In November 1937, Gaumont British released its latest action drama. Non Stop New York was in many ways a typical British crime caper of the 30s with an assortment of eccentric crooks, a breezy heroine (Anna Lee) and a handsome police detective (John Loder). What was not typical was its setting; aboard a transatlantic commercial flying boat. Not only was the setting novel, the concept itself was still more science fiction than scientific fact. At the time of the film’s release, no heavier-than-air passenger craft was capable of making a non-stop flight from Europe to America. However, by setting one of its films aboard a commercial flying boat, Gaumont was reflecting contemporary technical endeavours on both sides of the Atlantic to make this fiction a reality. Non-stop to New York by flying boat was in fact only a couple of years away. These pages look at the aviation context from which this now largely forgotten British film was born.
Flying boats had a military history almost as long as land-based planes, being utilised in numerous operations during the Great War. They had also proved to be valuable tools of oceanic and polar exploration. However, it wasn’t until the late 1920s that their commercial potential began to be appreciated. In 1928, Imperial Airways began operating a flying boat on the Mediterranean leg of its regular service to the Indian subcontinent. The Short S8 Calcutta was a triple-engine biplane capable of carrying three crew and 15 passengers up to a distance of 650 miles.
However, the market leader in flying boat design in the 1920s was undoubtedly Dornier. The Dornier Do J ‘Wal’ (Whale) was the German company’s most successful aircraft, more than 250 of various types being produced in various European countries and Japan and operated worldwide from 1922 up until the late 30s. The Wal was markedly different in design to the Calcutta, having a strut-braced parasol wing, atop which was mounted a single engine with twin push-pull propellers. Hull buoyancy and stability was enhanced by the addition of sponsons below the wing. Despite its limited range (500 miles), the Wal pioneered a number of indirect transatlantic routes taking advantage of intermediate landfall. By 1935, Lufthansa was operating Wals on their regular airmail service between West Africa and Brazil, the aircraft relying on a pair of mid-ocean freighters for navigation and refuelling purposes.
The Wal was a midget compared to the six-engine behemoth operated by Atlantic Airways in the Gaumont film; ‘a transatlantic airplane’, mocked The New York Times film reviewer, ‘as richly imaginative as a front-cover of Popular Science or a Buck Rogers space ship’. The reviewer had clearly forgotten events seven years earlier when a transatlantic airplane every bit as imaginative had touched down on the Hudson. The Dornier Do X was undoubtedly the first flying boat to approach the ambition of Gaumont’s model-making department. Its unprecedented six engines (12 propellers) matched the configuration of the Gaumont flying boat (incorrectly drawn with one fewer engines in the film’s publicity posters). Curiously however, aboard the German boat, the engines were controlled separately in the style of a ship by an engineer. As with the Gaumont model, the hull of the Do X was connected directly to the upper wing. At 48 metres, this was twice the span of the Do J, making it by far the largest aircraft in the world at the time of its completion in 1929. An early test flight over Lake Constance proved it was capable of carrying 150 passengers.
In November 1930, the year following the celebrated visit of the airship Graf Zeppelin, the Do X prototype took off from Friedrichshafen on a similar flag-waving voyage to New York. The flight was no less eventful, a fire grounding the aircraft for six weeks in Lisbon. Other technical issues along the flight path, which took in the Cape Verde Islands, Natal in Brazil, and San Juan in Puerto Rico, delayed the plane’s arrival until August of 1931. Nevertheless, the flying boat was greeted with great fanfare, and its nine-month maintenance stop at Glenn Curtiss Airport attracted thousands of curious sightseers.
Although there were no commercial takers for Dornier’s impractically cumbersome and unreliable ‘Flugschiff’ (flying ship), the event evidently spurred American flying boat development. Looking for a viable commercial design, Pan-American Airways had approached Russian-born aviation pioneer Igor Sikorsky. His first prototype, the S-40, test flown by Charles Lindbergh, was not deemed sufficiently aerodynamic; the aircraft’s large number of external wire and strut bracings earning it the moniker ‘Flying Forest’. Sikorsky’s follow-up design, the S-42, was, however, much better received by the company. Four Pratt & Witney radial engines moulded to the parasol wing gave the S-42 a top speed of 300km/h and a range of around 3,000km. The aeroplane had a distinctive double tail and underwing floats. Introduced in 1934, the ten aircraft built for Pan-Am opened up pioneering routes across the Pacific via Hawaii and New Zealand to China, their clean lines and speed leading the company to adopt the complimentary nautical term ‘clipper’ for these trans-oceanic services.
The S-42 had a serious rival for Pan-Am’s expanding airmail and passenger business in the M-130, a flying boat built by the Glenn L. Martin Company. The aircraft had similar dimensions and used the same engine configuration, although superior dynamics gave it an even greater range. Three units of this flying boat, dubbed the ‘China’, ‘Philippine’, and ‘Hawaii’ Clippers, swiftly superseded the S-42 on certain transpacific services. Such pioneering aviation made heroes of flying boat pilots, one of them, Ed Musick appearing on the cover of Time Magazine in December 1935. But transoceanic flight was not without its hazards, two American flying boats being lost en route in 1938, Musick and six crew members perishing when their S-42 ‘Samoan Clipper’ crashed near Pago Pago in January of that year.[1]
While Pan-Am blazed a trail across the Pacific, the company’s attempts to set up a transatlantic service were hampered by a British refusal to grant landing rights on its controlled territories until Imperial Airways could service the same routes with its own comparable machines. In 1934, the British government had issued a directive that all overseas mail was to be carried by air, prompting Imperial Airways to make a large order for flying boats of an improved design from Short Brothers. The first of these aircraft, the S-23 ‘Empire’, flew on 4th July 1936. Powered by four wing-mounted Bristol Pegasus Xc radial engines, the Empire was markedly inferior to its American contemporaries in terms of endurance. Nevertheless, a year later, only months after the destruction of the Hindenburg had eliminated the airship as a commercial rival, the first reciprocal crossing of the Atlantic by an Empire flying boat and an S-42 Clipper was achieved on a route from Foynes in Ireland to Botwood in Newfoundland, the British aircraft proving to be marginally swifter.
Meanwhile Short Brothers explored options for increasing the range of their aircraft. The most unusual was a ‘piggy-back’ experiment involving a long-range seaplane launched off the roof of a flying boat. Working to the principle that an aircraft in flight can carry a greater payload than during take-off, Short engineers designed the ‘Maia’, an Empire modified to improve its lift capabilities, and the ‘Mercury’ a bespoke four-engine seaplane with twin floats. The two aircraft were harnessed by means of a trestle take-off platform fitted to the roof of the Maia. Trials of the composite aircraft, dubbed the Short Mayo, were conducted in 1937, and the following year, on 21st July, they made a successful east-to-west non-stop transatlantic flight; the 3,000 mile journey from Foynes to Boucherville in Quebec taking 20 hours and 20 minutes. The Short Mayo made further pioneering non-stop flights, including one from Dundee to Alexander Bay in South Africa. However, simultaneous developments in inflight refuelling and airframe technology were quickly shown to be more viable than piggy-backing, and no further composite aircraft were built.
Bow Creek to Anatahan 