![]() Turner quickly briefed the passengers on the news. Turner decided to land at Hilo on the Big Island of Hawaii, which had a protected harbor and was farthest from Pearl Harbor. ![]() The instructions were clear: Get the aircraft to a safe harbor as quickly as possible, offload the passengers and camouflage the aircraft. Turner immediately pulled out his sealed envelope. A landing there was now out of the question. Bell informed Turner about the bombing and confirmed the attackers were Japanese. It had been an uneventful flight of about 15 hours when Radio Officer W.H. Lanier Turner in command, was flying with a crew of 10 and 17 passengers from San Francisco to Hawaii, the first leg of a 14-day round trip to Singapore, and was within about 40 minutes of a scheduled landing at Pearl Harbor that morning. Another B-314, the Anzac Clipper, with Capt. The Pacific Clipper was one of three Pan Am Clippers airborne over the Pacific at the time of the attack. He immediately briefed the crew that the airline would now be operating on a wartime basis and they would continue to Auckland, New Zealand. Ford reached in his flight bag for the sealed emergency orders that all Pan Am captains had begun carrying when the political situation started to deteriorate in the Far East. “It might have been a mistake or maybe only a test.” “Swede” Rothe, the first engineering officer, recalled later. “It seemed incredible that the news could be true,” Homans K. Then came a simple two-word message: “Plan A.” This was a prearranged signal that meant all Pan Am aircraft in flight were to maintain radio silence, land at their next scheduled destination and await instructions. Poindexter, taking down Morse code dispatches, heard the first reports about the carrier strike on Pearl Harbor. The Pacific Clipper’s trip from San Francisco and Hawaii to Noumea, New Caledonia, had been routine until two hours after its departure from Noumea on December 8 (it was still December 7 in Hawaii).įirst radio operator John D. ![]() It was transferred to the Navy during World War II. The American Clipper taking off in the Potomac River. The landing at New York marked the end of a nearly complete round-the-world flight of more than 31,500 miles. They were told the Pacific Clipper, operating in the Pacific between California and New Zealand, had been forced to deviate from its original flight plan and return from New Zealand by continuing westward because of the December 7, 1941, attack by Japanese naval air forces on Pearl Harbor. ![]() Newspaper reporters seeking information about the unusual arrival were given only the bare facts for security reasons. After hot coffee and a quick breakfast, crew members as well as passengers were interviewed by military intelligence personnel. Once the flying boat was moored, Ford and his 10-man crew and three Pan Am employee-passengers, dressed in summer clothing and clutching blankets to ward off the chilly wind, were quickly moved inside the terminal. More significant at the time, it was the first vessel of any kind to reach the United States from the Pacific war zone. The giant Boeing B-314 landed a little after 7 a.m., completing the longest continuous-and most unusual- flight of a commercial aircraft during the early days of American involvement in WWII.
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