The Pacific Clipper: the long way home, 1941–42

Open Overfly with nothing in the address and the map draws a route from Auckland to New York with eleven stops in between, across the Coral Sea, Australia, the Indian Ocean, Arabia, Africa, the South Atlantic and the Caribbean. It is the flight home of Pan American's Pacific Clipper.

In December 1941 the Pacific Clipper, a Boeing 314 flying boat under Captain Robert Ford, was on its way to Auckland on Pan Am's South Pacific service when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The way back across the Pacific was closed. Pan Am's instructions were to return the long way: westward, round the world, to New York.

The route

The aircraft and crew made it, landing at New York on 6 January 1942 after calling at Nouméa, Gladstone, Darwin, Surabaya, Trincomalee, Karachi, Bahrain, Khartoum, Léopoldville, Natal and Port of Spain. Most of these were water landings, on harbours and rivers, at places Pan Am had never served, with charts and fuel found along the way.

Because the Clipper was a flying boat, the route on Overfly uses the airport nearest each place it came down on the water: Nouméa's Magenta, not La Tontouta; Ndolo, on the Congo at Kinshasa (then Léopoldville), not N'djili; Natal's air base at Parnamirim; and LaGuardia, whose Marine Air Terminal was the Clipper's New York base.

The route in Overfly's figures

Summed as great circles between those airports, the twelve legs come to 18,151 nm, about 20,890 statute miles. The real track was longer, bent by weather, by the war and by what the crew could navigate; the figure is the floor, not the distance flown.

The legs vary as much as the places. Gladstone to Darwin is 1,346 nm; Surabaya to Trincomalee, across the Indian Ocean, 2,119 nm. The longest is Léopoldville to Natal, across the South Atlantic: 3,025 nm, about as far as New York to London, in a flying boat in wartime.

Drawn on the map, the route shows what Overfly is for. Each leg is a great circle, each has a distance and a time, and the schedule cascades from the first departure, held in Zulu with each stop's local time on the date it happened. Change the aircraft to a modern type and the range check shows which of the stops a jet would still need.

The same route, flown today

Try it with today's aircraft and the scale of the 1941 flight shows. Every one of the twelve legs is within the usable range of an A320neo, a single-aisle airliner, in still air, though only just: the South Atlantic crossing from Léopoldville to Natal takes 96% of its 3,150 nm. A Boeing 737-800, with 2,850 nm usable in Overfly's list, cannot make that leg at all.

Leave out the stops and fly Auckland to New York LaGuardia direct, and it is 7,675 nm. An A350-900, with 8,250 nm usable, flies it non-stop. A Boeing 777-300ER or a Gulfstream G650ER falls a few hundred miles short and would need one stop; the Clipper made eleven, across a world at war, with none of them planned in advance.