We conclude our series looking at one of the most stunning, yet near-forgotten, acts of skill in civilian aviation history: the round-the-world flight of the California Clipper in December 1941. You can find the first part of this series here.
Fourth Officer John Steers stood at the front of the boat and looked out over the river Nile. The California had landed on the river here, near Khartoum, on the 29th December. It had not been an entirely pleasant experience.
To complete their unplanned accidental circumnavigation, the crew had always known they would need to carry out several river landings. It wasn’t possible to cross Africa without them.
The journey to Khartoum was made even harder by the lack of military-grade aviation fuel at Bahrain, their last stop before crossing over to Africa. It had forced them to fly, once again, on lower-grade fuel that the California had never been designed to fly on.
The biggest risk a sea plane faced during landing was hitting something. That something might be a rock (on the surface or below), a sand bank or the rising sea (or river) floor. Such a collision would rip through the California’s hull and wreck her, likely costing the crew their lives. This was one reason their journey so far had been hard. It had involved landing in places where a clear channel for sea plane landings had not been defined.
They had been able to mitigate this risk at sea by landing further from shore. This reduced the risk of hitting something, at the price of a longer taxi along the surface to their intended berth.
On rivers, this wasn’t an option. Not only was the chance of hitting an obstruction far greater, but the ability to land further out and taxi in didn’t exist. On top of that, you now had to worry about things like your angle of approach and crosswinds. A river had banks. If the wind pushed you into the bank on landing, or your angle of approach wasn’t right, then this too could prove fatal.
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