Flight Disappeared 50 Years Ago This Week

A Pan Am flight that disappeared 50 years ago this week has agonized two California men into investigating the details of the Hawaiian-bound flight that left few details of why it vanished.

The aircraft, "Clipper Romance of Skies" was a Boeing 377 Stratocruiser operated by PanAm as a luxury airliner. The flight from San Francisco to Hawaii was a leg in an around the world flight where it disappeared enroute over the Pacific, only revealing a handful of bodies and a few bits of wreckage found floating a hundred miles north of its flight path, according to the San Francisco Examiner.

No one knows exactly where it crashed or who all the 44 passengers were, or who was really on the flight. Was there a mechanical failure, or was the aircraft blown up, or was there an inflight fire?

These questions haunt Ken Fortenberry, 56, and Gregg Herken, 60 who won't quit until they get answers.

Bill Fortenberry, Ken's father was a navigator was on the flight, and his body has never been found. Fortenberry at the time was six-years-old and living in Santa Clara when the aircraft disappeared.

Herken's elementary school teacher in San Mateo, stewardess Marie McGrath, was also on the flight and never found, and the shock of this news to this 10-year-old left him with many questions. Herken a former director at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, dug for clues to the Romance crash, producing no results.

The two think about the aircraft's disappearance daily.

"I owe it to my dad, and I tell you this: I am not giving up," Fortenberry said by phone from his home in Denver, NC, where he publishes a local newspaper. "If I leave this world without an answer, I'm sure I'll get it on the other side."But I want the answers now."

The flight on November 8, 1957 in the biggest and most posh airliner in the world was supposed to be a routine run for the four-engine Stratocruiser. Booked for the trip were six crew members and 38 passengers, including honeymooning couples, the vice president of Renault Auto and the general manager of Dow Chemical, people who you would expect to pay the then hefty $300 airfare.

The aircraft departed San Francisco at 11:51 am. The crew radioed a message to a Coast Guard cutter at 5 pm that all was well.

The only way investigators know the trouble began around then is because the wristwatches still attached to a few of the 19 corpses pulled from the ocean a week later were all stopped at the same time: 5:25 pm.

Investigators who found debris of the wreckage found few clues. Some metal had burn marks. A stewardess still strapped to her seat, wore life vests, indicating that the plane was making an emergency landing. Some bodies examined contained abnormal amounts of carbon monoxide.

"These things were interesting, but in the end they didn't solve a thing," Herken said in an interview at his home while he pored over the 3-foot-high stack of records he has accumulated. "What we really need is the wreckage itself. We can guess what area of the ocean it's in, but nobody knows exactly where the pieces are."

In the quest to find answers investigators looked at the profiles of the passengers. Investigators found one of the persons onboard, 46-year-old purser Eugene Crosthwaite, had a record of mental disorders... making him the strongest suspect.

Crosthwaite had a suicidal persecution complex and bickered bitterly with his bosses. Police in his hometown of Felton, CA were so concerned about his treatment of his stepdaughter that they called him "psycho." And, most telling of all, he showed a relative some blasting powder a few days before the flight -- and changed his will to cut his stepdaughter out of direct benefit just one hour before the plane's takeoff, according to the Examiner story.

"The purser angle never made the light of day anywhere in the papers," said Fortenberry. "We only found out about it when we searched through the Pan Am investigation records, but he had everything - motive, opportunity, materials. He was the perfect suspect."

Another passenger was a former Navy frogman with demolition experience... who also purchased last-minute insurance.

William Payne's last-minute insurance buy paid $125,000 to his wife, Harriet -- in addition to a $10,000 double indemnity policy he signed two weeks prior to the flight. Payne reportedly owed was $10,000, on a hunting lodge.

Not all the suspects in the downing are human: the investigating duo also believes the aircraft's propellers could have led to the crash. The Stratocruiser was driven by four Pratt & Whitney R-4360 B6 engines, at top speed it went an impressive 350 mph. However, the engines were so powerful, they had a reputation for shattering propellers in-flight.

Modifications to the engines and propellers that were ordered were not all made, according to PanAm records.

"Even after those fixes, they still had problems," Herken said, shaking a sheaf of aviation records on Pan Am's fleet. "That engine was just too big and too powerful."

Still after all the investigations there are few clues, and the evidence -- what little there was -- is missing. Not even the University of Miami, which got all of Pan Am's records after the Florida company went belly up in 1991, produced any of the real evidence... nor did the Historical Museum of South Florida, which got all of Pan Am's artifacts. The NTSB had little new to contribute, as well.

Fortenberry and Harken want to get their hands on the tape of radio transmissions from the Romance that the Civil Aeronautics Board examined over 50 years ago. Pan Am pilots who heard it thought they detected a "mayday" and a reference to a "missing arm," but nothing was intelligible. Digital technology today could probably clarify the sound, they say.

But nobody knows where the recordings are. "I have a feeling that tape and the debris are in some warehouse in San Francisco that has no key," Fortenberry said. "I have this image of it being like that last scene in 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' -- rows and rows of boxes, with no way to find anything in them."

The only other option left to the Fortenberrry and Harken is an expensive option to examine the ocean floor for the wreckage.

FMI: www.aviation-history.com/boeing/377.html, http://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=19571108-0