen and Fuzhou. At the time of CNAC, modern aviation promised to unite a China that had so long been divided by distance and topography.

When introduced, the DC-2 (and later the DC-3) were seen as symbolic of the very best of modern air transportation. (When the DC-2 was announced as having arrived in Shanghai, ticket sales tripled overnight.)

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Hangzhou Bay over which CNAC lost its first two S-38s due to the region's persistent fog. The airline had yet to build the radio systems and basing infrastructure that later characterized Pan American's success.

The CNAC Douglas fleet was involved in the famous DC-2 ½ incident early in 1941. Briefly, a company DC-3 on the ground at a grass strip in Szechuan province was attacked by Japanese warplanes and had a wing blown off. CNAC could not afford to lose the aircraft and did not have surplus DC-3 parts. So the Hong Kong Kai Tak maintenance staff had to figure out what to do. Employing Whitehorse as an inspiration, they designed a way to attach a DC-2 wing to the larger DC-3. They then air-shipped the wing to the remote airfield and their men "repaired the aircraft – which then flew passengers out of the field. The tale is wonderfully retold by CNAC legendary maintenance chief Zygmund Soldinski in My Story of the DC-2 ½.

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Finals into Shanghai's Hongqiao with the twenty-first century towers on the horizon

One of the greatest changes of our lifetime is the rise of China. In the last thirty five years, China has changed from a large but backward "third world" society into a global economic and political powerhouse. While the changes in government policies came first in the south, it is Shanghai's transformation that is most dramatic to outsiders' eyes.

Shanghai's first rise to a world city was spurred by the nineteenth and early twentieth century interventions by foreign powers. The British, French, and American negotiated (at gunpoint) economic zones along the coastline with Shanghai being especially important as it sits at the confluence of China's dominant river the Yangtze and the Pacific Ocean. The protected economic zones soon attracted Chinese industrialists, businessmen and bankers because they could find shelter from the Qing dynasty governance. And the prosperity attracted expatriates from around the world. By the 1930s, Shanghai was the financial capital of Asia.

But with the Japanese occupation followed in 1949 by the Communist victory, Shanghai's role was much diminished. Though still a large city with plenty of industry, its dynamic engine was throttled. And yet, once Shanghai was unleashed it grew and developed in ways that surprised everyone.

A great symbol of that change is Pudong, the district just across the Huangpo River from the European Bund. In living memory, this land was rice paddies and even as late as the 1980s is was single-storied housing. The district was designated as a special economic zone to house the engines of Chinese "market" institutions. Today, it is chock-full of high-rise office towers and the district includes three of the highest buildings in the world. Pudong is just a bit smaller than Chicago. A visual representation of this transformation is captured in the following pair of photographs.

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Here is Pudong in 1987 and in 2013.

Some think that Shanghai is about to become for the twenty-first century what New York City was for the twentieth century. Some of the excitement is portrayed in Michael Shainblum's Glimpse of Shanhai via Timelapse technique. Add another creative 22zweizwei "timelapse" film of central Shanghai. For a more "real people" view from denniscallan (our motorcycle-loving American friend from HCMC), you might like this 2013 Shanghai introduction (12:26). For a longer and richer journalistic documentary, you might view China Rises – City of Dreams (2013) by the New York Times and CBC. The most stunning human transformation of our time has many consequences.

A truly fascinating piece of film is Shanghai Forty Years Ago (1973) Part One (10:11) and Part Two (17:40). This western film provides an insightful look at life in Shanghai before the transformation. It presents a bit of documentary and then a focus on the daily lives of ordinary families and then a set of stories that illuminate the (then) ascendant Cultural Revolution. All this is done through film and interviews with regular people. The film says that it is chronicling the greatest period of change in Chinese history – and contrasts it with a resilient Chinese culture. Well, the next quarter century might have been more surprising.

It is possible to think that Mao's Cultural Revolution is the worst set of policy decisions ever made by any country. IN 1966, a combination of personal political ambitions coupled with a faith in his social theory, led Mao to lead an attempt to transform society and human nature. In the event, it led to a lost generation. The disastrous Cultural Revolution did not end until Mao's death in 1976 and the ascendance of Deng Xiaoping in 1978. "Socialism with Chinese characteristics."

Of course, China is a huge and complicated society. Not everything is what it seems. And not everything is the same.

For a well-informed personal perspective of flight in contemporary China, I'd recommend James Fallows' excerpted piece Flying Blind Through the Mountains of Hunan in the Atlantic. Fallows is a senior national journalist who flies a Cirrus SR22. And he has lived extensively in China and wrote the highly informative China Airborne that looks a China's economic miracle through the prism of aviation. If you are interested in aviation and in the complexities of China's transformation, this book is a first-rate read.


Summary:
Date: 2017-11-09
Route: VHHX-ZSAM-ZSFZ-ZSSS
Aircraft: L-049 [A2A]
Leg Distance: 700nm
Flight Time: 4:38
Total Distance: 9698nm
Total Flight Time: 41:42
 

[Jeff W 112]

Great videos Mike.  City of Dreams provided a lot of insight into issues in contemporary Shanghai.  Really like the timelapse videos too.

[kalizzi 53]

Love the DC-2 part! your diary stands out and its one of the ones I enjoy reading a lot. Keep 'em coming and happy flying.

[MM 137]

RTW80 Leg 16. Shanghai to Tokyo. ZSSS-RJTT.
2017-11-12

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We depart Shanghai for Tokyo, flying over the East China Sea and then the Japanese Archipelago.

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At the end of the bay in the distance is Nagasaki. This port, so far from the political and cultural centers of Kyoto, Osaka, and Tokyo (Edo) on Honshu, was the first access point for Westerners to begin contact with the Japanese. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Portuguese merchants and Catholic missionaries flourished here and Japan was largely open to the outside world. However, in 1637 the Tokugawa military forced out the Portuguese and Catholics and banned foreigners from Japan. (The Dutch and Chinese were given special trading privileges in Nagasaki where commerce was monopolized by the shogunate.)  For 200 years the Tokugawa Sakoku (period of isolation) maintained a death penalty for foreigners who set foot on Japanese soil and common Japanese were kept from leaving the country. With some exceptions, Nagasaki was the only gateway to the world.

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The Seto Inland Sea (or commonly the Inland Sea), at the center of Japan's main islands, was a primary transport route right up until the late-nineteenth century when the Meiji Restoration's emphasis on modernization built a network of roads and railroads to facilitate industrialization.

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The Great Seto Bridge. This series of two-level bridges spans the Inland Sea to connect the islands of Honshu and Shikoku. Finished in 1988, the system includes two long spans that represent the 13th and 19th longest suspension bridges in the world. The top level carries four lanes of traffic (two in either direction) while the lower level carries two railway lines with space for two future Shinkansen "bullet train" rail lines as well.

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The classic Imperial capital Kyoto. The city was spared during the World War II American bombing campaign. Accordingly, it retains many of the historic buildings in their original forms. On the picture's lower left you can see Nijo Castle, with its palace and grounds, which served the Tokugawa Shoguns during the 260 years that they ruled Japan. Then, slightly farther along at the upper left, lies the Imperial Palace which was the home of the emperor until the Meiji Restoration and the transition to Tokyo. To the right are the Nishi-Honganji and the Higashi-Honganji Buddhist temple complexes.

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Flying over the rugged terrain of Honshu. About 73 percent of Japan is mountainous and thus unsuitable for agricultural, industrial or residential use. As a result, the coastal areas are densely populated.

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Mount Fuji out the window.

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Worth another look. The world-famous Mount Fuji is Japan's highest mountain (3,776m/12,389ft). The symmetric snow-packed peak is an iconic, if not sacred, symbol of Japan. Often painted and photographed (and timelapsed), it was in 2013 designated as a World Heritage Cultural Site. Clouds and poor visibility often block the view of Mount Fuji so one is lucky to get a clear look at the peak.

The summit is a common destination for mountain climbing during July and August. "He who climbs Mt Fuji once is a wise man, he who climbs it twice is a fool." [Japanese proverb] Approximately 300,000 people climbed Mount Fuji in 2013 to find breath-taking sunrise views and crowded shops at the summit.

Of course, Japanese society was devastated by World War II. But the people made a remarkable recovery. A quick amateur film shows the early days: Yokohama to Tokyo in 1958. The history of Tokyo International Airport, or simply Haneda, transmits some flavor of Tokyo's and Japan's twentieth century history. 

Located on Tokyo Bay, Haneda Airfield was completed in 1931 and became the main civilian airport in all of Japan. It began offering commercial flights linking Japanese cities and "distant" destinations such as Formosa, Manchuria and Korea. As the country militarized, Haneda became a military airfield and served as such during the war. Afterwards, the occupying US Army and then Air Force commandeered the military installation and modernized it. They used the airfield as the main point of entry to Japan for military and civilian transports. Northwest Orient Airlines used Tokyo as a link for its flights from the US to China, South Korea, and the Philippines. And Pan American's first Round World Service in 1947 used Tokyo's Haneda Airfield as one of the regularly scheduled stops. The new government-sponsored Japan Air Lines (JAL) began its domestic operations form Haneda in 1951 and started its international flights three years later.

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The new terminal at Haneda in 1955

The US forces returned Haneda to the Japanese government in 1952 and the airport became the "gateway to Japan." The government repaved the taxiway and tarmac and then allocated the construction of the passenger terminal to a private company. (This privatization was in part due to resource constraints and in part consistent with the broader economic development strategy of state-managed capitalism.) The new terminal opened in 1955 and became a tourist attraction for Tokyo city.

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For Pan American's Asian hub, a DC-6B and Boeing 377 on the tarmac at Haneda in the late 1950s. (We shall switch from the Douglas to the Boeing Stratocruiser to continue our Around the World journey.) Note the charmingly curious visitors who brought their children to watch the aircraft operations.

Connections with the rest of the world ensued in the next few years with carriers such as Aeroflot, Air France, Air India, BOAC, Civil Air Transport, KLM, QANTAS, and SAS. Northwest Orient and Pan Am operated their Asian hubs here.

If you have ever visited Japan, and sat at the window of a departing flight, you should take a look out of the window after being pushed back from the gate. … the ground crew unhooks the tow and makes sure everything is clear. You can then see them do something very Japanese. They start to wave as you start to depart and when the plane has just left their work zone, they bow to you. … The Japanese ground crew all wave good bye and bow every time and I always feel a little sad when I see this as I'm leaving Japan but it makes me love Japan even more.
 — Hino Maple, Flights from Japan

The early 1960s brought change. First, in 1963 the government liberalized overseas travel for Japanese citizens, a move that greatly increased the demand for international connections. And then a second passenger terminal, a jet-capable runway, and the fast monorail connection with Tokyo center were built. All this was aimed to facilitate the 1964 Tokyo Olympics which introduced the newly developing Japan onto the world stage. In the next decade, a new international terminal was opened and passenger traffic exceeded 10 million per year. Throughout the "Golden Sixties" during the prime of the Japanese economic miracle, Haneda was Japan's window on the world. Then in 1978, with the fast rising demand, almost all international travel was transferred to the newly-opened Narita International Airport leaving Haneda as the domestic airport.

Narita itself illustrates some of what is special in Japan. In the mid-1960s, with the rise of jets, it became apparent that Haneda could not handle the rising demand for landings at Tokyo. The solution was to be a five-runway mega-airport to be built far into the countryside where the land could be easily acquired. However, the local villagers were surprised and incensed and rose in protest. Joining alongside the conservative farmers were Japanese leftists who argued that the new airport aimed to strengthen capitalism and would provide facilities for the United States military to wage war with the Soviet Union. While the central government had the power of eminent domain, the Japanese system emphasizes rule by consensus rather than by force. The emerging coalition of farmers and students began violent protests with deaths on each side. The protesters built steel towers to block the runways and invaded the control tower to destroy equipment. Eventually in 1978 the airport opened while surrounded by barbed wire and watch towers staffed by riot police. (One observer compared this situation to Saigon's Tan Son Nhut during the Tet Offensive.) The subsequent expansion of Narita International has been plagued by local protests and landowner resistance. The continuing land constraints mean that Runway B remains shortened below "international airport" standards and the planned expansion to a Runway C has been postponed indefinitely. Meanwhile, the expected fast rail connection to central Tokyo was long-delayed due to property-owners unwillingness to sell their land. Only in 2010 was a fast "Skyway Express" opened: nowadays one can reach the city center in something like 40 minutes.

Meanwhile, Haneda Airport was not diminished. It expanded onto reclaimed land on Tokyo Bay, introduced a new terminal in 1993, and then opened two new runways as passenger traffic climbed to 60 million per year by 2002. A second new terminal was opened in 2003 so that JAL and ANA each had a primary terminal for domestic operations. (All this was part of the government's expanded infrastructure investment program intended to counter the financial "bubble" that burst in 1989. The nation is only now recovering from the "Lost Decade" of the 1990s.) Meanwhile, Haneda started hosting city-to-city service via "scheduled charters" to super-charged Asian destinations such as Seoul, Shanghai, and Taipei. Slowly this international traffic expanded. In 2010 the new International Terminal was completed and Haneda has now emerged as a modern full-scale multi-terminal multi-runway domestic and international airport.

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On finals into Runway 34L of the current airport

About 21 percent of all passengers to, from, and within Japan land at Tokyo Haneda. You can connect to New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Toronto, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Dubai, Singapore and Sydney…as well as many other cities in Asia. In fact, Japan-China trips amount to about one fifth of all international traffic. Haneda now ranks among the world's top five airports.

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A fleet of private cars for our passengers. In the background, you can see the skyline of modern Tokyo. At the left is the red Eiffel-Tower-inspired Tokyo Tower (1958). And then at the far right stands the new Tokyo Skytree (2012) which (634m/2,080ft) is currently the second tallest freestanding structure in the world.

The modern airport's layout can be experienced in this Landing at Tokyo Haneda International Airport. Rwy 34R. Here.

A quick glance at modern Tokyo can be obtained in two contemporary videos:  a different ground-level feel for a Tokyo TimeLapse and a more technical and "upbeat" version of This is Tokyo Time Lapse. Of course, what is important is the Japanese people. Here are two looks, filmed for the 2020 Olympic siting competition. First, on a martial arts theme, Is Japan Cool? Dou. Then some Japanese smiles, Is Japan Cool? 2020 Tokyo.


Summary:
Date: 2017-11-12
Route: ZSSS-RJTT
Aircraft: L-049 [A2A]
Leg Distance: 960nm
Flight Time: 3:34
Total Distance: 10,658nm
Total Flight Time: 45:16
 

[MM 137]

RTW80 Leg 17. Tokyo to Midway Island. RJTT-PMDY.
2017-11-17

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Out of Tokyo, we head for a refueling stop at the Naval Air Station on Midway Island. We shall spend the night and the next morning we shall transfer to the Martin M-130 "China Clipper".

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The Pacific, Realm of the Clipper

After the first few years using the Lockheed L-049, the standard "Around the World Service" aircraft for the Pacific was the Boeing 377 "Stratocruiser." Our particular aircraft is N1037V Clipper Fleetwing that entered Pan American service in 1949 and retired gracefully in 1960. [Thanks to A2A Simulations for the wonderful aircraft and FoMoCo63 for the beautiful mid-1950 "white top" livery.]

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Apparently, fellow RTW80 pilot Jeff commandeered the Clipper Fleetwing out of Tokyo last night. But he graciously returned it from San Francisco to Haneda in the special overnight Air Mail envelope depicted above.

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Here is the Clipper Fleetwing flying high over the peaceful Pacific on a beautiful morning.

In 1944, as the war's outcome became apparent, Juan Trippe was making plans for Pan American's role it the Post-War world. He decided to move quickly and decisively to obtain the very best possible aircraft for his new fleet. Once he heard about Boeing's own plans, he was eager to get the B377 into action. That year, Pan Am sent representatives to Seattle to work with the Boeing engineers to build an aircraft to their own specifications.

This was not the only time that Trippe made the same sort of gamble on Boeing. In the 1955 he also backed the Boeing 707 as the key early "launch customer" who moved the aircraft to success. (Trippe also ordered DC-8s to hedge his bets.) This Boeing move turned out well when jet passenger aircraft completely replaced piston-engined models on long-distance international flights. And then in 1964-1966, he bet the company on the Boeing 747 jumbo jet when he made Pan Am the initial launch customer and had to go deeply into debt to get the program through its difficult development years. Again, this move reflected Trippe's commitment to the best available aircraft and a determination to ride the wave of technical progress. In this case, the gamble failed as the 747 went into service just as the West went into the 1970s stagnation period and air travel diminished. (The financial implications put Pan Am into a financial predicament from which they never fully recovered.)

It was this same personal belief in the absolute importance of running the very best of aircraft that led Trippe and his men to Boeing for the B377. This was to be a conversion of the revolutionary technology of the B-29 to the civilian world and Trippe could not, and would not, miss this opportunity.

You can get a feel for the "super airliner of tomorrow" in this 1950 Pan American promotional film that depicts flying the new Clipper Golden Gate. The Double-Decked "Strato" Clipper (24:32). "More power than it takes to drive a locomotive or an ocean liner." Included are some film clips of the great aircraft that served Pan Am over its long twenty-year history (as of 1950). (Another copy of the same film with better color quality but a crawl across the bottom of the screen.)

Also interesting is this 1946 company film by the award-winning filmmaker Jerry Fairbanks: Boeing 377 Stratocruiser – Tomorrow's Airplane Today (19:03). It shows Boeing's early days in the planning and production of the Stratocruiser. "Soon, over all the world's skyways, the Boeing Stratocruiser will be flying. Bringing the nations closer together, playing an important part in building international understanding." (At the film's very beginning are some interesting clips of the "village" camouflage used by West Coast aircraft plants during WWII.)

As it happened, the B377 was delayed in development and in certification until 1949. In the meantime, Trippe and Pan Am purchased Lockheed Constellations to fill the gap and engage in his rivalry with Howard Hughes' TWA on the prestigious and profitable transatlantic routes. Those Constellations proved a valuable choice as they maintained Pan Am's position as the United States' primary overseas airline – a position that remained strongly contested right through the next generation of aircraft.

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Cruising just below the stratosphere with contrails trailing over the Pacific sky

When it was introduced in 1949, the Stratocruiser may have had an edge over its direct competitors the Douglas DC-6 and the Lockheed Constellation. It was larger and flew higher and faster. However, as the numbers came in, the B377 was not only more expensive to purchase but it was also more expensive to operate.

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The passenger accommodations were an attraction for everyone

Straightforward economics aside, the Stratocruiser was very popular with the customer base. Most airlines, and especially Pan Am, flew it as a first class luxury ship – with intercontinental flights accommodating sleeper berths to increase the quality of the experience. Seats and aisles were wide, the men's and women's dressing rooms were capacious, and the aircraft was air-conditioned, pressurized, and relatively well-insulated.

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The lower deck cocktail lounge ... with the trumpet and trombone behind the door

One especially attractive feature was the lower deck cocktail lounge. Reached by a circular staircase, this 14-seat lounge (in which some airlines provided free drinks) provided passengers a chance to move about and to sit and relax and socialize with their fellow passengers. (Many advertising pictures of the cocktail lounge portrayed successful middle-aged men chatting with attractive young women. I cannot imagine what those Madison Avenue men hand in mind. It was the 1950s.)

Here is a story from Barbara Sharfstein (veteran Pan Am stewardess and purser):

“[O]ne of the most memorable times in my flying career happened on the Stratocruiser when Louis Armstrong and his band were downstairs in the lounge longing to get to their instruments. As it happened, there was a door to the cargo compartment right next to the bar. In fact, the liquor kits were kept in the same compartment as the luggage with only a mesh rope curtain separating us from what they could spot as a few of the instruments. I can only say it was fortunate for the weight and balance of the airplane that the lounge was centrally located or we might have been in trouble. Almost all the passengers were in the lounge seats or on steps. Passengers were helping me serve drinks and neither they nor I will ever forget it.”

Pilots' first impressions were good. The aircraft cockpit was roomy and offered excellent ergonomics and visibility. It handled well and was equipped with the latest in all aviation technology. It was fast and flew at 25,000 feet – above much of the worst weather. (It did have one quirk – it took off and landed on the nose wheel. A bit of a problem in a crosswind. Apparently the CAA required wing spoilers to assist in the stall warning and those spoilers adversely affected the landing angle of attack. Eventually, the CAA reversed its decision and the B377 landed as its designers intended.)

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The Pacific sunset behind the aircraft deepens the purple and pink hues in the skies ahead.

However, the aircraft soon earned a reputation as having problems. Besides the normal maintenance difficulties with the infamous Pratt & Whitney 4360 "corncob" engines, the powerful power plants were notoriously susceptible to the "runaway propeller." Of Pan Am's 20 original aircraft, four were lost thusly. The most famous was Pam Am Flight 6, the 1956 Around-the-World flight that ditched in the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and San Francisco. [We shall visit this event in much more detail when flying the same route in a couple days' time.]

Highly recommended is Ernest Gann's delightfully written "Lady with a Past", an excerpt from his excellent Flying Circus (1974). [By the way, IMHO, Ernest Gann's Fate is the Hunter (1961) is truly one of the best aviation books of all time.] Perhaps the most entertaining Stratocruiser quirk is its ability to drench its pilots.
 

The flight deck of the Stratocruiser was serenely quiet even if on a good day, just outside the windows, all 112 cylinders were in a reciprocating mood. But that commodious cell had its own peculiar disadvantages. In tropical climes the large areas of glass made it too hot and in colder regions prudent pilots carried raincoats and hats since they could be reasonably certain that soon after descent for landing was begun they would be sitting in the middle of a shower not indicated on their weather charts. The cause was soon discovered, but since the solution demanded the passengers stop breathing the problem was never entirely eliminated. Vaporous moisture expelled by the passengers during their ordinary life process rose and condensed as ice along the stringers at the top of the fuselage. Once the Stratocruiser assumed a descent attitude and passed thorough the freezing level, the ice melted, flowed forward in rivulets, and eventually emerged as a light rain condition directly over the pilots' heads.
 – Ernest Gann Flying Circus

As far as I can tell, the superb A2A Stratocruiser does not provide a realistic model of this famous feature. A hint to aircraft manufacturers: don't let your customers hire pilots who can write.

All this said, Pan American promoted the Stratocruiser as its flagship carrier. It assigned the B377 to its most prestigious Pacific and Atlantic routes. And (as you now know) it placed the aircraft in a prominent position as the iconic "Clipper" in its advertising.

Overall, Pan American operated 29 different Boeing 377 Stratocruisers and the overall safety record seems to have been better than most. While the P&W 4360s pushed piston technology to the very limit, Boeing's engineering and craftsmanship were first rate.

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The sunset turns to night as the Stratocruiser flies further into the wide Pacific


The long decent into darkness necessitated traversing a storm cell and its associated turbulence. I can personally attest that the aircraft's passengers, trained to a "Princess and the Pea" sensitivity by A2A, were artistically dramatic in their reactions. Without a doubt, they could easily become actors … or professional footballers for whom the hint of a foul leads to lengthy spells of writhing on the ground.

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Turning to final while in Midway's flight pattern

Midway Island is now almost unpopulated – staffed by some 40 US Fish and Wildlife Service personnel who administer the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge. Tourism is currently suspended for budgetary reasons. But when permitted, aircraft were asked to land after dark in order to protect the endangered albatross population.

This is the same Midway Island that was selected by Pan American as a stepping stone for its daring transpacific route. In 1935, Pan Am started regular Martin M-130 flying boat service (with overnight stops at Honolulu, Midway, Wake, Guam, and Manila). The flying boats landed in the atoll and pulled up to mooring barges in the lagoon. The passengers were boated to the pier and stayed at the new Pan Air Hotel (nicknamed the "Gooneyville Lodge" after the ubiquitous albatrosses, the "Gooney birds").

Midway soon played a prominent role in the pivotal 1942 sea battle of the same name. East Island hosted the 1942 battle's military field. Afterwards, the main larger runway was constructed on Sand Island. This is the runway and facility that served the Navy for 60 years thereafter.

During the Cold War, the US Naval Air Station constituted a stop-over point for Asia-America transports. The Navy flew radar aircraft night-and-day as an extension of the DEW line. And Midway housed a secret underwater listening post that tracked Soviet submarines.

We land at that Naval Air Station of the mid-twentieth century. The Navy turned it over to the civilian government in 1993. It remains an emergency field for transpacific flights.

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Stratocruiser arrival at the Naval Air Station

Summary:
Date: 2017-11-17
Route: RJTT-PMDY
Aircraft: B377 [A2A]
Leg Distance: 2,210nm
Flight Time: 7:37
Total Distance: 12,767nm
Total Flight Time: 52:53
 

[Jeff W 112]

Well Done Mike!   Appreciate the loan of the Fleetwing.  Tip of the Cap to Pan Am and Boeing for getting us safely across the Pacific.

[kalizzi 53]

Mike: so much attention to detail. I love it, for the umpteenth time! upvoting.

[DaveLTB 48]

That "passenger acommodations" pic... surreal in today's world... priceless

 

Greetings

Dave Britzius

(Cape Town)

[MM 137]

RTW80 Leg 18. Midway Island to Honolulu Pearl City. PMDY-(PHNL).
2017-11-20

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We switched aircraft to the Martin M-130 China Clipper which was ready in the lagoon at Midway Atoll. The plan called for an early start to take advantage of the relatively cooler morning air and to insure that we arrived for a daylight water landing.

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Sunrise over the Pacific

We flew from Midway to Pan American's flying boat dock at Pearl City, near Pearl Harbor on Oahu. We passed over the tiny Northwest Hawaiian Islands including the Pearl and Hermes Reef, Laysan Island, the Maro Reef, French Frigate Shoals, Necher Island, Nihoa, and then along the coastlines of Lihue and Oahu. This was a long flight over largely featureless water – so we asked our navigator to plot a route that catches some of these small islands and reefs.

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The China Clipper at cruise altitude

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The central passenger lounge in early morning sunlight

To get some sense of how adventurous this was in the 1930s, I'd recommend you look at this video China Clipper Inaugural Passenger Flight 1936 (13:25). It shows some interesting photographs but most helpfully it reproduces (via a reader) the notes of Edward B. Brier who was a passenger on that flight. This segment covers the Honolulu to Midway portion of the transit, our own flight path in reverse. It provides a well-written and highly descriptive personal travelogue. (The first and third parts of this sequence of videos are interesting as well.)

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Over Laysan Island

Though quite small, Laysan Island is the second largest of these Northwest Hawaiian Islands. The land essentially surrounds an shallow lake with a salinity three times that of seawater. (The best way to find fresh water on Laysan is to observe where the finches are drinking: the fresh water floats on the saltier water and accumulates around the shore.)

The island is a tribute to the ability of humans to alter an ecosystem. For two decades in the 1890s and 1900s, an American company mined guano (up to 100 tons a day) and, in the process, reduced the bird population from 10 million to 1 million. In the 1890s, the mine supervisor released domestic rabbits in a fanciful scheme to set up a meat canning industry. The rabbits … multiplied … and ate the entire plant cover off the island. Twenty six plant species were eradicated and the Laysan millerbird became extinct. The lack of vegetation loosened the soil and created sandstorms that filled much of the lake. Finally, in 1923, a scientific expedition exterminated the rabbits and the ecosystem began to stabilize. Still the Laysan duck and the Laysan finch were nearly made extinct and only through recent restoration efforts have their numbers been reinstated to sustainable levels.

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Trippe's ambitious plan

In 1934, the young and ambitious Juan Trippe realized that he needed a way to cross the Pacific. (The British had thwarted his attempt to obtain landing rights in Newfoundland, a base necessary for 1930s aircraft to execute a transatlantic route.) Happily for Pan Am, the United States held possession of the key islands necessary to cross the Pacific. The main obstacle was the lengthy Midway-Guam jump which was just at the range limit of the available aircraft. Happily, a solution was found. Legend has it that, while reading about the Yankee clipper ship captains at the New York Public Library, Trippe discovered the uninhabited Wake Island which lay halfway between Midway and Guam.

In early 1935, Pan American sent a cargo ship to these islands with the necessary materials for docks and offices and hotels, as well as radios and diesel-powered generators and stocks of oil and fuel. Quickly, the new Pan Am landing sites were under construction. (The political machinations that permitted this route are fascinating but too complicated for this telling. At the end of the day, the US Navy won the political war.)

Also in early 1935, with the Martin M-130 being a year late, Pan Am sent a pathfinding crew in the new Sikorsky S-42 Pan Am Clipper to survey the routes. (The S-42 was designed for the Caribbean and Atlantic and had insufficient range to operate over these distances. The survey craft had installed extra tanks in lieu of payload.) The ship was captained by Ed Musick who through the year flew successively longer flights deeper into the Pacific: to Hawaii, Midway, Wake, and then Guam. This careful planning and testing was characteristic of the normal Pan Am approach.

 

Meteorology for the Pacific was fragmentary and scarcely more than hearsay. Synoptic charts, those regional weather maps essential for long range flying, did not exist. Wind patterns above the ocean had never been charters. An old flier's tale advised that planes would be sucked into a vortex off the California coast. Not until pilots flew between Guam and Manila would there be warnings of thunderstorms 40,000 feet high, of cumulus clouds as tall as Mount Everest and visible only when the moon shone. Straying into one of those cloud towers, the plane would be caught in a high speed elevator.
 – Marylin Bender and Selig Altschul. The Chosen Instrument

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China Clipper flies over the unfinished Golden Gate

Then, in November 1935, the new Martin M-130 China Clipper made its first service flight from Oakland. It carried 110,000 pieces of airmail for Manila via Hawaii, Midway, Wake and Guam. Ed Musick was the pilot and Fred Noonan was the navigator. The flight began with much fanfare, including a live national radio broadcast and departure orders issued by Trippe himself. A cheering crowd of 25,000 looked on. According to the public relations plan, after departing from Oakland Alameda the plane was to fly over the partially-finished San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge before heading westward. But the M-130 aircraft, overloaded with mail and fuel, could not attain sufficient altitude. At the last second, Musick flew under the bridge instead. Ah, those were the days! [Here is a Universal Newsreel of the event.]

On landing in Honolulu, the crew delivered the mail and picked up fresh turkeys to be taken to Midway and Wake for the Pan Am staff's Thanksgiving dinners.

Pan Am continued to fly the Pacific carrying mail and gaining experience while the passenger hotels and facilities were completed at Midway and Wake. On October 7, 1936, the China Clipper executed the first passenger flight carrying members of the press. A week later, the Philippine Clipper carried Juan Trippe and other VIPs to Asia on a final preview flight.

The first commercial passenger service to Manila commenced on October 21, 1936 in the Hawaiian Clipper – with Ed Musick as captain, future Pan Am chairman Harold Gray as First Officer, and Fred Noonan as navigator. (Perhaps see the diary video suggested above.) The passengers included, among others, the aviation manager for Standard Oil, the chairman of May Department stores, an owner of the Lockheed aircraft company, and the famous "first flighter" Clara Adams. (Adams is a quirky character, the "Forest Gump" of early aviation. In 1939 she flew as a ticketed passenger on scheduled flights around the world in 16 days – only 12 years after Lindbergh's heroic solo flight over the Atlantic. Worth a quick look here and here.)

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Honolulu passengers embarking on the China Clipper in 1937

Pan Am continued to provide regular transpacific service between San Francisco and Hong Kong until World War II. Martin M-130 clippers departed San Francisco every Wednesday until the disappearance of the Hawaii Clipper between Guam and Manila in 1938. Left with only two M-130s, Pan Am reduced service to three times a month. By February 1939, the new (and more advanced) Boeing B-314 was added to the route and weekly service across the Pacific resumed.

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Our flight approached Oahu from the West

The Transpacific Clipper flights cost $950, the current equivalent of about $10,000 or, in the 1930s depression, about three times the average American wage. Pan American's transpacific routes, similar to other nations' intercontinental routes, were designed for wealthy elites, successful businessmen, government officials, and military officers.

For fans of the silver screen, here is the China Clipper (1936) Official Trailer (3:07). This film celebrates the "breathtakingly heroic adventure" of transpacific flight. The script was a thinly disguised biography of Juan Trippe (played by O'Brien). And here is a China Clipper Preview Clip (2:35) that depicts the hard-driving Trippe while he prepares to cross the Pacific. The Ed Musick-like pilot is a relatively unknown actor named Humphrey Bogart. Ironically, in taking advantage of Pan American's  transpacific success, the film popularized the airline and helped Trippe in his subsequent negotiations with the US government.

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The great China Clipper docked

The M-130 was the safest and most luxurious airliner of its day. In 1931, Trippe and Pan Am sent out a request for bids on an aircraft that could fly 3,000 miles while carrying a payload equal to its own weight. Both Sikorsky and the Martin Aircraft Company designed planes that met the airline’s demands – with the Martin aircraft being the more advanced. Although the first Martin M-130 was delivered over a year behind schedule, and its $417,200 cost was almost twice that of the Sikorsky S-42 (and more than five times the $78,000 price of the leading airliner of the day, the Douglas DC-2), the M-130 had the speed, size, and range to carry mail and passengers profitably across the Pacific or Atlantic.

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Cutaway of the Martin M-130

The M-130 could carry 46 passengers in daytime configuration, but in its more typical overnight service it provided sleeping accommodations for up to 30 passengers in three 10-berth compartments (one forward and three aft), with a 16-seat dining room/lounge compartment located amidships. On the expensive transpacific routes, the aircraft often carried no more than a dozen passengers (and on the long and challenging San Francisco-Honolulu segment, the limit was typically eight passengers).

The Martin featured an all-metal structure with streamlined aerodynamics and it was equipped with the most powerful engines of the day. The Pratt & Whitney R-1830 Twin Wasps were considered "military grade" and were kept under guard against national or industrial espionage.

The revolutionary aircraft was a significant technological achievement that might change the world. It made crossing the Pacific a commercially viable proposition and thus encouraged intercontinental connections for American business, military, and governmental elites. (This worried the Japanese military because they expected that the new aircraft would enable the United States to expand its influence to Asia and the South Pacific. Equally important, the US State Department believed that Pan Am's success would be in the US national interest. Things were never quite what they seemed in the newspapers.)

Here is a contemporary (1935?) "March of Time" newsreel (7:20) that celebrates the "fabulous" business opportunities of rich China and a need to compete with Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Germany. (Note the emphasis on Pan American's partnership in the CNAC being critical to the China-bound traveler.) This film shows a fictional "Trans-Pacific" flight that uses action footage of the Sikorsky S-42 in its scouting role. The allure of adventure is enhanced with some melodrama associated with a storm cell that forces a course deviation – a move safely guided by the new direction finding radio systems. "The transpacific airline will bring America as close to Asia as America is to Europe."

The Pan Am China Clipper flying boat (0:46) is a quick contemporary description and film of the early M-130 China Clipper made to celebrate the 24th anniversary of that flight. Note the spacious passenger lounge. And here is a General Motors film Four Square (7:45) that nicely depicts the M-130 "oceangoing liner of the air." The first 2 minutes are interesting for aviation (the rest is box beam engineering).

The name "China Clipper" certainly became famous around the world. Unhappily, although the M-130's performance greatly surpassed that of other seaplanes at the time in terms of speed and range, it was not an economic success. Pan American's three M-130s were the only ones built. Glenn Martin was disappointed because his substantial investment in developing new aviation technology was not fully rewarded.

These were courageous airmen, heroes of their day. Flying professionally in the 1930s was not a prescription for longevity. Ed Musick was a great example. He was a flight instructor for the US Army and then operated his own flight training business. He joined Pan American and quickly became the new airline's chief pilot. After being assigned to test the new Sikorsky S-42 for Caribbean use, he was thrust into the limelight as the pilot of "proving flights" that covered the prospective Clipper Route. (He flew the S-42 which barely had the range for some of the longer hops.) Then he was the first pilot of the China Clipper's inaugural airmail flight in 1935. …. And he flew the Hawaiian Clipper in the first commercial passenger service in 1936. At the time, Musick was a name heard around the world as the archetypical hero of the new "air-minded age." A quiet, confident, and superbly skilled aviator, he appeared on the cover of Time magazine on December 2, 1935.

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Ed Musick on the cover of Time

Trippe became intrigued with expanding the Pacific coverage from Hawaii to New Zealand and then Australia. In 1937 he sent Ed Musick in the S-42 Samoan Clipper to do the exploratory work on that dangerous long-range route. In January 1938, Musick took off from Pago Pago, but after two hours he lost an engine. Turning back and approaching the field, the crew announced that they were dumping fuel. Then no more communication. The best evidence is that the fuel dump mechanism dripped gasoline near the engines where an electrical spark likely caused a devastating explosion.

The navigator of the 1936 Hawaiian Clipper trip was Fred Noonan. He was an accomplished navigator, a pilot, a ship's captain, and veteran Pan Am employee. He left the company in 1937 with a goal of opening a navigation school. He signed on with Amelia Earhart, seeking fame to increase his chances of owning his own business. The rest of the story is a well known tragedy.

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Our China Clipper docked at the Pan American Pearl City facility

Pan American established its Hawaii base on the Pearl City peninsula which lies on the eastern shore of Middle Loch in Pearl Harbor. The area had been established as a getaway spot for Honolulu wealthy families who built homes on the peninsula. The Pan Am facilities included docks and offices and palm trees to greet mainlanders. (Not much of this exists today.) Pan Am purchased several large homes to serve the airline personnel. The passengers were transported into the city for more luxurious accommodations. At the time, Hawaii would have been an exotic foreign land.

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A tropical paradise…overnight

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Years later, Hawaii remains exotic...or exotique

It looks as though we shall spend our holidays on Oahu. From the flying boat days until 1960, the Pan Am crew lodging was in the classic Moana, the famous hotel on Waikiki. We'll volunteer for the hardship tour. Now Hawaii is "not what it used to be in the good old days." But, all things considered, this might be better than spending time in the Aleutians.

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The Moana on Waikiki

[Thanks to Jens Kristensen for the classic Martin M-130.]
 

Summary:
Date: 2017-11-20
Route: PMDY-(PHNL)
Aircraft: Martin M-130 [Jens Kristensen]
Leg Distance: 1,146nm
Flight Time: 8:09
Total Distance: 14,014nm
Total Flight Time: 61:02

[DaveLTB 48]

Love it, love it. 

Well done sir...

 

Dave Britzius

(Cape Town)

[robertorizzo 37]

Hats off.

[Heinz Flichtbeil 1609]

I like this diary .... 

Greets Heinz

[MM 137]

Thanks Dave, Roberto, and Heinz.

Look forward to seeing you in San Francisco!
Hope that X-Plane includes the Fairmont Hotel and the Tonga Room where where the drinks are on me...or the convening pilot, perhaps.

[MM 137]

RTW80 Leg 19. Honolulu-San Francisco. PHNL-KSFO.
2017-11-25

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Over the holiday word came over to the Moana that the scheduled aircraft, the Stratocruiser, would not be available for this leg. (The technical people have been talking a jargon that no pilot can understand. Something about "FSX," and thirty-two bits, and Windows, and Child Windows, and the Creator Edition. Official warnings and such. Hmmm.)

As a replacement ship, the New York office has quickly sent to Honolulu our old favorite, the Lockheed L-049 Constellation Clipper Undaunted. While not quite the first class luxury liner, she will do nicely – as we continue our celebration of Pan American's role in around the world flying.

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John T McCoy's painting of the Pan Am Constellation Clipper America that flew the first Around the World Service in 1947

Our pilots will not have to worry about the systems becoming non-functioning while the aircraft is four miles high over the middle of the Pacific. While we shall not disturb our passengers, if they knew more they might prefer slightly less posh accommodations to the prospect of paddling a life raft. Safety first is Pan American's guide. (Though see below.).

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An early start out of Honolulu made for a colorful sunrise

The "point of no return" is the position at which Pan American Flight 6 made its famous ditching on October 16, 1956. On a nighttime flight from Honolulu to San Francisco, part of the Around-the-World-Service, the Boeing 377 Clipper Sovereign of the Skies experienced a prop-governor failure (the dreaded runaway prop) on engine No. 1 at about 0120 hours. The crew eventually shut down that engine by cutting the oil line but the prop would not feather. The increased drag of the spinning prop meant that the speed was reduced below 150 kts with the craft losing 1,000 fpm in altitude. The crew went to climb power on the remaining three engines. But soon, perhaps due to the added stress of running on three engines, engine No. 4 started to fail, then lost power, and was eventually shut down and prop feathered at 0245. The aircraft would not be able to reach San Francisco or return to Hawaii on only two engines and the unfeathered prop.

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Our Constellation over the vast Pacific almost at the "point of no return"

At the time, the US Coast Guard kept a cutter at the midway point between Hawaii and San Francisco. This night it was the USCGC Pontchartrain. The Pan Am crew were able to establish radio contact and then find the Pontchartrain on the seas below. This was going to be a ditching in the open ocean – a very risky proposition in any case but at night a deadly business. The Pan Am crew did some calculations and Captain Richard Ogg (a 20-year veteran pilot) decided that they had enough fuel to circle aloft until daylight to greatly increase the chances of survival.

The crew began to prepare. The veteran purser remembered a Stratocruiser ditching from the previous year and that the tail broke off first. She moved the passengers to the center of the aircraft. The staff drilled the passengers in the ditching procedures and got volunteers to help with the life rafts. While frightened, the passengers did not panic. Captain Ogg descended to 2,000ft and kept circling after daylight to burn down the fuel and reduce the chances of fire.

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The Stratocruiser hits the water and kicks up spray as metal parts are hurled into the air

In the event, the Pontchartrain laid down foam to show the wind and help the pilot judge his altitude over the sea. And Captain Ogg made a steady careful full-flaps gear-up approach at 90kts and the big plane hit the water at 0615. One wing caught a wave top and the entire craft spun around and broke apart at the tail. The onlooking Coast Guard personnel thought that this must be the end, but miraculously they saw passengers climbing out of the fuselage and launching life rafts!

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The Coast Guard crew sped their boats to the site and rescued the survivors from the broken fuselage. The entire rescue took five minutes. The last two to emerge from the wreck were the captain and purser. Twenty minutes later, the plane sank into the seas.

All of the passengers and crew survived with only minimal injuries. They were returned to San Francisco several days later.

The participants in this event (on the aircraft and on the cutter) received well-deserved acclaim. Captain Richard Ogg was the first recipient of the Civilian Airmanship Award presented by the Order of Daedalians (a group of retired WWI pilots). Much like the 2009 US Airways Flight 1549 landing on the Hudson, everyone did his or her job with professional calm and skill and the procedures worked. And they were lucky. Pan Am's Captain Richard Ogg probably deserves our salute just as we have honored Captain "Sully" Sullenberger for his role in the "Miracle on the Hudson." Aviation heroes, both.

I would recommend this fine description of the event that puts it into context. Five Minutes of History: Pan American Flight 6 (8:26). Here is the US Coast Guard film of the event: US Coast Guard 1956 Rescue of Pan Am Flight 6 Ditched in Pacific Ocean (10:17). (The ditching footage starts at 4:30.) Other locations for the same film are here and here.

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Clouds as we approach the California Coast

A less heroic story, a mystery, surrounds Pan Am Flight 7. On November 8, 1957, Pan Am Stratocruiser Clipper Romance of the Skies vanished en route from San Francisco to Honolulu. While searchers recovered debris some 90nm north of the planned route, there was no clear evidence of a distress call, a mechanical failure, nor a fire on board. In fact, there were suspicions of passenger sabotage or insurance fraud. The Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) left the matter unsettled, without drawing a definite conclusion of the cause of the crash.

However, a recent investigation published in the January 2017 edition of the Smithsonian's Air and Space, "What Happened to Pan Am Fight 7?", suggests a stronger case for a crew distress call regarding mechanical failure, perhaps another runaway propeller. In addition, the article reopens the on-the-record evidence that Pan Am had cut corners in its Stratocruiser maintenance practices at the San Francisco facilities. The head of the CAB, James Durfee, dissented from the Bureau of Safety's non-findings and noted pointedly that there had been no reprimand of Pan American. Of course, Pan Am's lawyers were eager to eliminate any finding that might implicate the company's procedures. Pressure mounted from the families, from the politicians, and from the press so that eventually the ambiguous final report was approved.

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Approaching the Golden Gate and San Francisco Bay. The dark green areas on the right are Golden Gate Park, Lands End, and the Presidio.

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Ahead is Treasure Island, the southwest corner of which housed the terminal from which Pan Am ran its Pacific Operations from 1939 through the war years. Then Yerba Buena Island and the Bay Bridge. Further on is the  Alameda Naval Air Station whose predecessor was the Pan Am seaplane facility where the China Clipper began its service.

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Heading south down San Francisco Bay with the City, the Golden Gate, and Alcatraz in the background.

San Francisco at mid-century was clearly a world-class city. It had already been the heart of the Gold Rush, the West Coast's first major port, the wealthy financial center of the Western United States, and the American gateway to the Pacific.

In the 1950s, the "City" was known as the western home of the Beat generation writers and the San Francisco Renaissance in poetry. We could go to North Beach to visit the Vesuvio Café and Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Bookstore from which he published a number of the authors and poets. We might encounter, in their most creative years, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Neal Cassady or Gary Snyder. This group – who more than dabbled in alcohol, drugs, and sexuality – embodied a wrenching and dramatic shift in the sensibilities of western literary and popular culture. 

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, ...
 – Allen Ginsberg, Howl (text here, written 1955, published 1957)

The opening lines of Howl set the tone. After Ferlinghetti published the poetry volume in 1957, he was arrested and put on trial for distributing obscenity. In a landmark case, the local judge ruled that the poem "had redeeming social importance" and was thus not obscene. Viking Press was emboldened to publish Jack Kerouc's On the Road. The gates were opened and at first at trickle and then a flood of ideas flowed through. (For interesting details, see Fred Kaplan's "How 'Howl' Changed the World".)

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Rob Donnelly, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, Robert La Vigne and Lawrence Ferlinghetti in front of City Lights bookstore, 1956

Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle derisively labeled this literary avant-garde as "beatniks". The term stuck as a caricature, the image being "a man with a goatee and beret reciting nonsensical poetry and playing bongo drums." Vesuvio's engaged in self-parody when the café hired artist Wally Hedrick to sit in the window dressed in full beard, turtleneck, and sandals to create improvisational drawings and paintings. And, of course, those of a certain generation will recognize the Bob Denver character "Maynard G. Krebs" of Dobie Gillis fame.

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Bill Russell and K.C. Jones of the National Champion San Francisco Dons

If unsettling literature and disturbing poetry are not your cup of tea, you might enjoy the starry skies of the sporting world. In 1955 and 1956 the University of San Francisco's basketball team, the Dons, won sixty straight games while capturing two college national championships. The team featured Bill Russell and K.C. Jones who later formed the core of the NBA Boston Celtics. When in Boston, their dynasty won titles in 11 of 13 seasons from 1957-1969. And Russell and Jones, each in a different era coached the Celtics to a pair of NBA titles. So scoring tickets to see the Dons would be quite an achievement.

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Finals into San Francisco International with the city in the distance

Our Pan Am passengers and crew will stay at the classic St. Francis on Union Square. Built in 1904 and burnt in the 1906 earthquake fire, the grand hotel was restored and then restored again. The vast hallways of marble, gilt and crystal have hosted presidents and royalty since the hotel's beginning. Our arrival in the Eisenhower years and Mr. Trippe's being if nothing else a politically sensitive businessman, we took our business to the "Republican" hotel. The Fairmont is the "Democratic" hotel. [These were the traditional roles in the mid-1950s...happily an era of less feverish partisanship than today.]

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The St. Francis Hotel and Union Square in a 1950s postcard. The current 32-story addon towers that almost dwarf the original edifice were not built until the 1970s.

Check to see if the room is on the 12th floor. Two stories about film stars.

The first is Al Jolson, an American entertainer with a career in theater and film. Jolson frequented the St. Francis Hotel both when he was working and when he needed a break. In 1950, after going to Korea and performing 42 shows in 16 days, Jolson came to San Francisco for some rest. He was staying in Suite 1221 and playing poker when he looked at his friends, said, “Boys, I’m going,” and then died of a heart attack. (here)

[The second story is more famous.}

Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, all 260 pounds of him, was Hollywood's highest-paid silent-film star in 1921, earning $3 million from Paramount Studios for his Keystone Cop antics. Off-screen, his parties were equally legendary, but one in particular, inside a St. Francis Hotel suite, was so out of control it eventually ruined his career.

On Sept. 5, a pajama-clad Arbuckle was accused of dragging movie actress Virginia Rappe to Room 1219 and having his way with her as she screamed and her friends banged on the locked door. According to The Chronicle's coverage of the case, Rappe's friends were allowed entry an hour later, to find her naked and moaning on the bed, "I'm dying ... he hurt me." Her clothes were shredded on the floor.

Rappe's friends took her to a hospital, where she died the next day. The official cause of death was peritonitis caused by a rupture of the wall at the top of the bladder.

Arbuckle, who claimed Rappe had a drunken fit and tore her own clothes off, was charged with manslaughter and was eventually acquitted after three trials. Original charges of murder and rape were reduced after the defense played up Rappe's party-girl reputation and told the jury she had received multiple abortions over the years.

Although he was free, Arbuckle's reputation was ruined, Paramount dropped him and no one else would hire him.

The scandal has turned the suite (Rooms 1219-1221) into the most sought-after reservation at the St. Francis. Aside from some high-tech additions and upholstery upgrades, the suite looks largely the same as it did in the '20s. (here)

We shall deposit our flight bags in the room and join the other "Eighty Days" pilots gathered at the Fairmont's Tonga Room. An evening of refreshments and tall tales is something to value.

[Again, thanks to Eberhard Haberkorn for his repaint of the Pan American Clipper Undaunted.]

Summary:
Date: 2017-11-25
Route: PHNL-KSFO
Aircraft: Lockheed 049 [A2A]
Leg Distance: 2,114nm
Flight Time: 7:41
Total Distance: 16,128nm
Total Flight Time: 68:43

[DaveLTB 48]

Pan Am Flight 6: Fascinating story.

Thanks for the video link.

 

No Pan Am poster featuring San Francisco?  I'm getting hooked on those posters 

 

Dave Britzius

(Cape Town)

[MM 137]

Dave, the Pan Am San Francisco poster is one of those new-fangled ones with a photograph. Not a real poster but an imposter.

[DaveLTB 48]

 

12 hours ago, MM said:

Not a real poster but an imposter.

 

LOL

Very dry, very dry indeed

 

Dave Britzius

(Cape Town) 

[MM 137]

RTW80 Leg 20. San Francisco-Salt Lake City. KSFO-KRNO-KSLC.
2017-12-05

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Today we leave early in the morning to do a bit of sight-seeing. The passengers boarded the DC-3 Clipper Tabitha May to trace the route of the early Central Pacific Railroad.

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Leaving behind beautiful San Francisco

Pan American was not authorized to fly routes within the continental United States. Even after the "domestic" American airlines were awarded intercontinental routes after WWII, Pan American remained prohibited from obtaining internal US city connections. This restriction was a price that Juan Trippe paid as he pressed to become America's "chosen instrument" in international aviation. And this restriction indirectly led to the airline's demise. Today, we fly a "non-scheduled" jaunt.

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Profile of the proposed Pacific Railroad (Harpers 1867). Note the special significance of the steep ascent of the Sierra Nevada on the (left) west side of the railroad route.

Almost from the introduction of the steam powered railway, Americans had started thinking about a "Pacific Railroad" that would connect the east and west coasts – part of the notion of "Manifest Destiny."

By the 1860s, the primary promoter was the young Theodore Judah who had traveled west and done the surveying, engineering design, and planning. The lay of the land permitted skirting around the highest Rocky Mountains and thus the most formidable remaining barrier would be the Sierra Nevada mountain chain. For some time, Judah pressed Congress for the necessary subsidies and eventually a plan was approved to depart from Council Bluffs, Iowa and connect to San Francisco, California. (The approval of this central route did not occur until the Southern states had seceded and lost their veto over a non-Southern route.)

Two companies would be formed, the Central Pacific to start eastward from Sacramento and the Union Pacific to start westward from Omaha, across the Missouri River from Council Bluffs. (A third company to connect Sacramento with San Francisco never got going.) The US Government would pay per mile of track and allocate land alongside the track in a checkerboard pattern to each of the companies. (This incentive was common for these schemes – the railroad had every reason to help develop the region so as to make their land grants valuable. The new transcontinental road needed and received more explicit funding because investors doubted the prospects for real-estate-related profits.)

The original idea was to go north around the highest of the Sierra Nevada but the discovery of silver in the Comstock Lode made especially attractive a railroad that connected the lowlands of California with Virginia City. Judah returned to California to find investors – who were not immediately forthcoming.

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Climbing up the snow-covered Sierra Nevada

Eventually, four businessmen from Sacramento (then a city of 10,000) decided on the venture. These were Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Charles Crocker, and Mark Hopkins – now referred to as the "Big Four." Each of these men would become rich and make a substantial impact on the emerging national railroad network as well as the development of California. Crocker would found the Southern Pacific, a larger and more extensive railroad that eventually would encompass the Central Pacific. Huntington later played a part in the Southern Pacific and then (solo) built the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad. He became a national poster boy for the term "robber baron" when his career of intricate and shady maneuvers became public – it was the explicit revelations that distinguished Huntington, no so much what he did. Stanford, a California governor and senator and an adept capitalist and financier, later fell out with Huntington in a high-stakes corporate battle. At the height of his career, he turned his perfectly successful Palo Alto horse breeding farm into a California college that is now nicknamed "the Farm."

Just before construction began, Judah was eased out of the partnership (and he died shortly thereafter on a trip back east). Crocker took over the management of the railway's construction.

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The Central Pacific on the Cape Horn turn in 1880. Note the steep precipice and the dual locomotives used for mountain railroading.

The real work began in October 1863 and it reached the heights of the Sierra Nevada in 1865. The railroad needed a grade of less than two percent which meant that the path had to weave through deep canyons and circle along roadways carved out of shear rock faces to ascend the mountain range. Timber for the bridges and trestles could be harvested in California. But everything else, including tools and machinery, steam engines, railroad cars, and rails, had to be shipped from the east coast down around Cape Horn and back up to San Francisco. (Fast travel meant a sea voyage to Panama, a crossing by steamer and railroad, then then another sea voyage up the coast.) Almost all the work, from moving earth, cutting out ledges for the railbed, and the actual laying of track, was done by human labor.

The Central Pacific company found it difficult to find workers – the California boom meant that other employers could pay more to work in better conditions. After some experimentation, in 1865 the company started hiring Chinese workers (who were at first thought to be too small to build a railroad). Eventually, the Chinese constituted something like eighty percent of the 12,000 man workforce. (They were paid less than European Americans. At one point, they went on strike only to be cowed by a company-hired mob.) The company recruited from Guangdong Province in the south where rural poverty and the dislocations of the Taiping Rebellion made the prospect of coming to America seem worthwhile. Many sent their earnings home and returned after the event. Others stayed to take their place along with other immigrants making their way in the new country. (Those who stayed soon enough faced severe discrimination as "outsiders" and it would be generations before their descendants would be accepted as ordinary Americans.)

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The west face of the Summit Tunnel.

The tunnels were especially difficult. The Sierra Nevada presented a granite barrier which had to be cut by hand chisel and black powder. Teams of workers would drill out holes in the rock face, pack explosives in the holes, set a fuse...and run. This was (surprisingly) relatively safe. However, the progress was too slow – about a foot a day. Two things helped. The men cut shafts down into what was meant to be the middle of the tunnel and then begin cutting outward to the ends (thus allowing excavation of four different faces of the tunnel). Second, the company discovered that the new explosive nitroglycerin (which is highly dangerous to transport) could be manufactured on the spot. Once the men started using this nitroglycerin rather than black powder, the tunnel rate almost doubled.  

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The snow sheds enabled passage for the Central Pacific mail train in the 1870s.

And of course, the winters in the Sierra Nevada were treacherous. The famous "Donner Party" gave witness to the deadly season. Crocker originally intended to use special snow-plow-equipped locomotives to keep the tracks clear during snowfalls. This proved ineffective as the amounts exceed the plows capacity to clear. Eventually, the company had to build 40 miles of "snow sheds" that effectively covered the track in the high Sierra.

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Cresting the Summit. Look carefully at the lower left to see the west face of the Summit Tunnel below.

In August 1867, the Sierra Nevada were "conquered" with the completion of the Summit Tunnel of 1,659 feet in length at Donner Pass. And in June 1868 the first train crossed the summit to reach Lake's Crossing (modern Reno). Crews had already started building the roadway forward across the arid Great Basin toward what is now Utah.

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Delightful diversion over Lake Tahoe

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We lunch at Reno ... as did Fogg & Co in the nineteenth century.

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The Great Basin as seen from the DC-3 cockpit. Lots of, well, emptiness ahead.

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Turning to fly through the Ruby Mountains

Through 1868-1869, the company pushed the speed forward, laying track at a much faster pace in a race with the Union Pacific for distance. (On April 28, 1869, in a special competitive effort, the Central Pacific's Chinese workers completed a record 10 miles in one day – the "Ten Mile Day".) The goal was to reach the rich coal fields of the Wasatch Mountains before the Union Pacific – a goal that was not realized. (For a brief period at the end, the two companies had teams preparing separate roadbeds in parallel, each heading in a different direction. Soon enough, the two companies negotiated on the final meeting point.)

On May 10, 1869, the two railway companies met at Promontory Summit, Utah, where the symbolic "Golden Spike" was driven into place. This moment occasioned a celebration in cities and towns across the nation as the word "DONE" was instantaneously telegraphed to the east and the west. Five days later, the first transcontinental trains were run to Sacramento. And within a year, the line was completed to Oakland. Travel time from coast-to-coast was reduced from six months to six days.

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The Golden Spike ceremony. Note the bottles held aloft were then edited-out of the original photograph to suit contemporary standards of public decency. Also note the absence of Chinese workers on the Central Pacific side to the left.

Both companies immediately set about rebuilding bridges, trestles, and sections of track that had been constructed with an eye on speed rather than longevity. The Utah section was rebuilt with the transfer point shifted to Ogden. Promontory Summit retains an historic marker, but the railroad tracks are gone.

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Lacking Pan American representation, here is a 1950s Western Airlines poster!

We cross the Great Salt Lake and arrive at Salt Lake City. During the time of Verne's "Around the World in 80 Days," the Mormon community was in open but quiet rebellion against the United States government. (The precipitating issue was polygamy.)

Mark Twain visited Salt Lake City for two days in the 1860s (wryly recounted in his 1872 Roughing It):
 

Next day we strolled about everywhere through the broad, straight, level streets, and enjoyed the pleasant strangeness of a city of fifteen thousand inhabitants with no loafers perceptible in it; and no visible drunkards or noisy people … and a grand general air of neatness, repair, thrift and comfort, around and about and over the whole. And everywhere there were workshops, factories, and all manor of industries; and intent faces and busy hands were to be seen wherever one looked.
...
Our stay in Salt Lake City amounted to only two days, and therefore we had no time to make the customary inquisition into the workings of polygamy and get up the usual statistics and deductions preparatory to calling the attention of the nation at large once more to the matter.

I had the will to do it. With the gushing self-sufficiency of youth I was feverish to plunge in headlong and achieve a great reform here—until I saw the Mormon women. Then I was touched. My heart was wiser than my head. It warmed toward these poor, ungainly and pathetically "homely" creatures, and as I turned to hide the generous moisture in my eyes, I said, "No—the man that marries one of them has done an act of Christian charity which entitles him to the kindly applause of mankind, not their harsh censure—and the man that marries sixty of them has done a deed of open-handed generosity so sublime that the nations should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence."

The humor of the irreverent American Mark Twain is not so very different from that of the sophisticated Frenchman Jules Verne.

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The Wasatch Mountains form a backdrop for downtown Salt Lake City

By all accounts, today's Salt Lake City is a thriving modern metropolis. Trade, finance, transportation and tourism play the major role in the economy. And while most of the state is socially conservative, the city is somewhat more liberal in outlook. (In one of those self-consciously "silly" magazine articles, in 2007 Forbes found Salt Lake City women to be the most vain in the country – based on the per capita number of plastic surgeons and expenditures on cosmetics.) 

And the setting is stunningly beautiful!


[Again, thanks to Ron Attwood for his repaint of the Pan American Clipper Tabitha May. And to Manfred Jahn and Jan Visser for their splendid C-47.]


Summary:
Date: 2017-12-05
Route: KSFO-KRNO-KSLC
Aircraft: DC-3 [Manfred Jahn – Jan Visser]
Leg Distance: 570nm
Flight Time: 4:01
Total Distance: 16,128nm
Total Flight Time: 72:44
 

[DaveLTB 48]

20 hours ago, MM said:

No—the man that marries one of them has done an act of Christian charity which entitles him to the kindly applause of mankind,

I nearly wet myself with laughter reading that quote... A re-incarnated Mark Twain would have a problem in today's world...

 

Dave Britzius

(Cape Town)

[MM 137]

(Dave, I agree. Two thumbs up for Mark Twain!)

RTW80 Leg 21. Salt Lake City to Omaha. KSLC-KOMA.
2017-12-07

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Today we cross the Great Plains and the flat cornfields of the Midwest.

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Climbing out of the Salt Lake area

The first and longest part of the trip follows (roughly) the route of the Union Pacific as it was constructed westward to meet with the Central Pacific. Much of this story was reviewed in the previous log. The Union Pacific portion was technically less challenging, with the bulk of the path lying on the gentle continental rise toward the Rockies.

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Cloudy morning over the Rockies

Of course there were some difficulties. At first there was no labor force available due to the demands of the Civil War. But after 1865, many released soldiers traveled westward looking for adventure and employment. They were joined by recent Irish immigrants who were eager for jobs. As the track was laid westward, a train would bring forward more rails and ties for the next section. And a dormitory train, with crowded sleeper cars, followed closely to allow the workers to stay on the job. Additionally, a tent town "Hell on Wheels" accompanied the workforce as it moved west. This "town" provided the necessities of life that could be purchased by earned wages.

One advantage of having ex-soldiers as workers was that they could handle a rifle and were combat-trained. This factor proved helpful because not everyone was entirely welcoming.

Not to be forgotten, there were the long-standing local residents. The Native Americans, the Lakota Sioux and Arapaho and Cheyenne and others, had been by treaty granted sovereignty over the Great Plains in exchange for allowing free passage for Europeans heading westward to Oregon and California. As you know, the treaty rights were respected ... until the oncoming miners or settlers decided otherwise. For two decades, the Native tribes had been in an ambiguous state, at peace and at war with the European invaders.

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The railroad changed everything

When the railroad arrived, it was clear to the Native American leadership that things had changed permanently. The tracks and towns meant that the Europeans were going to stay. Many of the Native tribesmen (not all) decided to take direct action. The result was violence and the inevitable calls by the railroad men for protection.

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Native Americans destroying Union Pacific track. This painting was commissioned by an eyewitness of the actual event.

One of the valuable forces for the US army was a battalion of Pawnee Indians (lifetime enemies of the Sioux and Cheyenne) mustered into the army under the command of Major Frank North starting in 1865. Fort Kearny, Nebraska was the headquarters of North and his Pawnee warriors and their duty was to protect the construction workforce. The US Army was at first reluctant to break the peace but was eventually convinced.

Here is an illustrative story:

A large body of Indians appeared on the scene near Julesburg, Major North and 40 of his Pawnee started from Fort Kearny to the scene of the anticipated trouble. On the way he found the bodies of fourteen white men who had been killed by the  Indians and their bodies mutilated beyond recognition, their scalps torn off, tongues cut out, legs and arms hacked off and their bodies full of arrows. On arriving at Julesburg, he found the place besieged. Falling on the Sioux, he put the whole band to fight, killing twenty-eight in the transaction. This party of Indians had but a few days before surprised a party of fourteen soldiers, killing them all. Soon after this trouble broke out with the Cheyenne. Major North and a party of twenty of his Pawnee started to look into the matter, and while out, struck a band of 12 Cheyenne. Taking after them, the Major was the only one who could get near them on account of his men's horses being tired out, but being better mounted, he was able to get within gun shot and killed one of the Cheyenne. Seeing his Pawnee were some distance in the rear, the whole party turned on Major North. He shot his horse, and using its body for a breastwork, fought the whole party, killing or wounding nine of them and held them at bay until his men were able to come up. This fight was considered one of the most daring on the Plains and added greatly to the fame of the Major and his Pawnee. After the completion of the road, Major North retired, and in company with W. F. Cody (Buffalo Bill) went into the cattle business near North Platte.

The Jules Verne story of an attack on the early days operating railroad resonates with the actual history.

Over the next several years, the army established eight additional forts along the railroad construction line and eventually forced the Natives northward. The soldiers and the railroad men, and others, strategically killed and nearly eradicated the buffalo herds in order to starve the Natives and destroy their way of life. (The Little Bighorn, 1875, was the most famous battle, a decisive victory for the Lakota, Arapaho, and Cheyenne. However, the war was eventually won by the US Army and the Native tribes were forced to settle for designated "reservations" in the north country.)

All this you know.

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North Platte, Nebraska is now the site of the Union Pacific's Bailey Yard, the world's largest rail yard and the heart of America's rail transport system.

Perhaps less well-understood is the "contribution" of the railroad entrepreneurs to modern financial practice. The central figure for the Union Pacific was Thomas Durant, a clever, ambitious, and energetic figure who has been described as a scoundrel.  But that misses the point. This was a man of imagination.

He had been involved on the entrepreneurial side of railroad development (and other businesses) for several years – and had previously hired the Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln to handle a contentious legal dispute. When the US Congress decided on a "Pacific Railroad," Durant jumped forward and his group won the franchise.

Durant was slow to start construction, partly due to the lack of men and materiel and partly because he was unsure of the business venture. Most investors had shied away from the Union Pacific because it looked to be a loser. There was no way that the railroad could be an operational success – because the land over which it was building was utterly bereft of settlement. The railroad would have no customer base and thus no chance of turning a profit as an operating railroad.

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Nebraska is really flat. With snow cover you could sail a land yacht all the way to Omaha.

But Durant was able to devise a solution. He and a partner bought a Pennsylvania limited liability financial institution (a novel concept at the time) and renamed it Crédit Mobilier. (This was the name of the then-famous French financial institution – but the actual company had no relation to its namesake.) The government-selected Union Pacific then hired the private company Crédit Mobilier to do the actual construction of the railroad. The Union Pacific would pay the costs of construction and add a small management fee – all of this was on the books for all government inspectors to see. The construction costs were higher than first established, but that was not a total surprise: the US Congress raised the per mile compensation to accommodate the rising construction costs.

It happened that the President and Board of Directors and major stockholders of Crédit Mobilier were identical with those of the Union Pacific. So the individuals governing the Union Pacific hired themselves to do the construction work. And it happened that the construction company Crédit Mobilier charged Union Pacific construction prices that were about double the actual costs. Crédit Mobilier was making money hand-over-fist.

Congressman Oakes Ames entered the field and eventually forced Durant out of Crédit Mobilier. He continued the financial deceit and was generous enough to offer his fellow Congressmen and Senators a chance to buy Crédit stock at below par. Apparently, quite a number took advantage of the opportunity.

To be sure, a few years later in 1872 the enterprise became public. A disappointed partner leaked inside information to the New York Sun who immediately published the goods. The ensuing Congressional investigation did censure Oakes Ames (and one other) but most of the named participants (including future president James Garfield and Speaker of the House and future Secretary of State James Blaine) went untouched. Ames left Congress under a cloud and died despondent a few months later.

What we would understand to be fraud and illegal buying of favors was more or less common practice during the day. Most participants walked away with their earnings intact.

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This powerful Union Pacific freight train symbolizes the events' economic impact

For his efforts, Durant made a fortune. And then lost it in the Panic of 1873. The Union Pacific Railroad eventually became a highly successful enterprise. And the very nature of the American economy and the American nation changed as the east and west were linked together.

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On approach a view of downtown Omaha, the Council Bluffs rail yard, and the airport

We turned and landed at mid-century Omaha's charmingly quaint Municipal Airport.  By the end of the decade, the airport would be modernized, made jet-ready, and renamed Eppley Airfield after the local hotel magnate who helped finance the change.

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The historic Omaha Municipal Airport served by United Airlines B247 and DC-3

The layover was brief. It turns out that our Round-the-World passengers unanimously voted to spend the weekend in Chicago rather than in Omaha. Hmm.

[Again, thanks to PMDG for their sterling DC-6B Clipper Liberty Bell.]


Summary:
Date: 2017-12-07
Route: KSLC-KOMA
Aircraft: DC-6B [PMDG]
Leg Distance: 728nm
Flight Time: 3:19
Total Distance: 17,426nm
Total Flight Time: 76:03