Clipper Completes Historic Westbound Journey Around the World
In December 1941, just as Captain Robert Ford and his crew were nearing Auckland, New Zealand, in the Pan American Boeing 314 flying boat Pacific Clipper, they received a message that would change their course: Japanese aircraft had attacked Pearl Harbor.
The entire ocean between them and San Francisco was now a battlefield, and going back the way they came was impossible. So Ford took the bold decision to head westward, right around the world, making the Pacific Clipper the first commercial airliner ever to circle the globe.
The crew of about a dozen, along with a handful of stranded Pan Am staff, had to improvise their journey across uncharted territory without proper charts or fuel. At Surabaya in the Dutch East Indies, they filled up on 76-octane automobile petrol after finding no aviation fuel available.
The engines backfired but kept turning as they continued their perilous journey. They hand-pumped fuel from cans at Darwin and descended through cloud over a surfaced Japanese submarine near Ceylon, which fired a shot that missed the flying boat.
After nearly two days of non-stop flight across the South Atlantic to Brazil, the Pacific Clipper finally landed safely at LaGuardia's Marine Terminal in New York on January 6, 1942. Ford radioed in with the calmness of a man arriving five minutes late for work: 'Pacific Clipper, inbound from Auckland, New Zealand, Captain Ford reporting. Due arrive Pan American Marine Terminal LaGuardia seven minutes.'