Novel Idea

I'm not sure where this book came from - we have a LOT of books in our house, but it was published in 1946 by Random House, New York and it's called "Skyblazer". The inside cover states, "FIRST RUN EDITION" Here's the premise: a Seattle-based aircraft manufacturing company is hoping to stay viable as it transitions from World War 2 bomber builder into civilian aviation. The competition is the Boeing Stratoliner, the Douglas DC-6 and the Lockheed Constellation but the Starwing Airplane Company has countered with the "Skyblazer"; a silver, four-engined, turbine-powered, double-decker giant able to carry one hundred passengers!

Our hero is one Barry Martin, a young and coming test pilot with hundreds of hours testing and delivering bombers. He is confident that this new venture will take him, and the Starwing Company, far into the future of aviation. Drama builds quickly as the night before the Skyblazer's maiden voyage a dark and shadowy figure hands him a note suggesting he not report for duty in the morning. "...Barry had a vague feeling that he was being drawn into some kind of international plot - A plot that was beginning to hatch right here in the Starwing factory." Sure enough, with the press watching (and flying) the plane fails and crashes in flames somewhere over the Cascade Mountains. Everyone but the senior test pilot is able to bail out and he is the only casualty - thus making Barry the new senior test pilot. However, the crash has scared the biggest potential bidder, one Panama-South American Airways based in Santiago.

Who was behind the crash and who was it that tried kidnapping our hero early one morning? With only one prototype remaining, the customers bailing out (like their representative had done near Mt. Rainier) and the company at risk for losing everything, the big boss hatched a plan. A gesture of goodwill on behalf of the Skyblazer and the Starwing Airplane Company: "We've heard a lot about the good neighbor policy with regard to the Latin American countries," the boss stated, "but I've been wondering if we haven't gone about it in the wrong way." The boss looked into the faces of his colleagues before continuing. "There are some people who think that being liberal with money and material goods is being a good neighbor, but I've found that whenever someone loans me money, or even gives me a present, I feel indebted to that person. I'm uneasy in his presence, and my peace of mind does not return until the debt is fully paid. Apparently whole nations can think and feel this way and there is some of that going on in South America right now. We need the friendship of South America, and the South American countries need our friendship. It's a matter of mutal interest." Oh, and one more thing the boss had to say, "You are not to make any effort to sell Starwing planes while on this trip. Your primary mission is to make friends."

As the book hatched the plan to fly the sole remaining prototype from Seattle to Santiago I decided to fly one of my favorite sim turboprops on the same route - so, join with me in flying this novel by Howard M. Brier. I loaded in a GPS direct route from Everett/Snohomish County to Santiago and then dragged the flight path line over my waypoints: Burbank, Mazatlan, Mexico City, Guatemala City, Tegucigalpa, Managua, San Jose, Panama City, Guayaquil, Lima, La Paz and Antofagasta. I don't have a Skyblazer in my hangar (and I'm guessing you don't either) so I'll use a Lockheed L-188 Electra. According to the book the Skyblazer has a 145 foot span, is 115 feet 4 inches long and weighs 72,000 pounds empty. Four engines with 3,600 hp each, four-bladed propellers with a 17-foot circumference and the cockpit was 33 feet above the tarmac (roughly the size of the Connie I guess). I downloaded real world weather and set out as the first rays of dawn were brightening the eastern skies.

   

I climbed past Mt Rainier and headed towards the Battleground VOR (pictures, above). I setup the Electra for comfortable cruise at 25,000 feet passing over KPDX as the first rays of sun peaked around Mt Hood and bathed the ground in warm light. I continued down the Willamette Valley over Eugene and roughly followed I-5 into California and down the San Joaquin Valley (below, left). The book stated that the Skyblazer was cruising at 383 knots and 30,000 feet. It looked like they would be setting speed records for commercial aircraft circa 1946 - darn, I should have noted my departure time more closely to see how the simulated Electra compared to the fictional Skyblazer. I was cruising at 25,000 feet (well below the ceiling for Electra) and 283 knots. According to the book they arrived into Burbank in just 3 hrs:21 mins and as I say, I didn't log my departure time but I arrived at 09:16 - maybe 4:15 out of Seattle (below, right)?

   

In LA they meet the aircraft buyer from Chile again - he's been unable to decide what he wants, he wants the future today ... jet-powered aircraft. "By the time you buy a jet-powered plane some other airline will have all of the routes taken. You'd be better off to buy a DC-4 today" says our hero. "You work for Starwing yet you sell Douglas?" the man asks. "No," Barry replies, "I tell you what good aircraft are; and the DC-4 is a good plane, the DC-6 will be good and others will follow. Someday they may even have a DC-10! Maybe it will be rocket-powered?" (And this in 1946! Cracks me up!!) During their night in Burbank someone tried to burn down the hangar - they failed but somebody somewhere did not want the Skyblazer flying.

       

On their second day of flying the crew made their way south (above, left) along the Gulf of California (above, center) to Mazatlan where they stopped for food and fuel (above, right) - not that the Skyblazer needed gas but then they were quickly off to Mexico City, flying over Guadalajara on the way (below, left). They were 4:35 in the air from Burbank to Mexico City. I made it in the Electra in 6 hours 16 minutes arriving to a brutal, gusting crosswind just after 17:00 (below, center). By the way, according to the book they landed first in Mexicali (just over the boarder) to pass customs - was this the norm? We'll see it again when they stop in Arica, Chile just over the boarder from Peru. No need for gas, no in-flight emergency just stopping off to check through customs...weird. Anyway, I didn't stop over for customs but with a supposed cruise speed about 100 mph faster than the Electra they still beat my time.

       

       

In Mexico City there was a threatening phone call from the mystery villain but no attempts were made on the great aircraft. On the leg from Mexico City to Panama (upper, right) the book revealed that the Skyblazer had a brand new feature on the Wright-Cyclone engines which were Curtiss electric propellers that could feather for REVERSE thrust. This technology was practically unheard of in 1946 - apparently. The route today included brief stops in Guatemala City (above, left and center), Tegucigalpa, though with no mention of a challenging approach (below, left and center), Managua, San Jose (above, right), and Albrook Field in Balboa, the "Panama Canal Zone" (below, right). Another threatening note awaited our crew in Panama but again, no attack came forth. The drama was nearly more than I could handle (I say jokingly).

       

       

From Panama they set off for LaPaz (above, left) via Guayaquil (above, center and right) and Lima (below, left), promising a stop in Cali (below, right) for the return trip but I have a hunch I won't be reading about any other Colombian stops. They made Guayaquil in three hours, I made it in just under four. During the stop-over the pilot remained behind while the crew went into town but through the crowd of curious onlookers someone snuck aboard the Skyblazer and used a hacksaw to cut the right rudder cable. As he ran from the plane our hero Barry spotted him, tackled him, dodged the blade of the knife and knocked the man out cold. During some heavy police interrogation the man finally admitted that an American had offered to pay him if the plane crashed. He was to meet the man along the waterfront, on the Malecon, after the crash. No crash, no meeting! Luckily the plot had been discovered and the Pan American Airways ground crew was able to quickly replace the cables.

   

"The coast of Peru was rocky and barren in contrast to the lush jungles of Ecuador. Here great sand dunes rose from the shore and marched back to a dry, desert-like shelf that reached to the foothills of the Andes." After a brief and trouble-free stop in Lima they continued on to La Paz, coming in over Lake Titicaca and circling north of the city until cleared to land. With the navigator taking up guard duty the others headed into town. "The ride down to the city in the rickety bus was a breathtaking way to enter La Paz, for the road was steep and the scenery was awe-inspiring." I also found a type error in the La Paz story because as they were climbing out of La Paz the next morning the author referred to the co-pilot as "Cooper" but for the rest of the novel he had been "Hooper." Never seen that before! Real weather download had less than 10 miles visibility for me but having flown into here many times over the years (and with a good VOR not far off) the eastbound landing was a piece of cake (pictures below).

   

After a tension-filled customs stop in Arica they were off to Antofagasta - a brief gas and go had them heading on to Santiago. The feeling amongst the crew was that they had simply wasted time and gas. Sure, some guy wanted the plane to crash and there had been some curiosity here and there about the giant plane able to fly higher than anything else at the time, but they hadn't found that "news jackpot" they were hoping for (picture below). "Perhaps air travel has already become too common" one of the men commented, "perhaps people don't care about what a plane can do anymore..." They landed smoothly on the wide grassy runway of Los Cerrillos Airport.

Santiago was warm and modern and welcoming. They met the man hoping to buy aircraft and although his daughter was ill he drove them to their hotel and helped to get them settled. They hadn't been in the hotel 30 minutes and the phone rang, it was our villain again, "I warned you not to fly the Skyblazer to Chile ... now you must pay!" (cue scary music: Dun-Dun-Duuummmmmmmmmmm)

The crew was all invited to dinner at the home of the man from Panama-South American Airlines but he was unable to attend because his daughter's illness. After dinner our hero Barry slipped away to meet the bad guys, it all went wrong as you might expect and Barry ended up at the deserted airport with the bad guys and the Skyblazer. "You will now crash trying to fly into a remote mountain airstrip near an old ore mine..." But Barry's crew had been watching out for him and they were ready to take out the bad guys. Meanwhile the local man's daughter was nearing death and only one doctor on the planet could help her, a doctor in New York City. A little quick math figured they could be in New York in about 14 hours - "no one has ever dreamed of flying from Santiago to New York in only fourteen hours!"

"The Skyblazer roared down the runway, wings spread, motors throbbing. Up ... up into the gray morning bearing its tiny burden - a little girl who wanted to live, and who was so close to death. 'Wheels up' Barry ordered. 'Wheels coming up' Kelso reported."

"Streaking through the stratosphere like a silver bullet, the Skyblazer clung to its course." All along the way the radio cracked, La Paz, Lima, Bogota, Quito, Panama were all requesting updates on the little girl. The Skyblazer and this "Mission of Mercy" were making world-wide headlines! They were on the ground in Panama for just 32 minutes and then cruised at 416 mph at FL450 arriving into La Guardia at 18:10 local. "Thirteen hours and ten minutes from Santiago to New York. 'There's a record to shoot at!' Cato told the press after they had arrived in New York."

The book ends with the little girl surviving the surgery, PSAA placing an order for 100 Skyblazers and the crew all getting home in time for Christmas. So what ever happened to the Starwing Airplane Company of 1946? While the story is fiction, in recent decades we have seen the Concorde flying higher and faster than any other commercial plane and obviously the A380 carries more than 100 passengers ... We'll have to see if reality is better than fiction in the A380's case.

   

And what about the flight sim? I loaded up a futuristic "2010 SST" by the famous designer Shigeru Tanaka (above, left), available right here at FlightSim.Com, and made the 4521 mile flight, non-stop, in 4 hours 37 minutes (above, right)! I was cruising comfortably at FL500 (below, left) and Mach 2.2 (below, center) arriving into La Guardia before 11 AM (below, right) - hmmmm, I should try that on VATSIM sometime!

       

Ron Blehm
pretendpilot@yahoo.com

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