Right, seeing as I’ve just ruined my reputation by revealing to millions of web surfers that I like soppy romantic comedies, I’d better see what I can do to repair matters. And what could be more blokey than aeroplanes. Yeah, aeroplanes are cool.
I’ve taken somewhat of a fascination lately with the Boeing 314 Clipper. This flying boat was operated by Pan Am on the first ever trans-Atlantic flights between New York and Southampton, my home town.
It all started a couple of summers ago when I bought an add on for Microsoft Flight Simulator that modeled the 314.
Ed Dover, a former radio operator who served on 314s was an advisor on that project, and he wrote a book detailing the true story of a Clipper that had to return home the wrong way around the world after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The Long Way Home is quite hard to come by so I ended up purchasing a signed copy direct from the author. It’s a gripping tale of heroic feats of navigation, engineering, and aviation fuel acquisition!
Just recently I started reading Ken Follet’s Night Over Water – a thriller set on a fictional last flight from Southampton across the Atlantic at the outbreak of WWII. (Commercial flights of the Clipper were reduced after that as the planes were drafted into service).
There’s something particularly romantic about the early days of passenger flights: the 314 was fitted out luxuriously for the extremely rich people who were the only ones who could afford to fly on it (see how we need rich people to pay for innovations like air travel?); there was real danger; real enterprise on the part of companies like Pan Am that were built up without governent subsidies; and people felt real awe at the idea that such huge machines could take to the skies. I expect it was something like the way we will view commercial space travel when it finally gets going. (And when it does I fully expect it to get going in much the same way as commercial aviation did – through enterprising people taking risks).
It seems I’m not alone in my fascination with this huge plane: there are various web sites devoted to it, including one on Aviation-History.com that contains some good photos, and a long article by Steve Cartwright of AVSim.
Today I ordered Last of the Flying Clippers by M.D Klaas, so I expect I will have more to say on this subject when it arrives.