Weekend, January 22-23, 2022 – IMAGINE CIRCUMNAVIGATING THE WORLD AND LANDING AT LA GUARDIA
FROM THE ARCHIVES
WEEKEND, JANUARY 22-23, 2022
THE 579th EDITION
BIG PLANES:
CROSSING THE OCEAN
STEPHEN BLANK
Big Planes: Crossing the Ocean
Stephen Blank
From my Rivercross balcony, I can see half a dozen floatplanes (airplanes with pontoons) fly by in a few minutes, presumably hauling well-heeled Wall Streeters Out East on Fridays and back on Mondays. I’ve flown on floatplanes myself, between Vancouver and Victoria when I worked in British Columbia, and even once between Philadelphia and New York City. Landing on water was always an adventure.
Watching these planes made me think about the great flying boats of the pre-WWII era. (A flying boat is an airplane with a boat-like body that lands directly on water.) Some of the most glamorous were based here in New York, at the brilliant art deco Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia airport.
Why flying boats? Easy. As airplanes became larger and heavier after WWI, and traveled longer distances, the grass landing strips that had sufficed in the early years of aviation were no longer good enough. And larger airports were space and infrastructure intensive, water was cheaper and didn’t require runway construction.
The big deal soon became international, over water flights. Not that many passengers were involved. Planes carried mail (governments subsidized new international routes), officials and travel elites – and there’s a story to be told here about the changing nature of elite travel to exotic spots, from long, elegant shipboard voyages to much faster airplanes. But in the 1930s, travel in these great flying boats was the peak of luxury.
After WWII, the golden age of flying boats came to an end. During the war, many large new airports were constructed, and governments had built huge land-based aircraft, faster, more reliable and with longer range than the flying boats. Soon, jets would make international travel faster still, more comfortable and more affordable. “Economy class” remade world travel once again.
Navy-Curtis 4, Wikipedia
| A Little Context Air travel expanded after WWI, from rebuilt war planes to purpose-built passenger planes. Washington used airmail contracts to subsidize airline development and passengers were secondary at first. Ford’s Trimotor (the Tin Goose) was one of the first all-metal planes, and the first designed to carry passengers rather than mail. In Europe, national airlines (Lufthansa, Imperial, Air France) drove innovation and sought to capture new routes. But much of airplane development after WWI took place on the water. In 1919 – just 16 years after the Wright brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk – a Navy-Curtis 4, a huge flying boat, made the first staged aerial crossing of the Atlantic, though this involved several planes, multiple landings and repairs and took 19 days. Throughout the 1920s, the attention of governments and airplane manufacturers focused on the Schneider Trophy. Jacques Schneider, a French industrialist, funded the race with the idea of encouraging seaplane development for commercial use. Speed rather than distance or comfort became the dominant factor, however, and the race became a military testing ground. |
| The Golden Age of Air Travel But airlines saw a huge potential in flying boats for long haul travel and governments encouraged new, larger long-range models. The first of the new generation of flying boats were Italian – Italy had been a major contender in the Schneider races – and German. In the 1920s, Italian sea planes made spectacular voyages across the South Atlantic and even to the US. (Germany moved in a different direction, developing huge Zeppelins which provided another form of elegant international air travel.) Italian sea planes were beautiful, but British and US airlines – Imperial and Pan Am – developed new over water passenger routes. By the 1930s, regular air transport between the US and Europe was possible, with new air travel routes opening up to South America, Africa, and Asia. In June 1931, Pan American President Juan Trippe (Pan Am had been forged in 1927 from several small airlines operating in South America) began looking for a plane that could cross oceans. The result was a long relationship with Sikorsky and later Martin. Over the next decade, Pan Am helped design and then purchased successively larger, more luxurious and further ranging flying boats – the Sikorsky S-42 which established new routes in the Caribbean and Latin America; the Martin M-130 which was capable of flying the Pacific with a passengers and mail; and the Boeing B-314 which provided the perfect image of the Pan Am “Clipper”. (Trippe named all of his new flying boats “clippers” to link them with the American clipper ships of the mid-19th century, the queens of ocean traveling sailing ships.) The first Boeing B-314 was delivered to Pan Am in January 1939 and christened the Yankee Clipper. The largest commercial plane until the arrival of the 747, it was a feat of aeronautical luxury, with seating for 74 passengers that converted into sleeping quarters for 36. The 314s had a lounge and dining area, and the galleys were crewed by chefs from four-star hotels and white-coated stewards served five and six-course meals with gleaming silver service. There were separate men’s and women’s dressing rooms and even a honeymoon suite. |
B-314. Life Magazine, August 23, 1937
B-314 “Honeymoon Suite”
Boeing 314 Dining Room
| This was travel for the super-rich, priced at $675 (equivalent to $12,000 in 2020) round trip from New York to Southampton. Most of the flights were transpacific, with a one-way ticket from San Francisco to Hong Kong via the “stepping-stone” islands posted at $760 (equivalent to $14,000 in 2020). The 314 Clippers brought exotic destinations within reach of air travelers and came to represent the romance of flight. Transatlantic flights to neutral Lisbon and Ireland continued after war broke out in Europe in September 1939 (and until 1945), but military passengers and cargoes necessarily got priority, and the service was more spartan. |
| Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia Just six days after plans for the new New York airport were approved by President Roosevelt, Mayor LaGuardia presided over groundbreaking ceremonies and construction proceeded rapidly. At 558 acres and with nearly 4 miles of runways, the $40 million airport was the largest and most expensive in the world. New York Municipal Airport–LaGuardia Field opened on October 15, 1939. Terminal A, the airport’s international terminal, was built to handle seaplanes, namely Pan American Airways’ fleet of Clippers. |
www.atlasobscura.com/places/la-guardias-art-deco-marine-air-terminal
Marine Air Terminal, LaGuardia airport https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/la-guardias-art-deco-marine-air-terminal
| The Marine Air Terminal was designed by the firm Delano & Aldrich and constructed by the Works Progress Administration (this was the WPA’s largest project). The Terminal deserves an essay of its own, but here, we’ll just underline the great mural that circles the interior of the main building, called “light” by the American painter James Brooks (there’s a huge story here about how the mural was covered in the red scare era). The Terminal was dedicated in March 1940; the first flight from the Terminal by a Clipper departed on March 31, 1940, carrying a crew of 10, nine passengers and over 5,000 pounds of mail. It landed in Lisbon, Portugal 18 hours and 30 minutes later. |
| Accomplishments and …. One of the Boeing 314’s most impressive accomplishments came on December 7, 1941. The Pacific Clipper had had just taken off from Honolulu when the Japanese launched their surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Rather than returning to Hawaii and risk being shot down by a Japanese Zero, the Clipper was ordered to fly west to Auckland, New Zealand. Once safely in New Zealand, the aircraft was told to head west to New York, a 31,100-mile flight with stops in Surabaya (Indonesia), Karachi (Pakistan), Bahrain, Khartoum (Sudan), and Leopoldville in the Belgium Congo. On the morning of January 6th, 1942, the landed at LaGuardia Field’s Marine Air Terminal – the first commercial aircraft to successfully circle the globe. The Clippers were a huge technological advance. But bear in mind that range meant little unless the crew, flying over unchartable ocean, knew where to go. Before long range over water flights could commence, Pan Am was deeply involved in creating new navigation technology, basically radio beacons, which allowed the plane to beam in on its target. All Clippers carried an onboard navigator-radio operator (radios were still large assemblies). Another engineering innovation was the ability to “feather” an engine – to shut it down in flight. In case of a problem, the onboard engineer could crawl through a tunnel in the wing to work on an engine while in flight. Finally, for one who has traveled extensively on planes below 10,000 feet, the idea of ploughing along at 5,000 feet at 188 miles an hour for 18 or 19 hours, through whatever weather, without cabin pressurization, seems to me pretty grim, no matter how luxurious the fixings. But I’m still sorry I didn’t have the chance to fly on a Clipper. Stephen Blank RIHS January 16, 2022 |
WEEKEND PHOTO
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FRIDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
Painting titled Escaping Criticism(1874)by Pere Borrell del Caso in trompe l’oeil style.
Laura Hussey and Gloria Herman got it!
Sources
https://www.avjobs.com/history/index.asp
https://simpleflying.com/pan-am-clippers/https://www.clipperflyingboats.com/
http://clipperflying.wpengine.com/pan-am/boeing-b314
Text by Judith Berdy
Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS
Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website
Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
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