Post by RobinK on Jan 22, 2007 18:39:16 GMT 12
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE FLYING-BOAT
"Drat!" (or words to that effect) said the captain on the intercom as he closed the throttles. "Brace, brace, brace", he followed on more urgently; and disconcertingly.
The Sunderland flying-boat settled waterwards and pounded into the face of the next swell. Having too much speed to be a boat but not enough to be a bird, when the machine was thrown off again into the air it just wallowed clumsily. The nose lurched up and a wing dropped. A rapid and coarse application of rudder and aileron arrested the tilt. The machine hit the water a second time, nose high but more or less square on. And it hit hard; a jarring encounter verifying the hitherto half-disbelieved assertion that water is less compressible than dirt.
This time the craft stayed down. Though it wallowed awkwardly during the runout over succeeding swells it did remain afloat and, happily, did so with topsides and keel still in their original relationship. Had the wing not responded to the controls (and to certain impromptu but prayerful imprecations from the cockpit) the float on the low side would likely have been torn off, in which case the design margins would have been much more sorely tested.
The date was 26 April 1960. The place was Kwajalein, in the Marshall Islands of the central Pacific. The occasion was an attempt to take off from the lagoon in RNZAF Sunderland NZ4113. The aircraft was one of several from Laucala Bay and Hobsonville, then en route via Tarawa, Kwajalein, Guam and Sangley Point to Seletar in Singapore for the SEATO maritime Exercise "Sealion" in the South China Sea.
The base at Kwajalein hosted a squadron of US Navy Martin P5M “Marlin” amphibians at that time. The lagoon is not fully enclosed by the reef, however. Gaps lie open to the long Pacific swell, through which it can invade.
Within reason, short-period chop was normally little problem for flying-boats. But this was not so for longer-period swell, which could be critical, especially for such as the Sunderland. Though it was less the case for the more robust Marlin, here is to be found one of the reasons the flying-boat would not mature in either military or commercial service.
The land-plane, of course, had advantages other than never having to tame the authority of the sea. In the end it would turn out to be much simpler and cheaper to provide the necessary terminal and other infrastructure support wholly on land than to bridge from land to seadrome. Ready accessibility was the key. Wheeled support vehicles, permanent fuel reticulation, accessible maintenance hangars, passenger and freight handling facilities and many other things all had (and have) a huge advantage of convenience over the complications of floating support tenders, refuelling barges, routine aircraft preparation in the open whilst afloat at an anchor or a buoy, and the awkwardness of transferring passengers and freight across a water gap, no matter how short, from dock to flying machine.
In general aircraft maintenance there was also the problem that sea water and the alloys used in aircraft construction are sworn foes. Salt water corrosion of aircraft body parts, propellers and engines was an intractable additional technical burden in the case of the flying-boat. This is a principal reason why mating a gas turbine engine to a seaplane was never really successful, though several attempts were made to do it. The metallurgical hi-tech in the gizzard of such engines was simply unequal to gallons of salt water swallowed during takeoff and landing.
Until a land-based network was established, however, and across the broad expanse of the Pacific in particular, the flying-boat had the running. Given that the range capabilities of the longest-range aircraft of early days was still very short in the terms of today, the scattered Pacific atoll lagoons offered a prospect of usable haven to a youthful international aviation industry. And, in the 1930s as the industry began to take off as it were, expectations did lie with flying-boats. But the war lay just ahead. When it ended it had exposed the comparative advantage of the landplane so emphatically that the balance had shifted. The flying-boat would never become a truly competitive people-shifter in mass. This result would have happened anyway of course, but the war made it happen sooner.
In 1935, however, the war and its outcomes were still in the future, and a usable land airfield network across the huge Pacific was barely conceivable. Accordingly, in November that year a US-NZ Air Agreement was signed, authorising Pan American Airways to begin regular services between San Francisco and Auckland. The route would be via Honolulu, Kingman Reef in the Northern Line Group and Pago Pago. An earlier proposal that (the British) Imperial Airways should operate trans-Tasman services through a New Zealand-based company had already been ratified by the Australian, British and New Zealand Governments. Nevertheless, unlike Australia for which Britain was most conveniently west-about, New Zealand at the 180th meridian was more inclined to take a bob each way and look at least equally to an east-about route through the Pacific.
In March 1937 a Sikorsky S42B flying boat made the proving Pacific flight. The captain was Edwin Musick whose name was given to a point of land in Auckland Harbour. The first scheduled flight, also with Captain Musick, was in December 1937. In the same month an Imperial Airways flying-boat arrived from Britain via Australia and the Tasman route.
The experimental Pacific route had practical shortcomings, however; and alternatives were sought. This led to some diplomatic shadow-boxing between Britain and the United States as each sought to establish sufficient authority over possible island waystations to support regular national flying-boat traffic across the long oceanic expanses. For example, in 1937 there occurred the Canton Island incident (Canton Island is in the Phoenix Group, east and slightly south of Tarawa).
HMS Wellington, a Grimsby-class sloop on the (then) New Zealand Station of the Royal Navy, arrived at Canton on 26 May. She had visited Suva en route where she had represented the RN at the Coronation celebrations there. Her declared purpose at Canton was threefold: to act as a base ship for the New Zealand Total Solar Eclipse Expedition, to carry out a sextant survey for Admiralty charts, and to plant a substantial number of coconut palms. But events suggested that a fourth, less candid item also lay on the agenda.
On arrival at Canton Wellington found that the only secure anchorage was already occupied by USS Avocet, a US Navy seaplane tender according to reports in the National Geographic of September 1937, but a minesweeper according to Wellington's own report. Avocet was there for like purposes, to provide a base and support for an American solar eclipse observation mission jointly sponsored by the National Geographic Society and the US Navy.
Earlier on 18 March that year the British Ambassador to the United States had handed to the US Government a copy of an Order-in-Council whereby Canton and other islands had been incorporated into the Gilbert and Ellice Islands colony (Evening Post, 20 July 1937). The Captain of HMS Wellington was aware before arriving at Canton that the Americans were already there, having been alerted during passage by SS Niagara and SS Aorangi. He asked USS Avocet to yield the anchorage since Wellington needed it for safety reasons (she was the larger ship and claimed to need the room), and because the Phoenix Group had been declared British colonial territory which gave the British ship preference over others.
Avocet declined, citing incapacity during an engine overhaul programme then in hand. The US Navy Captain in charge of the US naval party said he had been told in Honolulu of the British Order-in-Council. The American expedition had, he said, previously asked the State Department to obtain permission from the British Government to land at Canton. The State Department, however, had advised that no prior permission was required because the ownership of Canton and the Enderby Islands was undecided, and the State Department did not anyway recognise British sovereignty over them.
Wellington moored nearby, having obtained an assurance that if her safety was indeed imperilled then Avocet's engine overhaul would be interrupted and the ship would move. As it happened Wellington did drag her anchor and was obliged to go to another anchorage; this time to a safer position. Force of circumstance thus very much weakened the original contention that Avocet was occupying the only anchorage safely available to Wellington.
After the strained start the relationships between the two parties developed in a cooperative and cordial manner. Facilities were shared. The American Captain showed the engineer officer of Wellington a four-foot high concrete plinth with National Geographic Society commemorative medallions and two two-foot American flags enamelled on iron embedded into it. Wellington's report mentions in passing that no attempt had been made to interfere with the "proclamation of ownership" boards left by HMS Leith in 1936 and earlier in 1937; the Union Jack also left by Leith was still flying, though tattered. Wellington herself left another proclamation board, nailed to a coconut tree; and on high ground a brick structure four feet high (the same height as the American plinth) with galvanised iron plates let into it bearing a painted Union Jack. Wellington also planted 3,000 coconut palms brought from Suva for the purpose.
[An extract from a broadcast made on 16 May 1937 by a commentator of the National Broadcasting Corporation of America who was attached to the American expedition is said to be: “Before us are the nine palms, with their fronds bent and twisted all in one direction from the constant East wind, and between two trees is planted a tattered British flag on a staff and two water boxes, with the words painted on their sides 'New Zealand Eclipse Expedition of 1937'. Nailed against one trunk and partly obliterated already is a sign on which we can read 'This island belongs to His Britannic Majesty King Edward VIII'". Two things seem not quite right about this, however. It could not be that HMS Wellington had placed the 1937 Expedition notice before 16 May, because she did not arrive until the 26th. And, had the American commentator been more familiar with matters Royal he might have spotted another anachronism in the conclusions he sought to have his audience believe. The Royal "ownership" sign was weatherbeaten and the flag tattered not because the elements had got at them in short order, but because they been put there the year before, preceding the Abdication. Had the sign been placed by the 1937 expedition it would have read George VI, not Edward VIII.]
Meantime members of the New Zealand civilian scientific party had elicited from their American counterparts the opinion that Canton would "unquestionably" become an air port in the near future. Wellington's Captain reported his own opinion that with a certain amount of coral blasting large stretches of the lagoon could be cleared for a flying-boat seaway. A landing ground could also be established on the north west corner of the island without much difficulty.
On 29 June an immediate message was sent from the Commodore Commanding New Zealand Station to the Secretary of the Admiralty reporting these events. He intended to visit the Phoenix Group in HMS Achilles during the first week in August. He speculated that the sudden decision by the American Government to send the expedition to Canton might have been the result of an unfavourable report from the experimental flight to New Zealand on the intermediate bases at Kingman Reef and Pago Pago, which seemed to be unsuitable for the heavy flying boats which Pan American Airways intended to use. Canton was more attractive because it was approximately half way between Honolulu and New Zealand; it had reasonable land facilities for stores etc; it could be made suitable for heavy flying boats and possibly land planes; and ownership by the United States "appears to them to be possible". He remarked that the development of civil aviation in the South Pacific was bound to come, and that the American Government was extremely anxious to extend its commanding position in the North Pacific into the South as well, both for the purposes of defence and in order to have a well-established company by the time a paying service was possible. He was convinced that the Americans would soon try to obtain possession of Canton Island; and he sought an indication of British Government policy.
In the New Zealand Herald of 9 July 1937 there appeared a number of articles reporting the "Naval Incidents" at Canton (it appears from an apology to the Naval Office in Wellington by the civilian expedition leader that a member of his party had been "indiscreet" in speaking to the Press).
As background, the articles included a report from Sydney that a sea captain with the trading company Burns Philp who had visited the Phoenix Group in 1882 in the Auckland barquentine Isabel felt that the Americans had some right to Howland and Baker Islands since there were large boards there, erected in 1840, announcing that they belonged to somebody called Williams of Connecticut. Another captain who had visited there "30 years ago" opined that they were the last places anybody would have wanted.
The main report in the Herald covered in some detail, and with accuracy, the anchorage incident and the increasing density of declaratory notice boards, national flags, monuments and other devices purporting to underscore sovereignty. Mr Peter Fraser, Acting Prime Minister, said the Government had been unaware of the incidents referred to, but that when the information was received it had immediately been transmitted to the British authorities who were responsible for the control of the Pacific Islands. New Zealand was, however, vitally interested in transpacific aviation, and questions concerning British sovereignty in the Pacific area had been the subject of representations to the Home (sic) authorities.
Subsequently the Herald and the Evening Post printed opinions by a professor of international law at Sydney University on matters of ownership of the islands. The Post also printed a report of a question in the House of Commons bearing on the communication to the United States notifying the Order-in-Council. A Labour Member had asked whether any steps were being taken to avoid the recurrence of an unpleasant incident. The Foreign Secretary, Mr Eden, said he would deprecate any suggestion that there had been an unpleasant incident. Had a reply been received from the United States? Mr Eden said he did not think the communication in question requested a reply. The Colonial Secretary, Mr Ormsby-Gore, in respect of the American assertion at Canton that the American Government did not admit British sovereignty there, had said the position thus disclosed was being considered.
The Pacific Island Monthly expanded upon the new-found interest in hitherto unpopulated Pacific islands of questionable economic interest. As had others, the journal saw this as a precursor to the future establishment of air routes. In addition it reported renewed interest in other commercial activities, including an intention by Burns Philp to start operations in the Phoenix Group. And it reported that on 26 July a Mr William Cowie, a wireless operator formerly of the British Colonial Office in Suva, had embarked in HMS Achilles to go to Christmas Island (then under lease by the British to a French copra company) with replacement radio equipment of greater power, the better to keep in touch with Fanning Island and Suva. The picture accompanying this article has Mr Cowie in mid-stride with his bull-terrier on a lead standing four-square to the camera, against a backdrop of a ceremonial life ring bearing the blazon of HMS Achilles. The caption, it may be thought, strayed toward the lurid in saying that the man and his dog were to hold Christmas Island for John Bull against Uncle Sam. Mr Cowie, it was reported, insisted that the pose was accidental and not symbolical.
Thus, at the time and in the absence of land-based aviation infrastructure - and indeed for some time after the intercession of the Second World War - the flying-boat seemed ideally suited to the Pacific, and Britain and the United States were jockeying for handholds. The underlying assumptions seemed to dismiss concern about lack of airfields. After all it was true, was it not, that the Pacific Ocean was mostly water? And it was true that water was a medium upon which the flying-boat was designed to float? To the general public the symbiosis was comforting in safety terms during an age when neither the reliability nor the range capabilities of airborne machinery was what it is today. If something went wrong the aircraft would surely be able to put down on the ocean, of which there was plenty to spare.
Unfortunately, this comfort was based on an unsound assumption. The flying-boat was in fact neither boat nor bird. The design and construction had to be a compromise between ship and aircraft and, as in many such cases, the compromises can bring out what is not good as much as what is good.
On the one hand because it was an aircraft and weight saving was important, the flying-boat had to be constructed to aviation engineering standards using lightweight aviation materials. Giving it the strength and robustness of shipbuilder's plate steel was not possible. On the other hand because it was a boat it needed a planing hull in a shape designed for water, not for air, but with awkwardly un-shiplike appendages of wings and tail attached to it. As the call increased for better designs with lower coefficients of drag to allow higher airspeeds and greater ranges at higher altitudes - and in that latter regard the additional engineering problems of sealing a flying-boat hull for pressurized operation at altitude were considerable - so the shape of the planing hull became an increasingly serious impediment.
Finally, the need for higher and more efficient engine power to deliver improved range and speed soon outstripped the capabilities of the reciprocating engine. Gas turbines either as turboprops or as jets replaced the big and heavy reciprocating radials, and their metallurgy did not tolerate brine. Thus the attempts to develop large flying-boats such as Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose (or even comparable land-planes such as the Bristol Brabazon in Britain) using reciprocating engine technology owed more to faith than to reason. These were not visions ahead of their time, but were unimaginative attempts to clone the past as the future. They were fascinating, eccentric and impractical. They failed.
Beyond that, the story that opened this chapter illustrates the danger of assuming too much of flying-boats. Normally they could not operate from the open sea, or could do so only in the best of conditions. They needed sheltered waters to be safe. Both the takeoff and the landing could be problematical in anything other than a medium, short-period chop. A long-period swell of any significant amplitude could throw the aircraft off the surface before the aerodynamic controls could bite the air and before the wing was ready to fly, as was the case at Kwajalein.
A couple of notes to end this tale.
About a month after the incident on Canton, USS Avocet was involved in searching for Amelia Earhart's Electra, which was presumed missing in the vicinity of Howland Island to the northwest of Canton. There are tales, too, that HMS Achilles, also of the New Zealand Station, was in the vicinity but that neither she nor her Walrus was asked by the Americans to assist in the search – this is unconfirmed, but one American source suggests that “There had been some ludicrous performances on the island involving flags and some pretty tense diplomatic exchanges between Washington and Whitehall. Perhaps, in the wake of all that, the Americans were not about to ask a British ship to conduct a search in that same island group.” We shall never know, but what we might observe is that at the very time the two Powers were arm-wrestling over potential seaplane bases, Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan lost their lives trying to show they weren't necessary.
A second point to reflect upon is that the 1984 row between New Zealand and the United States Navy was not the first time they had disagreed!
"Drat!" (or words to that effect) said the captain on the intercom as he closed the throttles. "Brace, brace, brace", he followed on more urgently; and disconcertingly.
The Sunderland flying-boat settled waterwards and pounded into the face of the next swell. Having too much speed to be a boat but not enough to be a bird, when the machine was thrown off again into the air it just wallowed clumsily. The nose lurched up and a wing dropped. A rapid and coarse application of rudder and aileron arrested the tilt. The machine hit the water a second time, nose high but more or less square on. And it hit hard; a jarring encounter verifying the hitherto half-disbelieved assertion that water is less compressible than dirt.
This time the craft stayed down. Though it wallowed awkwardly during the runout over succeeding swells it did remain afloat and, happily, did so with topsides and keel still in their original relationship. Had the wing not responded to the controls (and to certain impromptu but prayerful imprecations from the cockpit) the float on the low side would likely have been torn off, in which case the design margins would have been much more sorely tested.
The date was 26 April 1960. The place was Kwajalein, in the Marshall Islands of the central Pacific. The occasion was an attempt to take off from the lagoon in RNZAF Sunderland NZ4113. The aircraft was one of several from Laucala Bay and Hobsonville, then en route via Tarawa, Kwajalein, Guam and Sangley Point to Seletar in Singapore for the SEATO maritime Exercise "Sealion" in the South China Sea.
The base at Kwajalein hosted a squadron of US Navy Martin P5M “Marlin” amphibians at that time. The lagoon is not fully enclosed by the reef, however. Gaps lie open to the long Pacific swell, through which it can invade.
Within reason, short-period chop was normally little problem for flying-boats. But this was not so for longer-period swell, which could be critical, especially for such as the Sunderland. Though it was less the case for the more robust Marlin, here is to be found one of the reasons the flying-boat would not mature in either military or commercial service.
The land-plane, of course, had advantages other than never having to tame the authority of the sea. In the end it would turn out to be much simpler and cheaper to provide the necessary terminal and other infrastructure support wholly on land than to bridge from land to seadrome. Ready accessibility was the key. Wheeled support vehicles, permanent fuel reticulation, accessible maintenance hangars, passenger and freight handling facilities and many other things all had (and have) a huge advantage of convenience over the complications of floating support tenders, refuelling barges, routine aircraft preparation in the open whilst afloat at an anchor or a buoy, and the awkwardness of transferring passengers and freight across a water gap, no matter how short, from dock to flying machine.
In general aircraft maintenance there was also the problem that sea water and the alloys used in aircraft construction are sworn foes. Salt water corrosion of aircraft body parts, propellers and engines was an intractable additional technical burden in the case of the flying-boat. This is a principal reason why mating a gas turbine engine to a seaplane was never really successful, though several attempts were made to do it. The metallurgical hi-tech in the gizzard of such engines was simply unequal to gallons of salt water swallowed during takeoff and landing.
Until a land-based network was established, however, and across the broad expanse of the Pacific in particular, the flying-boat had the running. Given that the range capabilities of the longest-range aircraft of early days was still very short in the terms of today, the scattered Pacific atoll lagoons offered a prospect of usable haven to a youthful international aviation industry. And, in the 1930s as the industry began to take off as it were, expectations did lie with flying-boats. But the war lay just ahead. When it ended it had exposed the comparative advantage of the landplane so emphatically that the balance had shifted. The flying-boat would never become a truly competitive people-shifter in mass. This result would have happened anyway of course, but the war made it happen sooner.
In 1935, however, the war and its outcomes were still in the future, and a usable land airfield network across the huge Pacific was barely conceivable. Accordingly, in November that year a US-NZ Air Agreement was signed, authorising Pan American Airways to begin regular services between San Francisco and Auckland. The route would be via Honolulu, Kingman Reef in the Northern Line Group and Pago Pago. An earlier proposal that (the British) Imperial Airways should operate trans-Tasman services through a New Zealand-based company had already been ratified by the Australian, British and New Zealand Governments. Nevertheless, unlike Australia for which Britain was most conveniently west-about, New Zealand at the 180th meridian was more inclined to take a bob each way and look at least equally to an east-about route through the Pacific.
In March 1937 a Sikorsky S42B flying boat made the proving Pacific flight. The captain was Edwin Musick whose name was given to a point of land in Auckland Harbour. The first scheduled flight, also with Captain Musick, was in December 1937. In the same month an Imperial Airways flying-boat arrived from Britain via Australia and the Tasman route.
The experimental Pacific route had practical shortcomings, however; and alternatives were sought. This led to some diplomatic shadow-boxing between Britain and the United States as each sought to establish sufficient authority over possible island waystations to support regular national flying-boat traffic across the long oceanic expanses. For example, in 1937 there occurred the Canton Island incident (Canton Island is in the Phoenix Group, east and slightly south of Tarawa).
HMS Wellington, a Grimsby-class sloop on the (then) New Zealand Station of the Royal Navy, arrived at Canton on 26 May. She had visited Suva en route where she had represented the RN at the Coronation celebrations there. Her declared purpose at Canton was threefold: to act as a base ship for the New Zealand Total Solar Eclipse Expedition, to carry out a sextant survey for Admiralty charts, and to plant a substantial number of coconut palms. But events suggested that a fourth, less candid item also lay on the agenda.
On arrival at Canton Wellington found that the only secure anchorage was already occupied by USS Avocet, a US Navy seaplane tender according to reports in the National Geographic of September 1937, but a minesweeper according to Wellington's own report. Avocet was there for like purposes, to provide a base and support for an American solar eclipse observation mission jointly sponsored by the National Geographic Society and the US Navy.
Earlier on 18 March that year the British Ambassador to the United States had handed to the US Government a copy of an Order-in-Council whereby Canton and other islands had been incorporated into the Gilbert and Ellice Islands colony (Evening Post, 20 July 1937). The Captain of HMS Wellington was aware before arriving at Canton that the Americans were already there, having been alerted during passage by SS Niagara and SS Aorangi. He asked USS Avocet to yield the anchorage since Wellington needed it for safety reasons (she was the larger ship and claimed to need the room), and because the Phoenix Group had been declared British colonial territory which gave the British ship preference over others.
Avocet declined, citing incapacity during an engine overhaul programme then in hand. The US Navy Captain in charge of the US naval party said he had been told in Honolulu of the British Order-in-Council. The American expedition had, he said, previously asked the State Department to obtain permission from the British Government to land at Canton. The State Department, however, had advised that no prior permission was required because the ownership of Canton and the Enderby Islands was undecided, and the State Department did not anyway recognise British sovereignty over them.
Wellington moored nearby, having obtained an assurance that if her safety was indeed imperilled then Avocet's engine overhaul would be interrupted and the ship would move. As it happened Wellington did drag her anchor and was obliged to go to another anchorage; this time to a safer position. Force of circumstance thus very much weakened the original contention that Avocet was occupying the only anchorage safely available to Wellington.
After the strained start the relationships between the two parties developed in a cooperative and cordial manner. Facilities were shared. The American Captain showed the engineer officer of Wellington a four-foot high concrete plinth with National Geographic Society commemorative medallions and two two-foot American flags enamelled on iron embedded into it. Wellington's report mentions in passing that no attempt had been made to interfere with the "proclamation of ownership" boards left by HMS Leith in 1936 and earlier in 1937; the Union Jack also left by Leith was still flying, though tattered. Wellington herself left another proclamation board, nailed to a coconut tree; and on high ground a brick structure four feet high (the same height as the American plinth) with galvanised iron plates let into it bearing a painted Union Jack. Wellington also planted 3,000 coconut palms brought from Suva for the purpose.
[An extract from a broadcast made on 16 May 1937 by a commentator of the National Broadcasting Corporation of America who was attached to the American expedition is said to be: “Before us are the nine palms, with their fronds bent and twisted all in one direction from the constant East wind, and between two trees is planted a tattered British flag on a staff and two water boxes, with the words painted on their sides 'New Zealand Eclipse Expedition of 1937'. Nailed against one trunk and partly obliterated already is a sign on which we can read 'This island belongs to His Britannic Majesty King Edward VIII'". Two things seem not quite right about this, however. It could not be that HMS Wellington had placed the 1937 Expedition notice before 16 May, because she did not arrive until the 26th. And, had the American commentator been more familiar with matters Royal he might have spotted another anachronism in the conclusions he sought to have his audience believe. The Royal "ownership" sign was weatherbeaten and the flag tattered not because the elements had got at them in short order, but because they been put there the year before, preceding the Abdication. Had the sign been placed by the 1937 expedition it would have read George VI, not Edward VIII.]
Meantime members of the New Zealand civilian scientific party had elicited from their American counterparts the opinion that Canton would "unquestionably" become an air port in the near future. Wellington's Captain reported his own opinion that with a certain amount of coral blasting large stretches of the lagoon could be cleared for a flying-boat seaway. A landing ground could also be established on the north west corner of the island without much difficulty.
On 29 June an immediate message was sent from the Commodore Commanding New Zealand Station to the Secretary of the Admiralty reporting these events. He intended to visit the Phoenix Group in HMS Achilles during the first week in August. He speculated that the sudden decision by the American Government to send the expedition to Canton might have been the result of an unfavourable report from the experimental flight to New Zealand on the intermediate bases at Kingman Reef and Pago Pago, which seemed to be unsuitable for the heavy flying boats which Pan American Airways intended to use. Canton was more attractive because it was approximately half way between Honolulu and New Zealand; it had reasonable land facilities for stores etc; it could be made suitable for heavy flying boats and possibly land planes; and ownership by the United States "appears to them to be possible". He remarked that the development of civil aviation in the South Pacific was bound to come, and that the American Government was extremely anxious to extend its commanding position in the North Pacific into the South as well, both for the purposes of defence and in order to have a well-established company by the time a paying service was possible. He was convinced that the Americans would soon try to obtain possession of Canton Island; and he sought an indication of British Government policy.
In the New Zealand Herald of 9 July 1937 there appeared a number of articles reporting the "Naval Incidents" at Canton (it appears from an apology to the Naval Office in Wellington by the civilian expedition leader that a member of his party had been "indiscreet" in speaking to the Press).
As background, the articles included a report from Sydney that a sea captain with the trading company Burns Philp who had visited the Phoenix Group in 1882 in the Auckland barquentine Isabel felt that the Americans had some right to Howland and Baker Islands since there were large boards there, erected in 1840, announcing that they belonged to somebody called Williams of Connecticut. Another captain who had visited there "30 years ago" opined that they were the last places anybody would have wanted.
The main report in the Herald covered in some detail, and with accuracy, the anchorage incident and the increasing density of declaratory notice boards, national flags, monuments and other devices purporting to underscore sovereignty. Mr Peter Fraser, Acting Prime Minister, said the Government had been unaware of the incidents referred to, but that when the information was received it had immediately been transmitted to the British authorities who were responsible for the control of the Pacific Islands. New Zealand was, however, vitally interested in transpacific aviation, and questions concerning British sovereignty in the Pacific area had been the subject of representations to the Home (sic) authorities.
Subsequently the Herald and the Evening Post printed opinions by a professor of international law at Sydney University on matters of ownership of the islands. The Post also printed a report of a question in the House of Commons bearing on the communication to the United States notifying the Order-in-Council. A Labour Member had asked whether any steps were being taken to avoid the recurrence of an unpleasant incident. The Foreign Secretary, Mr Eden, said he would deprecate any suggestion that there had been an unpleasant incident. Had a reply been received from the United States? Mr Eden said he did not think the communication in question requested a reply. The Colonial Secretary, Mr Ormsby-Gore, in respect of the American assertion at Canton that the American Government did not admit British sovereignty there, had said the position thus disclosed was being considered.
The Pacific Island Monthly expanded upon the new-found interest in hitherto unpopulated Pacific islands of questionable economic interest. As had others, the journal saw this as a precursor to the future establishment of air routes. In addition it reported renewed interest in other commercial activities, including an intention by Burns Philp to start operations in the Phoenix Group. And it reported that on 26 July a Mr William Cowie, a wireless operator formerly of the British Colonial Office in Suva, had embarked in HMS Achilles to go to Christmas Island (then under lease by the British to a French copra company) with replacement radio equipment of greater power, the better to keep in touch with Fanning Island and Suva. The picture accompanying this article has Mr Cowie in mid-stride with his bull-terrier on a lead standing four-square to the camera, against a backdrop of a ceremonial life ring bearing the blazon of HMS Achilles. The caption, it may be thought, strayed toward the lurid in saying that the man and his dog were to hold Christmas Island for John Bull against Uncle Sam. Mr Cowie, it was reported, insisted that the pose was accidental and not symbolical.
Thus, at the time and in the absence of land-based aviation infrastructure - and indeed for some time after the intercession of the Second World War - the flying-boat seemed ideally suited to the Pacific, and Britain and the United States were jockeying for handholds. The underlying assumptions seemed to dismiss concern about lack of airfields. After all it was true, was it not, that the Pacific Ocean was mostly water? And it was true that water was a medium upon which the flying-boat was designed to float? To the general public the symbiosis was comforting in safety terms during an age when neither the reliability nor the range capabilities of airborne machinery was what it is today. If something went wrong the aircraft would surely be able to put down on the ocean, of which there was plenty to spare.
Unfortunately, this comfort was based on an unsound assumption. The flying-boat was in fact neither boat nor bird. The design and construction had to be a compromise between ship and aircraft and, as in many such cases, the compromises can bring out what is not good as much as what is good.
On the one hand because it was an aircraft and weight saving was important, the flying-boat had to be constructed to aviation engineering standards using lightweight aviation materials. Giving it the strength and robustness of shipbuilder's plate steel was not possible. On the other hand because it was a boat it needed a planing hull in a shape designed for water, not for air, but with awkwardly un-shiplike appendages of wings and tail attached to it. As the call increased for better designs with lower coefficients of drag to allow higher airspeeds and greater ranges at higher altitudes - and in that latter regard the additional engineering problems of sealing a flying-boat hull for pressurized operation at altitude were considerable - so the shape of the planing hull became an increasingly serious impediment.
Finally, the need for higher and more efficient engine power to deliver improved range and speed soon outstripped the capabilities of the reciprocating engine. Gas turbines either as turboprops or as jets replaced the big and heavy reciprocating radials, and their metallurgy did not tolerate brine. Thus the attempts to develop large flying-boats such as Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose (or even comparable land-planes such as the Bristol Brabazon in Britain) using reciprocating engine technology owed more to faith than to reason. These were not visions ahead of their time, but were unimaginative attempts to clone the past as the future. They were fascinating, eccentric and impractical. They failed.
Beyond that, the story that opened this chapter illustrates the danger of assuming too much of flying-boats. Normally they could not operate from the open sea, or could do so only in the best of conditions. They needed sheltered waters to be safe. Both the takeoff and the landing could be problematical in anything other than a medium, short-period chop. A long-period swell of any significant amplitude could throw the aircraft off the surface before the aerodynamic controls could bite the air and before the wing was ready to fly, as was the case at Kwajalein.
A couple of notes to end this tale.
About a month after the incident on Canton, USS Avocet was involved in searching for Amelia Earhart's Electra, which was presumed missing in the vicinity of Howland Island to the northwest of Canton. There are tales, too, that HMS Achilles, also of the New Zealand Station, was in the vicinity but that neither she nor her Walrus was asked by the Americans to assist in the search – this is unconfirmed, but one American source suggests that “There had been some ludicrous performances on the island involving flags and some pretty tense diplomatic exchanges between Washington and Whitehall. Perhaps, in the wake of all that, the Americans were not about to ask a British ship to conduct a search in that same island group.” We shall never know, but what we might observe is that at the very time the two Powers were arm-wrestling over potential seaplane bases, Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan lost their lives trying to show they weren't necessary.
A second point to reflect upon is that the 1984 row between New Zealand and the United States Navy was not the first time they had disagreed!
