Clipper Down

The U. S. Army freight transport Meigs zigzagged all night in a light rain, sending up flares and fingering the dark water with her searchlights. Late the next afternoon, 400 miles east of San Bernardino Strait in the Philippines, she came upon a vast patch of gasoline and oil, like rainbow-tinted gossamer rising and falling on the Pacific swells. She radioed her discovery to Manila. Airmen guessed that under the oil patch, in 5,000 fathoms, were 15 dead men and a handsome $450,000 airplane, the Hawaii Clipper.

The Clipper could have dropped the oil to smooth the sea for an emergency landing, then drifted off out of sight of the Meigs. But at the end of the week, though army bombers and navy destroyers and submarines kept up the weary search, the subject in the minds of most airmen was closed. The Clipper was a 26-ton Martin 130, built for Pan American's transpacific route in 1935. Trim and seaworthy, she could ride out rough weather as easily as a small yacht. She had four watertight bulkheads. She carried rubber inflatable boats, a stock of small balloons to drop behind her in hare-hounds fashion to show her course, kites for an emergency radio aerial, a shotgun and fishing tackle in case she piled up on a coral reef, enough food for 15 people for a month. But not all the gadgets in the world could save her if she smacked the water hard enough to crack her seagoing hull--or if she caught fire while dumping gasoline, as the Samoan Clipper, with Captain Musick and a crew of six, did last January off Samoa.

Pan American officials, hard put to it to explain their first loss of passengers in nearly two years of transpacific flying, did not think the Clipper had caught fire. After last January they had changed the design of the gasoline dump valves. What had happened they did not know. The Hearst press suggested that since one of the passengers, a Jersey City, N. J. restaurant owner named Wah Sun Choy, was carrying money to China, was it not a case of Japanese sabotage? An investigator from the Bureau of Air Commerce started from Washington, with little hope of discovering anything. Meanwhile, the Hawaii Clipper'?, sister ships, the China Clipper and the Philippine Clipper, coolly flew their scheduled routes, passing each other in mid-Pacific.

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