Amerika (22 page)

I was careful not to skip like a boy, although I sure felt like it. Three days ago I was on my knees digging for buried treasure in the Dry Tortugas. Today I was the first officer getting ready to fly the biggest flying boat in the world.

For those of you who are pilots, right about now your eyebrows are rising, wondering if all this is on the level. Well, don’t forget, I was a fully- rated Master of Flying Boats, I could handle four engines, a cranky crew, crappy weather, and still arrive on time with fuel to spare. Yes, I know what you’re saying;

‘That was the S-42, not the Boeing 314.’

I agree. And your question is valid: how could I confidently climb up the spiral staircase to the flight deck of an aircraft twice the size of anything I’d ever been in before, with half-again more horsepower and range and performance issues I hadn’t a clue about, and instead of shaking in my boots I was whistling softly and smiling to myself?

Two words: Captain Fatt.

He wanted me in the right hand seat, and that was good enough for me. If it had been anyone else, trust me, I would have had my nose buried in every Boeing 314 manual ever printed.  And believe me, there are hundreds of them. That said, and Fatt’s confidence aside, I confess I did spend every second I had on the flight from Couba Island up to Baltimore thumbing through manuals that laid out the performance envelopes, power curves, handling characteristics, and so forth, that test pilots had compiled and that Pan Am captains had added to once they went into service. I might be dumb but I wasn’t stupid, and I wasn’t alone.

While Orlando and I were busy being thrown in jail by the Nazis down in D.C., the Navy crew was spending a solid week of crew training,  So…. in the highly unlikely event I turned out to be a blithering idiot during the check flight, one of them could take over for me. But that wasn’t going to happen. Not on my watch.

We settled in to our respective stations on the bridge: Fatt to my left in the red leather-cushioned pilot’s seat, or ‘Watch Officer’s Station,’ as Pan Am’s Preister declared it to be in the manuals, while I sank happily into my co-pilot’s seat to his right.

‘This thing’s like a sofa,’ I said.

‘The Dutchman thought of everything,’ Fatt said, ‘Including our sorry asses.’

Rightfully so. With overseas legs lasting eight and ten hours at a clip, our Pan Am asses could become sorry indeed. Preister might be a pain in the same place, but he understood ours all too well.

The smell of ozone joined the symphony of other smells on the bridge; leather, hydraulic fluid, warm oil, and the ever present smell of the ocean. The Naval officer acting as our radio operator, a skinny lieutenant who looked eighteen, sat hunched over his equipment at his station directly behind me. The crew staircase hatch between my seat and his led to the passenger compartment below.

The navigator, a somber, brooding lieutenant, swung the hatch closed and in doing so, gave us more square footage in a space that still amazed me as being big as a house.

‘Hatch secure,’ he said.

‘Aye,’ Fatt answered and turned to me. ‘Let’s find out if they glued her wings on tight.’

‘Nothing better to do, I guess.’

‘Oh, I could think of a few things. One of them is golf, the other a blonde met in New Orleans.’ He sighed and keyed his microphone.

‘Ready to cast off.’

The metallic-sounding intercom voice of our second officer, positioned forward in the nose said, ‘Standing by, sir.’ Then to me, ‘Battery switch on.’

‘Battery switch on.’

And just like that, we went from two men shooting the breeze to two serious cogs smoothly turning against each other in a vastly complicated machine designed to lift off from the water and fly across the ocean.

‘Left generator.’

I flipped the proper switch. ‘Set to forward battery.’

‘Right generator.’

‘Set to aft battery.’

‘Trim tabs.’

‘Neutral.’

‘Altimeter set.’

‘Set.’

‘Prop pitch.’

A quick adjustment. ‘Full increase.’

And so the ritualistic pre-flight checklist continued as we moved inexorably through the engine start procedure. As we did so, Lieutenant Mason, our flight engineer, a slight, sandy-haired man with ruddy cheeks, echoed us as he sat at his station next to the radio operator’s.

Like the organist  at  Radio  City  Music  Hall,  Mason  worked  a  vast  array  of instruments and levers in front of him that duplicated engine throttles, cowl flap controls, mixture levers, while all the time monitoring a maze of dials before him. Orlando sat next to him, watching his every move the way a lion watches an antelope, learning the ins and outs of the plane as fast as he could, just like me.

‘Mixture,’ Fatt said.

I confirmed the four levers. ‘Full rich.’

‘Master ignition.’

‘On.’

‘Turn number one.’

I reached for the engine start controls on the overhead panel between us, and mashed the start button marked ‘1.’

‘Spinning one.’

The outermost left engine whined into life as the starter motor began turning its massive, fourteen-foot Hamilton Standard propeller. The pitch of the blades caught the morning sunlight and flashed over and over again, faster and faster as the cylinders began firing, one, two, then five, then twelve, but I kept my finger on the start button as more and more cylinders coughed and belched blue exhaust and chattered and stuttered until suddenly the clattering smoothed to a steady powerful roar as all of them joined in.

I released the button and checked the RPM to make sure it didn’t exceed one thousand until the oil temperature gauges reached one hundred- four degrees, or so the checklist stated as I stared at its laminated surface and thought, if only we had checklists for life. I would make things a lot easier. But we don’t. We just fly by the seat of our pants.

‘Mason, watch your cylinder head temps,’ Fatt said over the intercom to the flight engineer. ‘These Wrights can run away from you fast.’

‘Got my eye on them, skipper.’

‘That’s a good lad, and don’t let Reverend Diaz touch any buttons. He might break something.’

‘Hands in my lap, captain,’ Orlando rumbled.

‘Okay, let’s get the rest of these sorry critters spinning.’

In quick succession engines four, two and three whined, groaned and then burst into smoky life. In less than a minute, four blurring discs spun the sunlight into silver buttons.

‘Elevator trim five degrees positive,’ Fatt said.

I cranked the small ridged wheel on the throttle quadrant beside me until the elevator trim tabs had five degrees up-angle. This was critical to getting our silver whale into the air because trim tabs added even more pitch angle to the aircraft’s elevators as she sped through the water, which in turn increased the lift forces acting on the wing, and before you knew it, forty-two tons of airplane would be flying sweet as honey.

But at present we were just slowly taxiing from the boarding ramp out into the harbor to our takeoff lane. The Panair launch paced alongside usual, two men standing at the open stern, their binoculars trained on every inch of the clipper, making a visual check.

Soon a raspy voice came over the headphones; ‘Launch reports looking good from here, captain. You’re cleared for your check flight.’

‘Roger.’ He turned to me. ‘Pray, Captain Carter, would you please let the Nazi assholes know we’re ready for takeoff.’

I smiled and keyed the radio.  ‘Baltimore Harbor tower, Lufthansa zero-five requests permission for take-off.’

‘Standby one,’ the nearly accent-free voice said. ‘Compliance traffic your area.’

Maybe a show of force, or just showing off, but in any event, four Me-109 fighters flashed past us at about two hundred feet in perfect wingtip-to- wingtip formation. As they reached the southern end of the bay the gleaming-white fighters split off, two each, and rose in a graceful climbing turn that ended with them re-joining formation at a thousand feet to continue their patrol of American airspace, guns at the ready.

Fatt watched the aerial performance without saying a word. Then he turned to me. ‘Who would have thought we’d live to see the day.’

The radio crackled. ‘Lufthansa zero-five, you are cleared for immediate take off, sea lane two. Wind zero-five-zero at fifteen, gusting to twenty. Observe altitude restrictions.’

Fatt rolled his shoulders, pulled out a cigar and lit it. ‘Get us the hell out of here, kid, before I start goose-stepping and shouting ‘
Sieg heil
.’

‘Not a chance. I’m still learning my way around this fat lady.’

‘No time like the present.’ Fatt lit his cigar, wiggled the control wheel and leaned back. ‘You have the aircraft, captain. Full speed ahead.’

I took a deep breath and grabbed the control yoke.

‘Your funeral,’ I said.

‘Always was, always will be,’ Fatt said casually. ‘Get her off at seventy knots, nose level until one-ten, then up we go to the heavens above, right, Reverend?’

‘Affirmative and amen,’ Orlando said.

I slowly advanced the throttles to full takeoff power and the engines answered with a confident roar. With only a partial fuel load and an empty plane we accelerated quickly across the open bay. Unlike a ground plane where its landing gear stays in firm contact with the earth until you lift off, a seaplane  responds  more  like  a  sailing  ship  until  you  get  some  decent airspeed going.

Within seconds I could feel the effect of the reported fifteen-knot crosswind shoving against the immense slab-sided fuselage the same way it would against a ship, trying to make it weathercock. I instinctively applied more power to my left engines, turned the control wheel to the right and added a touch of right rudder, and the nose obediently swung back on course.

‘Doing great, kid. Thirty on the dial.’

As the airspeed indicator needle touched the thirty-five knot mark, I called for ten degrees flaps. Fatt hit the toggle switch and her nose began rising as the additional wing area from the extending flaps made the Boeing lighter on her feet.

Even though we sat high above the water, I could still hear the thrumming slap of her hull hitting the small wavelets. 40…45....the airspeed indicator needle continued climbing and the controls stiffened as the wind moved faster and faster across her ailerons and elevators. The rudder pedals tightened up as the Boeing awakened more and more to the idea that she was about to fly.

I relaxed back pressure on the wheel as I felt her lift up ‘onto the step;’ that carefully engineered spot midway along the fuselage where our seaplane’s gracefully curving hull abruptly ‘stepped up’ up eighteen inches and then continued toward the tail. Without that design feature to break the glue-like, surface tension of the water, we’d be here until doomsday.

‘All clear forward,’ Fatt called out.

In a normal takeoff with Fatt at the wheel, the co-pilot’s job was to keep a sharp lookout for potential water hazards. But for reasons known only to him, he had thrown me into the pool with every expectation that I knew how to swim. Time to show him - and myself and the crew - that I did.

‘Here comes seventy,’ Fatt crooned.

‘Roger.’

I applied smooth back pressure to the wheel, but instead of feeling her leap into the air like most airplanes do at that magical instant, the Yankee Clipper rose like queen from her throne; slowly, elegantly, inexorably. And as she did I felt it square in my butt. Not too poetic, I know, but of all the instruments on the panel in front of me and the flight engineer, the best instrument a pilot can rely upon to tell him he’s flying is the seat of his pants. Your rear-end never lets you down and it didn’t then as the glittering waters of Baltimore Harbor fell away and I aimed her nose for the sky.

‘Positive  rate  of  climb,’  Fatt  intoned  as  the  airspeed  reached  one hundred-ten knots. I  throttled  back  to  twenty-one  hundred  RPM  and  the  thundering engines backed off from their frantic roar to a more reasonable rumble. Manipulating the four-levered throttle took a light touch, much in the same way a stagecoach driver holds the reins that lead to a team of galloping horses. But in my case, the ‘reins’ led to six thousand of them.

At five-hundred feet Fatt slowly raised the flaps while I re-trimmed for a steady climb to our operating altitude of two thousand feet. Once there I retarded  the  throttles  to  cruise  setting,  eased  the  prop  pitch  from  full increase and leaned the fuel mixture.

‘How we looking, gents?’ Fatt said over the intercom.

One by one the various bridge stations reported in. Then he rang up the steward station located directly below us on the lower deck. ‘How’s the silverware, Nawrocki?’

The flight steward’s voice crackled with mock anger. ‘Who’s flying this kite anyhow? A bunch of knives and forks fell into my pocket.’

‘Put them back or else,’ Fatt growled. ‘It’s company property.’

‘Aye, aye, captain, sir.’

‘And hurry the hell up with our coffee, I’m about to fall asleep.’

‘Coming right up, oh mighty Lord and Master of the Boat.’

Fatt smiled and swung his bulk around in his seat and shouted, ‘How we doing, boys?’

Thumbs up, ‘OK’ signs all around, and Fatt beamed. ‘That’s what I like; a well-oiled team doing what God put them on this good earth to do.’

For the next half hour we went through a meticulous systems checklist that, when finished, convinced us that the aircraft was ready to accept paying passengers, which when added to the crew count would be termed, ‘souls on board,’ a chivalrous naval term from ages past that signified both the dignity of our human cargo and of its frailty.

Fatt reached the end of the checklist.  He turned to me and grinned.

‘So, tell me, kid, how are you doing now?’

As I started to say that I felt pretty damn good about handling the

Boeing, his hand shot out and yanked both port engines to idle.

‘Fires in number one and two.’

The clipper sagged as if punched in the face and began falling off on her port wing. I quickly shoved her nose down to maintain airspeed.

‘Got any plans?’ Fatt pressed.

‘Props full increase on three and four, mixture rich, throttles full,’ I said as calmly as I could, and then added, ‘Feather one and two.’