From the Saturday P-I:
Crews pull plane from bay
NTSB recounts the Stratoliner's final moments in the airSaturday, March 30, 2002
By DAVID EGGERT
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
For the Clipper Flying Cloud, the problems began soon after it took off from Paine Field and ascended 1,500 feet into the sky over Puget Sound.
The No. 3 engine surged but normalized, causing the cautious pilot, Richard "Buzz" Nelson, to head for Boeing Field much earlier than planned.
Workers put a mattress into place to support the Stratoliner after it was pulled from Elliott Bay and placed on a barge. The time-consuming recovery had to be done carefully. Grant M. Haller / Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Click for larger photo
On his approach, the left landing gear failed to come all the way down.
Nelson circled back around over Bainbridge Island while another crew member climbed down into the belly of the vintage Stratoliner and manually cranked it into place.
Things seemed to be under control -- until the No. 3 engine lost power. Seconds later, the 42,000-pound bird lost power in its three remaining engines.
Yesterday, as salvage crews carefully pulled the world's last existing Stratoliner from the corrosive salt waters of Elliott Bay, the National Transportation Safety Board recounted the final moments of the plane's final flight.
The refurbished Stratoliner, which was one of 10 built by The Boeing Co. in the late 1930s and early 1940s, had plopped down in frigid waters about 75 yards from Salty's Restaurant in West Seattle the day before.
All four crew members escaped with barely a scratch and stood on a wing until a Coast Guard rescue boat arrived.
"The landing was fantastic," said Debra Eckrote of the NTSB. "Ditching is not any easy thing to do."
Yesterday's time-consuming recovery drew hundreds of onlookers, many of them saddened to see the old bird in the bay.
But they were hopeful that it could be restored.
A worker positions cables near the tail section as others watch from the barge. Once on the barge, the plane was transported up the Duwamish River to a Boeing terminal. Grant M. Haller / Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Click for larger photo
The plane was supposed to head to the Smithsonian Institution next year, where it was to be displayed in the National Air and Space Museum's new Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles International Airport outside Washington.
Yesterday, Bill Moffat was among those who stopped by the site to take one last look at a piece of Seattle's flying history.
Moffat helped build fuel tanks for the Stratoliners more than 60 years ago.
He carried old pictures of the planes as they were rolled off the line at Boeing Plant 2 and showed them to bystanders -- many of them plane buffs.
He figures he even had a hand in building the Flying Cloud.
"It's a shame to see it in the water," said Moffat, who worked at Boeing for 47 years. "To see an airplane go down -- it just gets you."
Late yesterday, a crane delicately lifted the Flying Cloud and placed it onto a barge, which transported it up the Duwamish River to a Boeing terminal.
There, it was to be flushed with fresh water, put on a flatbed trailer and taken to Boeing Field.
Earlier yesterday, water was drained from the fuselage and fuel was siphoned from the tanks. But because of the water pressure on the wings, cranes had to pull the plane very slowly from the bay.
It will likely be washed with a preservative to halt the corrosive effects of the salt water, said Keith McGuire, regional director of the NTSB, which is investigating the crash.
That investigation could take months to complete.
It's still too early to determine how much damage the plane sustained -- and how much could be repaired.
"That remains to be seen," said Peter Conte, a Boeing spokesman.
Six-year restoration
When it was built, the 307 Stratoliner was the first commercial plane with a pressurized cabin -- that allowed it to fly at 20,000 feet, far higher than the 5,000- to 10,000-foot altitudes of its unpressurized competitors. The Stratoliner could carry 33 passengers and a crew of five.
The plane caught the eye of multimillionaire Howard Hughes, who bought one for $250,000 and turned into the first luxury private airliner.
The plane in Thursday's crash was first delivered to Pan American Airways in 1940 and named the Clipper Flying Cloud.
At one point it was the presidential aircraft for Haitian dictator François "Papa Doc" Duvalier. It was about to become a firefighting water bomber in Mesa, Ariz., in 1969 when a Smithsonian curator spotted it and saved it for posterity.
Boeing offered to restore the plane and flew it back to Seattle in June 1994. Fans of the plane set to work, scouring the globe for original parts. The restoration took six painstaking years and was finally completed last June.
'I shed a tear'
At 12:23 p.m. Thursday afternoon, Nelson and three others -- Mike Carricker, 46, Nathan Andrews, 43, and Mark Kempton, 43 -- flew the plane to Paine Field in Everett.
It was scheduled to make six successive landings as part of a maintenance and training exercise.
Hundreds of people gathered to get a look as crews worked to pull the plane from Elliott Bay. So many people showed up that police had to close part of Harbor Avenue for a time. Grant M. Haller / Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Click for larger photo
Before Thursday, the plane had not been flown since August.
Nelson landed the plane in Everett once and then took off again.
That's when he noticed the power surge in the right inboard engine and headed for Boeing Field.
Nelson called in "mayday" and -- moments later -- managed to safely ditch the plane into Elliott Bay.
"It floated like a cork," Nelson recalled in an interview Thursday night.
The plane remained partially submerged in the bay until late yesterday afternoon.
Paul Tooley was among the onlookers who came to say goodbye to the old plane.
He had been on the Clipper Flying Cloud twice and knew the work that went into its restoration.
"Everything was so professionally done, an incredible labor of love," Tooley said. "I shed a tear when I saw it go down" on the television news.
Otto Gaiser, 70, a Boeing retiree, also came to watch. "This is history," Gaiser said. "It's a sad situation,"
Al Schuerman, who worked at Boeing for 39 years, came to the crash site to film the recovery effort and show it to his grandchildren.
He left wanting to get the plane back into shape.
"I might consider volunteering to help them get it back into flying condition," he said. "It's a shame. I'm really curious to find out what caused the engines to fail."
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P-I reporter David Eggert can be reached at xxx-xxx-xxxx or xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx@seattlepi.com
"TD - Virtual FAA investigators are on line 2, AGAIN!!!"
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I guess (and I'm not an attorney nor do I play one on TV <g>) scholastic works are not considered "commercial" and there's the loophole. Arguably, we aren't commercial either (since all we want to do is break even) but that's the hitch that the "billable hour" dudes will latch on to. <g> We're just so friggin' young here that we just want to make triple sure that we don't get into to trouble before we're out of the gate.