Fog Flight

Fog is man's enemy. Coast dwellers frown when the grey banks drift in and smother the buoys. At sea the slowed ships feel their way; the sirens mourn incessantly. Voices are lowered in a fog, which muffles them yet lower as though it shrouded something grave about to happen. Fog, several hours of it, gets on men's nerves. Two thousand miles of groping through fog might drive two men in an airplane--a land airplane over an ocean--close to distraction. So thought radio operators listening last week to the day-and- nightlong flashes of Ernest L. Smith, civilian pilot, and Emory Bronte, navigator, who entered dense fog with their Travelair monoplane, City of Oakland, soon after leaving Oakland, Calif., for Honolulu in mid-Pacific. "Foggy as hell," snapped Flyer Smith's first signals. Then he seemed to get used to it and flashed: "Going fine ... we will run out of it soon." Again, he said: "Go-ing strong. . . . Radio beacon working great." The strain began to show in a later message: "Receiving set on the bum .... don't worry me," but still the sender signed a jaunty, "So long." Early in the second day fog-fear had them fairly. Flying through or above obscurity, they had not seen the Pacific since they left shore. Head winds had slowed them down badly. Evidently they had been reckoning their position and nervously gauging their gasoline. They said they were about 700 miles from Hawaii and added, "Only enough gas for one more hour. S. O. S. S. O. S. S. O. S." Then within 30 minutes, they pulled themselves together and corrected this report to enough gas for four hours, but still, S. O. S., S. O. S. S. O. S.! Three steamships in that part of the Pacific opened their drafts and started toward the plane's course. The next message was panicky, "We are landing in the sea. We have a rubber lifeboat but send help." Nothing but silence followed, for hours. At Wheeler Field, near Honolulu, Army planes were readied for the search. The three rescue ships talked back and forth in anxious, inaudible flashes. . . . Four and one-half hours after sending their last cry for help, Flyers Smith and Bronte planed down toward a thorny strip of land guarding a lagoon on the isle of Molokai* in the Hawaiian group. Bushes ripped their ship as it crashed down through a breadfruit tree. But their gasoline had lasted just long enough. They were out of the fog. They were safe.

Judge Edward McCorrison, "Little King" (U. S. magistrate) of Molokai, had seen the wheezing ship pass over his courthouse and was among the first to welcome the visitors. He guided them to the local radio station. The army planes from Honolulu were sent over (60 miles southeast) to pick up heroes instead of victims. Pilot Smith used Charles Augustus Lindbergh's phrase as he set foot on Wheeler Field. "Well," he said, "here we are."

On the rescue ships, when news came that the flyers had reached land, the rescuers wondered why Flyers Smith and Bronte had not canceled their alarms when safety neared. Old seamen nodded knowingly. "That's what the fog does to you," they said. The explanation of their silence given by the flyers was this: When the S. O. S. signals were sent, the plane was dropping due to poor fuel feed, which boded a shortage. Near the sea's surface, the clog in pump or fuel line cleared up under the increased atmospheric pressure of the lower altitude. But so close to the sea had they dropped that the radio aerial trailed in the waves, was torn off.

Pilot Smith described a hazardous moment: "Once we started to land on some 'farms' (formed by mirages) caused by the moon on a fog bank. . . ."

*Popularly thought of as the "leper island" and called "The Land of the Living Death." Actually, the Molokai leper colons --made famous through the writings of Robert Louis Stevenson and by the successful experiments there with chaulmoogra oil, leprosy specific-occupies only a small triangle of land around the isolated village of Kalaupapa, inaccessible save by an arduous path which is easily guarded. Only about 40 lepers now remain at the colony, many having been discharged in recent years after chaulmoogra oil treatment. Molokai itself is fifth in size of the Hawaiian group, having an area about one-fifth the size of Rhode Island. Flyers Smith and Bronte were in no danger of contracting leprosy.