Transatlantic flying was clearly an adventure for all concerned in those days. Dare I say, in a whimsical kind of way, that there seemed to be a little romance to the industry in those days.
About the author: Tony Spooner (1917-2002) learned to fly with Brooklands Flying Club in 1937. Obtaining a commercial licence, the following year he became a flying instructor at Liverpool’s Speke airport. Upon the outbreak of war, he joined the RAF, flying Wellingtons and then Liberators with Coastal Command, and receiving the DSO and DSC. Post-war civilian life saw Spooner joining BOAC, ending up on trans-Atlantic routes in the Boeing 377 Stratocruiser and then the 707.
The Boeing Model 377 Stratocruiser was a unique and peculiar aircraft. Essentially, the ‘Strat’, as everyone who flew the aircraft invariably called it, was a B-29 bomber which had been hastily converted by Boeing into a civil airliner by replacing the fuselage with a ‘double-bubble’ cabin capable of seating 40-60 passengers on the top deck. Down below in the lower lobe there was a bar reached by a spiral staircase. The wings and the Pratt & Whitney ‘corncob’ R-4360 engines were originally those of certain late B-29s, later redesignated as the B-50.
‘Originally’ was, however, the operative word. When the 377 came before the FAA in order to get its all-important certificate of airworthiness, it failed to meet that body’s stalling criteria. As the ‘Strat’ stalled, it tended to drop a wing. This did not please the FAA at all. That august body, on stalling tests, liked to see the nose, and not the wing, drop first.
A quick fix was devised. Along almost the full length of the ‘Strat’s’ nice clean wing, Boeing was obliged to add lift spoilers. Yes, lift spoilers! The FAA was happy. The aircraft now dropped its nose obligingly as it reached the stall; but we poor pilots of BOAC, and the few other airlines which had ordered the type, were left with an aircraft which possessed several mighty odd characteristics.
Before dwelling on these characteristics, it is worth recording that after the ‘Strat’ had been operated commercially for about 10 years, the FAA decided that the lift spoilers were not really necessary at all. So, off they came. By then, of course, the aircraft had long passed into oblivion as a front-line airliner.
In a flying career which began with Tiger Moths in 1937, and which ended about 30 years later and never forgetting six years of flying overloaded RAF types under wartime conditions, the 377 remains in my mind as by far the most difficult aircraft to fly. For one thing, no matter how hard you pulled back on the stick while rounding out and landing, it was always the nosewheel which first made contact with the runway. It was much the same on take-off: heaving back hard at the correct speed made not the slightest difference. The ‘Strat’ was still determined to run the last few hundred yards with only her nosewheel on the ground. In a good crosswind, the stresses on that nosewheel must have been considerable owing to the tendency of the aircraft, with its huge tail, to weathercock into wind. Fortunately Boeing had designed a nosewheel which could — and daily did — soak up a lot of cruel punishment. This was just as well, as the ‘Strat’ was almost wildly unpredictable. If it just wasn’t ‘one of her days’, she would decide to fall out of your hands whenever anywhere near a landing runway. Bang! Crunch! She would hit with some quite horrible noises. However, to her maker’s credit, the nosewheel always seemed able to take whatever blows befell it. I never once heard of one giving way. It was solid Boeing engineering at its best.
The corncob engines were not so forgiving. They derived their nickname because they were a four-row air-cooled radial. The 28 cylinders were arranged in four banks. To the best of my knowledge this was the only engine so designed. The difficulty about such a wadge of cylinders was to keep the back rows sufficiently cool. It was usually the third row, not the aftmost one, which suffered most from lack of coolth. As a consequence, engines on long flights were always liable to pack up. Yet, oddly enough, this did not pose too much of a problem. This was because of two things. First, the engines seldom overheated and failed during take-off; secondly, once the ‘Strat’ could be persuaded to leave Mother Earth — something which at times it was most reluctant to do — then it was in its true element. It flew like a bird. Many of us collected scores, if not hundreds, of three-engined hours on ‘Strats’. Some of us even collected a few two-engined hours. These were not so comfortable.
It tells its own story that, although the engine was in commercial use for at least a dozen years, it started and ended its life with exactly the same power rating. No attempt was made to uprate it in the light of experience. I can think of no other engine which was so restricted. Enough was enough.
Another unusual ‘Strat’ feature was that it was virtually an all-electric aircraft. There was scarcely a hydraulic pipe in it. I remember talking with ‘Digger’ Ifold, the engineering chief at Dorval, Montreal, where I and the rest of the post-war BOAC Atlantic base were then located. The first ‘Strat’ delivery had just arrived and Digger had been all over it.
“I’ve never seen so much electrical stuff in any one aircraft in all my life”, that worthy man was saying. “Come to think of it, I’ve never seen so much electrical stuff in any two aircraft in all my life”. That wonderfully strong retractable undercarriage was electrically operated: even down to the emergency lowering system. This had to be seen to be believed. The drill went like this: remove all the drinkers from the lower bar (not easy); remove the big mirror at the front of the bar; remove from behind the main spar the emergency hand electric motor, a heavy-duty mechanism, a bit like a roadman’s drill; connect this to the drive of one of the main undercarriage legs and operate so as to lower that leg; and while flying along with ‘one hung low’, repeat the process for the remaining undercarriage leg.
As I remember it, all that had to be done to lower that remarkably tough nosewheel was to heave it out manually. This was accomplished by sending a man down through a hatch into an area which was always known as ‘Lower 41’ and having him disconnect a catch or two and then manually throw the nosewheel out. It was a task for the crew member with the most muscles. It was not a weakling’s job.
A basic drawback to the Stratocruiser as a trans-Atlantic airliner — and BOAC used it for little else — was that it lacked the endurance to fly between London and New York, or even Montreal. Occasionally, with a good tailwind, you could do it the other way, but I never once could find enough range to complete a westbound crossing non-stop. This meant that the skipper, and that included me, had to devise some means of overcoming this shortage. At times, the journey required four stops. London to Prestwick, to pick up passengers; thence to Shannon for a max-all-up weight take-off to Gander or Goose Bay; then on to New York’s Idlewild airport, as it was then called. Alternatively, a London-Prestwick-Keflavík (Iceland)-Sydney (Nova Scotia) or Moncton (New Brunswick)-New York route might be preferred. Pan Am, which for most of the time was the only other airline using ‘Strats’ on the Atlantic routes, had a liking for routes to New York which took them via Lisbon, the Azores and Bermuda; but we, in BOAC, seldom if ever went that far south. In a ‘Strat’, heading for New York, I have several times been over the centre of the huge ice-cap of Greenland. I can even recall, again heading for New York, being over Hudson Bay heading south by east but ‘sailing’ downwind, west of the low. Captains soon became meteorologists first and pilots second, and in BOAC it was the individual captains who decided which route to take. We had no flight despatch system as used by Pan Am.
Despite its engine failures and shortages of fuel, the ‘Strat’ was much loved by its passengers, especially by those who were able to adopt a tolerant attitude to the many delayed or truncated services. This was for two reasons: that downstairs bar; and those lovely bunks.
The bar was an obvious attraction, especially for the many first-class Monarch crossings when drinks were free. It recalled the gentler pre-war days of the leisurely, comfortable Empire flying boats of Imperial Airways. It also prompted TWA, which was the only serious rival to BOAC and Pan Am, to produce a most ingenious publicity campaign. Having no downstairs bar in the Constellations it was using, TWA is reputed to have launched the slogan of, “Fly the Atlantic in comfort: no stairs to climb!”
