On November 22, 1935, the flying boat known as the China Clipper took flight from Alameda, California and headed west. It was a special flight; the inaugural journey of the newly established Pan-American Airways route between San Francisco and Manila in the Philippines. This flight carried just mail, 111,000 pieces of it, and was meant to show off to the world that these new flying boats were a safe and effective way of getting across the Pacific quickly, which in those days meant about a week.
The China Clipper carried a crew of seven (including Fred Noonan, who would later accompany Amelia Earhart as her navigator on her doomed attempt at circumnavigating the globe), and made four stops between America and the Philippines, all at locations that would later become famous as focal points of the Pacific theater of the Second World War, including Midway, Wake Island, Guam, and Hawaii. The reason it took so long for the plane to travel the distance was because, while it was able to achieve flight, it didn’t actually go that fast. The China Clipper had a top cruising speed of 180 miles per hour, but on this trip they averaged just 125 miles per hour, hardly a distance-shrinking speed when your destination is over 5,000 miles away. Yes, it was faster than a ship, but in comparison to the flights today that travel at over 600 miles per hour, this was still a very early model.
While the China Clipper had the honor of making the first pan-Pacific flight for Pan-Am, it was just one of three clippers they ordered. The second, named the Hawaii Clipper, conducted regular passenger service between San Francisco and Manila for a time, but disappeared between Guam and Manila in the summer of 1938 with a full complement of passengers and crew. Both the China Clipper and the third plane, the Philippine Clipper, conducted passenger flights for a period before being pressed into service during the war as shuttles for naval personnel. The Philippine Clipper crashed in the Northern California hills while carrying several high ranking naval officers back from Hawaii in 1943. The China Clipper suffered a tragic fate as well, crashing and sinking near Trinidad and Tobago in the Atlantic Ocean.
It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that these planes were somehow inherently unsafe, and while they were certainly less reliable than modern jets, for the time they served their purpose well. Between the three of them they logged hundreds of flights and tens of thousands of flight hours. All three planes did crash in service, but both the China Clipper and the Philippines Clipper can attribute their demise to pilot error according to the Civil Aeronautics Board, the investigatory body of the time. Regardless, these three planes represent a transformative era in popular aviation, when it became commonplace to fly around the world for business and for pleasure, and when flying became less of a daredevil’s diversion and more of a fact of life.