The Yankee Clipper crash: when a wartime flying boat fell into the Tagus

On the evening of 22 February 1943 a Pan American launch was waiting on the Tagus off Cabo Ruivo, on Lisbon's eastern waterfront. The sun had officially set at 6.20 by Greenwich time, so the ground crew had laid out a string of landing lights on the river. At about 6.35 the flying boat they were waiting for, the Yankee Clipper, appeared overhead, 15 minutes early. It had left New York the day before and stopped in Bermuda and at Horta in the Azores.3 sources3 sources

The aircraft flew north-east over the landing area at about 135 knots and between 500 and 600 feet. About a mile and a half east of the centre light it began a descending turn to the left. The turn continued until the Clipper was heading west. Then its left wing tip skimmed the surface, dug in, and the 42-ton aircraft went into the river.2 sources2 sources

It stayed partly afloat for about ten minutes and then sank. The launch that had been standing by reached the wreck about ten minutes after the crash and began pulling people out of the water. A launch of the British airline BOAC and a second Pan American boat joined it some ten minutes later.1 source1 source

Of the 39 people aboard, 24 died. Among the survivors was Jane Froman, one of the best-known singers on American radio, who had been on her way to her first USO show for the troops in Europe. In the water she was helped by a junior officer of the crew, John Burn, who had himself broken his back.3 sources3 sources

Portugal was a dictatorship in 1943. The Estado Novo (New State) of António de Oliveira Salazar had kept the country neutral when the war began in 1939, while keeping its old alliance with Britain. Neutral Lisbon traded with both sides, sheltered refugees from occupied Europe and was full of diplomats, businessmen and spies.1 source1 source

That made it the European end of Pan Am's passenger service across the Atlantic. The flying boats left New York, refuelled in Bermuda and at Horta, and landed on the Tagus; the February trip was then to go on to Foynes in neutral Ireland. In 1943 the trip from New York to Lisbon took about 27 hours, including the stops.2 sources2 sources

A seat cost a fortune. In 1939 the one-way fare from New York to Marseilles was $375, and there was only one class; José Correia Guedes, a former captain with TAP, the Portuguese national airline, puts that at $8,500 to $9,000 in today's money. The wealthiest refugees waiting in Lisbon bought tickets on the Clipper, which flew twice a week between Lisbon and New York. Most of the rest waited, often for months, for passage by sea.3 sources3 sources

By early 1943 it took serious money or influence to get a seat, and many of those on the February flight were travelling on war business of one kind or another. About a dozen United States Army officers were aboard in civilian clothes, using commercial flights through neutral territory.1 source1 source

The river was not a safe runway. Six weeks before the Clipper crash, on 9 January 1943, a British flying boat, the Golden Horn, exploded after a fuel leak on a test flight and fell into the Tagus at Cabo Ruivo. Thirteen of the 15 people aboard died, many of them airport staff who had gone along for the ride against the rules.1 source1 source

The Boeing 314 was built for Pan Am in Seattle. The airline ordered six in July 1936 for $4.8 million, and the first flew on 7 June 1938. Only 12 were ever built. In 1939 it could carry more passengers than any airliner in service, up to 74, in five compartments with a dining room, dressing rooms and sleeping berths.1 source1 source

The Yankee Clipper, registration NC18603, was christened by Eleanor Roosevelt in 1939. On 20 May that year it flew the first scheduled transatlantic airmail service, Foreign Air Mail route 18, from New York towards Marseilles, with the pilot Arthur LaPorte in command. Mail for Lisbon on that first flight arrived on 21 May.3 sources3 sources

When the United States entered the war in December 1941 the Clippers kept flying, now carrying high-priority passengers and cargo for the American and British forces. In January 1943 the Dixie Clipper flew Franklin Roosevelt across the Atlantic on his way to the Casablanca Conference, making him the first sitting president to fly.1 source1 source

The Yankee Clipper was one of the busiest. In January 1943, the month before the crash, it became the first airliner to fly more than a million miles across the Atlantic. Its captain on the February trip, R. O. D. Sullivan, known as Sully, was the first pilot to log 100 transatlantic flights; a fellow officer recalled the celebration two weeks before the crash.3 sources3 sources

The flight was Pan Am trip 9035, scheduled from New York to Bermuda, Horta, Lisbon and Foynes. It left New York's Marine Air Terminal on 21 February 1943 with 27 passengers and a crew of 12. The historian Brooke Blower, who has written a book about seven of the people aboard, calls theirs a Casablanca story of the Second World War rather than a Saving Private Ryan one.3 sources3 sources

Seven of the passengers were a troupe of entertainers sent by the USO, the organisation that put on shows for American servicemen. Jane Froman was its star. With her were Tamara Drasin, a Ukrainian-born Broadway singer who had been the first to sing Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, the accordionist Gypsy Markoff, and the performer Roy Rognan and his wife Jean.3 sources3 sources

Across the aisle from Froman sat Ben Robertson, a South Carolina journalist she knew from the University of Missouri. He had watched the Battle of Britain from a bluff at Dover with his friend Edward R. Murrow of CBS, written a successful book about Britain at war, I Saw England, and a memoir of the American South, Red Hills and Cotton. He was going back to London to run the New York Herald Tribune's bureau.1 source1 source

Others had stranger stories. Frank Cuhel, a former Olympic athlete, had become an export salesman and then a radio war correspondent. Manuel Diaz Riestra, a Spanish-born shipping magnate and supporter of Franco, was suspected by the American government of helping the Axis. James N. Wright was a State Department diplomatic courier.3 sources3 sources

Nobody aboard seems to have expected a crash. The surviving crew and passengers told the investigators that they thought the aircraft was making a normal landing. Seat belts had not yet been called for, according to a Pan Am officer who later spoke to the captain and to John Burn, and one crew member was standing on the flight deck between the pilots.2 sources2 sources

The aircraft was demolished, in the investigators' word. Froman had a gash below her left knee that nearly severed the leg, a right leg so badly broken that doctors considered amputating it, broken ribs and multiple fractures of the right arm.2 sources2 sources

Guedes, who has written a novel about the crash, points out that Lisbon had no rescue service on the river: in his words, it was private boats that went to fetch the survivors. Froman was taken to the Hospital de São José, which she later called medieval in an interview, he says.2 sources2 sources

The dead included the first officer, H. S. Rush, and the third officer, Andy Freeland, as well as Tamara Drasin, Roy Rognan, Ben Robertson, Frank Cuhel, Manuel Diaz and the courier James Wright. Captain Sullivan survived. Later accounts put the number aboard at 38 or 42, but the investigators counted 39.4 sources4 sources

Bill Nash, a junior Pan Am officer, had been due to fly on the Yankee Clipper as third officer until he was switched to an earlier trip two days before it left. Andy Freeland took his place. Nash was in Lisbon when the Clipper crashed. His crew stayed three weeks, working on the wreck after it was lifted from the riverbed, taking out instruments and parts that might explain the crash and packing them in barrels. They also had to identify crew friends, Freeland among them, in the morgue.1 source1 source

Captain Sullivan told the investigators that the aircraft had gone into an abnormally steep dive, about 45 degrees from 400 feet, and that the first officer had tried to help him regain control. The Civil Aeronautics Board did not accept his account. It found nothing in the wreckage of the controls to explain a failure, and no other survivor had noticed anything unusual.1 source1 source

The Board suggested that the wind and the coming darkness may have led Sullivan to land from east to west across the line of landing lights, and that in the last of the daylight he misjudged his height in the turn. Guedes, the former TAP pilot, makes a similar point: at dusk the surface of water acts like a mirror and makes height very hard to judge.2 sources2 sources

Sullivan was dismissed by Pan Am after a hearing. Accounts of his later life differ: Nash says he flew for Firestone in Africa, while Guedes says he never went back to the United States and ended up commanding coastal ships. Of the three Boeing 314s lost in accidents, the Yankee Clipper is the only one whose loss was put down entirely to pilot error.3 sources3 sources

In Portugal the crash made little noise. Guedes found the story by chance in a 1943 copy of the Diário de Lisboa while researching something else, and says the press of the time gave it scant space; censorship under the Estado Novo kept wartime news thin. In the United States it was front-page news.2 sources2 sources

The river gave up its dead slowly. Ben Robertson's body was recovered several days later and sent home in a Portuguese casket to be buried at Liberty, South Carolina. On 28 February Murrow spoke about him on CBS. A Liberty ship, the SS Ben Robertson, was launched at Savannah in January 1944.1 source1 source

Froman spent about two months recovering in Portugal. Later in 1943 she was back on the Broadway stage in Artists and Models, singing from a wheelchair, and in 1945 she toured Europe on crutches, performing for about 30,000 servicemen. She had an estimated 39 operations in her lifetime and wore a leg brace for the rest of her life.1 source1 source

She also went to court. In April 1944 Pan Am answered her million-dollar suit by saying that it was not liable and that, if it were, the Warsaw Convention on international air travel capped what it owed her. In 1958, fifteen years after the crash, Congress passed a private act paying compensation to her and two of the other entertainers.2 sources2 sources

Froman married John Burn in 1948, after divorcing Don Ross; they separated in 1955. In 1952 Twentieth Century Fox told her story in With a Song in My Heart, with Susan Hayward in the lead and Froman's own voice in the songs. Part of the film is set in Lisbon. Froman died in Columbia, Missouri, in 1980, aged 72.2 sources2 sources

Renascença, the Portuguese Catholic radio station, has called it the biggest air accident in Lisbon's history. It came in the years when Pan Am's airliners from New York touched Europe on the river at Lisbon. Its passenger list reads like a cross-section of the Americans who passed through Lisbon in those years: entertainers, reporters, officers in civilian clothes, a courier and a businessman under suspicion.3 sources3 sources

The era of the big flying boats ended soon after the war. Pan Am flew its last Boeing 314 Clipper service in 1946, and none of the 12 Boeing 314s survives. Seaplane traffic at Cabo Ruivo ended in the 1950s: Portugal Resident gives 1950, Time Out Lisboa 1959.3 sources3 sources