The last Boeing 307 ditches in Elliot Bay

By Bryan Corliss

Herald Writer

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

“I can’t believe it,” said retired Boeing worker Otto Gaiser of Edmonds, part of a volunteer group that spent six years restoring the historic passenger plane. “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. The pilot tried to return to the airport about 30 minutes after takeoff, said Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Mike Fergus.

The pilot was cleared to land, but called the tower to say he had a landing gear problem and was going back up to figure it out, Fergus said.

The pilot asked the tower again for permission to land, but then, at about 1:09 p.m., he radioed a mayday. The plane crash-landed near the shore of West Seattle, said Coast Guard Petty Officer Aida Cabrera. Coast Guard crews rescued those aboard and took them to a nearby boat launch.

Fergus said he didn’t know what caused the crash or whether the landing gear played a role.

The plane sank slowly as rescue boats pulled it closer to shore, coming to rest in 60 feet of water, its nose and wings underwater and its tail in the air. The plane was secured so it would not drift.

The names of the pilot and passengers were not immediately available. However, a Boeing spokesman said the four men – all Boeing employees – were treated at Harborview Medical Center and released.

Foss Environmentals and Global Diving and Environmentals, two local salvage companies, were at the site Thursday evening. Cranes likely will be used to pull the plane from the water. It then could be placed on a truck and probably transported to nearby Boeing Field, Eckrote said.

The National Transportation Safety Board will investigate the crash. Boeing refused to comment, citing the NTSB investigation.

The plane had its first post-restoration flight last July, and volunteers had taken it up periodically since, said Larry Cummings of Everett, another retired Boeing worker who helped restore the plane.

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

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

West Seattle residents Cathy and Bob Horton saw the crash.

“At one point, we were wondering if he was going to get us,” Bob Horton said. “He was sputtering and kept getting lower.”

The plane hit the water with an enormous splash, Cathy Horton said.

The plane is owned by the Smithsonian Institution’s ‘s National Air and Space Museum and was to be the centerpiece of a new exhibit at Washington Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C., that opens next year.

The plane was the last of 10 307s built by Boeing before 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 rollout ceremony for the restored plane.

The plane flew at an unheard of 20,000 feet and traveled fast enough to shave 2 1/2hours off transcontinental flights, which still took 12 hours.

However, aviation technology raced forward during World War II, and at war’s end the 307 had become obsolete. This last surviving plane of the series was discovered in an Arizona aircraft junkyard in 1994.

It “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 dirt and debris – and a litter of kittens – there was remarkably little corrosion, he said.

Volunteers and retirees from Boeing and Pan Am, which operated the plane from 1946 to 1954, spent thousands of hours restoring the plane. Several Boeing suppliers donated materials and parts. Many parts had to be machined new, from old schematics.

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

Prior to its restoration, the plane for a time was the personal transport of notorious Haitian dictator Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier. Its interior was later gutted by an owner who planned to use it as a crop duster.

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

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

“I’ve never seen a better restoration in my life,” Don Lopez from the Smithsonian said last summer. “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.

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

The Associated Press contributed to this report.