PAN & SOS

Said Amelia Earhart: "Well, they can have that coffee grinder. I wouldn't care to go out to sea in it myself."

Said an airport mechanic: "She'll float, anyway, if she won't do much else."

"She" was the Airspeed Envoy monoplane Stella Australis (Star of Australia), an unprepossessing craft in which to attempt the hazardous flight from California to Australia. Her lack of power and last-minute patchwork of fabric, however, failed to perturb Flight Lieutenant Charles T. P. Ulm, who had made the Pacific crossing in 1928 with Air Commodore Sir Charles Edward Kingsford-Smith in the Southern Cross. Said he: "I don't intend to get my feet wet."

Spurning lifeboat and life-preservers. Lieutenant Ulm and two companions last week climbed aboard Stella Australis, took off from Oakland on the 2,400-mi. water hop to Honolulu. Nineteen hours later, off-course and lost, the plane's radio crackled out the dread letters PAN, emergency call of the air. Half hour later, fuel exhausted. Lieutenant Ulm landed on the water, sent out a frantic SOS.* Stella Australis could float for 48 hours in a calm sea. But the Pacific became rough and after 48 hours no trace of the Ulm plane had been found by 34 Army & Navy planes, 18 U. S. submarines, three minelayers, countless small craft. To spur the search, the Australian Government offered a $5,000 reward.

*Had Stella Australis been equipped with radiotelephone, Lieutenant Ulm would have radioed neither PAN nor SOS, but MAYDAY, phonetic version of the French m'aider, distress signal word prescribed for radiotelephony by the International Radio Regulations.

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