Everett man OK as last Boeing 307 takes plunge

Herald Writer

The last remaining Boeing 307 Stratoliner crashed into Elliot Bay Thursday afternoon. All four people aboard – including a 46-year-old Everett man – were safely rescued, the Coast Guard said.

“I can’t believe it,” said retired Boeing worker Otto Gaiser of Edmonds, part of a volunteer group that had spent six years restoring the historic passenger plane and had continued to maintain it. “I was down there (at takeoff). They said they were going to be gone two or three hours.”

The plane took off from Boeing Field around 12:30 p.m. It crash-landed in the water about 45 minutes later, near the shore of West Seattle, said Coast Guard Petty Officer Aida Cabrera. Coast Guard crews from the nearby Seattle base were able to rescue those aboard and take them to a nearby boat launch, she said.

The plane then sank slowly, although rescue boats attached lines to it and tried to pull it to shore.

The names of the pilot and passengers were not immediately available. However, Harborview Medical Center reported the Everett man and the three others were in satisfactory condition and being treated in the hospital’s emergency room Thursday afternoon.

The plane had its first post-restoration flight in July of last year, and the volunteers had taken it up periodically since, said Larry Cummings of Everett.

“You’ve got to keep it flying,” he said.

Gaiser said he and other volunteers had put the plane through its ground tests Thursday morning, then watched it take off. “It’s just hard for me to believe that this happened,” he said.

The plane is owned by the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum and was scheduled to be the centerpiece of a new Smithsonian exhibit being built at Washington Dulles Airport. The exhibit opens next year.

The plane was the last of 10 307s built by Boeing just prior to World War II. Based on B-17 bomber designs, they were the first four-engine passenger planes as well as the first with pressurized cabins.

For its time, the plane was as revolutionary as the proposed Sonic Cruiser is today, Boeing Commercial Airplanes chief Alan Mulally said last summer at the roll-out ceremony for the restored plane.

The plane flew at 20,000 feet – “above the weather,” as the airlines billed it – and with enough speed to shave 2Z\x hours off transcontinental flights, which still took 12 hours.

However, aviation technology raced forward during World War II, and at war’s end, the 307 was obsolete.

This last surviving plane of the series was discovered in an Arizona aircraft bone yard in 1994 by Boeing volunteers who had come to retrieve another historic Boeing plane – the Dash 80, which was the prototype for the 707, Boeing’s first jet airliner.

The 307 “was full of dust and dirt, deteriorated,” Gaiser said last summer. “Nobody thought we could make it fly again.”

But while the wings were full of dust and debris – and a litter of kittens – there was remarkably little corrosion, he said.

Volunteers and retirees from Boeing and Pan Am – the airline that operated the plane from 1946-54 – spent thousands of hours restoring the plane. Several Boeing suppliers donated parts and materials. Many parts had to be machined new, using old schematics.

Some of the final pieces – including two compasses and the tail wheel – showed up for sale on e-Bay.

The plane for a time was the personal transport of notorious Haitian dictator Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier. Its interior was later almost completely gutted by an owner who planned to convert it to a crop duster.

Gathering clues from photographs and scraps of materials stuck behind panels, the volunteer pieced together what the interior looked like and restored the plush compartments.

First-class passengers sat facing each other in Pullman-style compartments that had chairs that folded out into beds. Coach passengers sat in blue leather seats. The interior was lined with a distinctive yellow cloth embroidered with patterns depicting the globe.

“I’ve never seen a better restoration in my life,” Don Lopez from the Smithsonian said at last summer’s roll-out ceremony. “Magnificent is not too strong a word.”

Both Cummings and Gaiser said it was too early to know what kind of damage was done in the crash.

“Salt water is hard on an airplane,” Gaiser said. “I don’t even want to think about it.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.