Today’s headlines and TV
news are again filled with speculation about Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370.
The Boeing 777 vanished from radar without a trace last year. Discovery of a
777 wing part on Reunion Island off the coast of Africa this week has spawned new
theories of the fate of the plane and the 239 souls aboard. While reading and
watching this new evidence, I was again struck by how eerily similar the MH 370
mystery is to one I uncovered while doing research for my second novel, Hold Back the Sun. I am therefore reprising the blog post I wrote when MH370
disappeared.
Hold Back the Sun begins with a Pan American Clipper flying boat flight across the
Pacific from San Francisco to Manila in the Philippines. When this service was
begun in the 1930s, the Pacific was a vast stretch of open water with few aids
to navigation, as we understand them today. Fuel capacity limited the flights
to daylight island-hopping. Nights were spent in posh hotels ashore. The
four-engine aircraft rode radio beacons from island to island. The price
of a passenger ticket was the equivalent of about $5,000 in today’s currency.
Only airmail contracts with the U.S. government made the flights profitable.
For businessmen, cutting the trans-Pacific travel time from 30 days on a ship
to five days flying made the flights attractive.
The last stop before Manila
was on the U.S. controlled island of Guam. About 136 miles to the north, the
Japanese-owned island of Saipan was home to a major base of the Imperial
Japanese Navy (IJN).
At about 12:15 p.m. Manila
time on July 29, 1938, The Pan Am flying boat, Hawaii Clipper, reported
its noon position by radio to airline stations in Guam and the Philippines. At
that time, the plane was about 582 nautical miles east-southeast of Manila and
on schedule for arrival in the Philippines. No contact with the aircraft ever
occurred after that transmission. The Martin 130 aircraft and its passengers
and crew simply vanished. A widespread air and surface search of the projected
course found no wreckage, but an oil slick was encountered. Samples of the oil
were taken and tested, but proved not to be oil from the aircraft. With
war raging in China and about to begin in Europe, the fate of Hawaii Clipper
and the people aboard soon faded from the news. It remained a total mystery
until the end of the Pacific War.
At about 12:15 p.m. Manila
time on July 29, 1938, The Pan Am flying boat, Hawaii Clipper, reported
its noon position by radio to airline stations in Guam and the Philippines. At
that time, the plane was about 582 nautical miles east-southeast of Manila and
on schedule for arrival in the Philippines. No contact with the aircraft ever
occurred after that transmission. The Martin 130 aircraft and its passengers
and crew simply vanished. A widespread air and surface search of the projected
course found no wreckage, but an oil slick was encountered. Samples of the oil
were taken and tested, but proved not to be oil from the aircraft. With
war raging in China and about to begin in Europe, the fate of Hawaii Clipper
and the people aboard soon faded from the news. It remained a total mystery
until the end of the Pacific War.
The similarities of Hawaii
Clipper’s loss to that of Amelia Earhart barely a year before soon spawned
a number of theories and enthusiasts. In 2000, after many years of
research, Charles N. Hill published a book entitled, FIX ON THE RISING SUN: The
Clipper Hijacking of 1938 –and the Ultimate M.I.A’s. Mr. Hill’s thesis was
that two Saipan IJN officers hid in the plane’s baggage compartment, emerged
soon after liftoff from Guam, and commandeered control of the flight. He
believes that they then diverted the plane to Truk. While enroute, the Japanese
officers supposedly forced the Pan Am navigator, George M. Davis, to file false
position reports to make Pan Am believe that the plane remained on its planned
course. Mr. Hill presents a fairly convincing case that the false position
reports contained clues to point investigators to the actual destination—Truk
Lagoon. Mr. Hill also documented conversations with native people on Truk in
which they told of helping to bury a number of Caucasians in the foundations of
an IJN hospital being built at the time. He was unable to get government
permission to dig under the foundations to test the veracity of the stories.
No comments:
Post a Comment