Again, Pan American

A 30-knot wind blew on the starboard quarter of a Pan American Airways flying boat on the regular Cristobal-Miami run one day last week. The crew and two passengers were thankful to be up in the gusty sky instead of down on the surface of the Caribbean which still writhed and tossed from a whipping by a three-day gale. About 100 mi. short of Barranquilla, Colombia, first stop on the plane's northering flight via Jamaica, Pilot Frank Ormsbee saw something that made him nose rapidly down toward the water.

Copilot, radioman, steward and passengers plastered their noses against windows while Pilot Ormsbee banked lower & lower around an animated speck on the surface --a lifeboat. Someone in it was waving an oar with a shirt tied to the blade. . . . There seemed to be ten persons in the boat. . . . One of them looked something like a woman. . . . And over there, taking a terrific beating from the waves, was another man hanging to a broken hatch door.

Obviously the gesticulating castaways believed that rescue was at hand. But Pilot Ormsbee knew otherwise. He might put his ship down upon that boiling sea but he would never take it off again. He scribbled a note on a message blank, passed it through the little window to ''Sparks's" compartment just abaft the control cabin, saw Sparks (radio operator) begin to pound brass . . . "NHC [the Naval base at Cristobal]--NHC--sighted ten men in lifeboat at 10:22 North 76:52 West--ORMSBEE." With that message and another to Miami on their way, Pilot Ormsbee turned northeast and kited for Barranquilla, hating to think of the eleven pairs of dejected eyes that focussed upon his vanishing ship. . . .

Pan-American radio stations at Cristobal and Miami broadcast the SOS. Six airplanes set out from the Naval base at Coco Solo, C. Z. The minesweeper Swan was ordered to patrol off Cartagena, Colombia. Pilot Herbert Boy, a German War flyer and chief pilot of Scadta air lines, searched from Barranquilla. For two and a half days there was no trace of the shipwrecked men; hope was nearly given up. Then a carpenter's mate on the bridge of the Swan sighted the drifting lifeboat.

The survivors--eleven men--were of the S. S. Baden-Baden, once famed as the rotor ship invented by Anton Flettner (TIME, May 24, 1926) but since converted into an ordinary Diesel-powered cargo carrier. Bound from Riohacha for Tumaco on the west coast of Colombia with a cargo of salt, the vessel had become disabled in heavy weather. The cargo shifted, the ship listed heavily to starboard, shipping water faster than the disabled pumps could pour it out. She foundered less than a half hour before the Pan American plane sighted what remained of the crew of 16 (five men, including the two owners, had been drowned).

It was not the first time that Pan American's excellent radio system, with its network of 56 stations extending from Miami and Mexico City to Buenos Aires, had gone to a rescue. A year ago it was a Pan American operator who flashed the message that Santo Domingo was struck by a hurricane, just a few minutes before his own station was laid low. Next morning the same operator was on the air again, begging Miami to send doctors, nurses, supplies. Pan American planes carried them (TIME, Sept. 15, 1930).

One day seven months later the pilot of a P. A. A. plane flying south from Miami received a radiogram in mid-air to drop his passengers at the nearest station and proceed to Managua, which had just been flattened by an earthquake. Two hours later the Sikorsky was sitting on the shore of Lake Managua, her own radio humming with messages from local authorities. Next morning seven company planes were at the scene. Last September the P. A. A. station at Belize was wrecked by the hurricane and tidal wave which struck the town. In water up to their armpits the station crew salvaged their emergency equipment, worked all night setting it up, began functioning next morning--the only means of communication available to the Honduran Government.

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