Certainly not trying to pick a fight but here’s an excerpt from the book “The Long Way Home” about the Boeing Clipper that flew from Auckland to New York instead of heading back to Hawaii right after the Pearl Harbor attacks:
Bob Ford glanced quickly at the airspeed indicator. Seventy knots - the design-rated landing/stall speed. As the airspeed needle crept above that mark he gently brought the wheel back. The Clipper’s bow rose above the horizon but it did not break off the water. He let the wheel forward again. With the bow down he could see the edge of the gorge 1,700 yards away. More speed, he needed more speed to break the suction. He kept the nose down, hoping to build up the airspeed.
Fifty seconds now. Sixty. Seventy. Then he decided. If we don’t break off in another twenty seconds I’ll pull back three engines but keep Number One at full power. Its torque will swing us around and we can head upstream. All eyes on the flight deck were fixed on the rapidly approaching gorge. No one uttered a word. Ford adjusted his grip on the throttles. He flexed his left hand. At that moment NC18602 came off the water.
But the reprieve was only momentary. They barely had flying speed and were not climbing at all, just hovering a few feet off the surface and still headed toward the gorge.
“Ninety one seconds” Swede Rothe called from the engineer’s station. “That’s past max time for full power. Can we pull it back now?”
“No way! Keep those throttles to the stops. We’re not out of this yet!”
“Okay, but the cylinder head temps are over redline! We could blow at any time!”
Ford did not reply, but thought to himself: Hell! We’ll either blow up or hit those rocks. Either way we’re dead. Might as well die trying. And he kept his hand hard against the throttles. Gingerly he tested the yoke, attempting to find a balance between pulling back too far and risking a stall and maintaining just enough nose-down attitude to build up the airspeed without settling back on to the river.
At that moment they passed the rim of the gorge. The river dropped away into the rocky defile and the water turned to white foam as it crashed against the boulder-strewn bottom. Without the cushioning effect - the so-called “ground effect” - of being only a few feet above the water surface, NC18602 also began to descend into the gorge. In seconds they were flying within the confines of a narrow canyon, still not too far above the surface. But the extra separation from the water surface did allow Ford to drop the bow a little more and gradually the airspeed began to pick up.
“Eighty five knots,” John Mack called out.
Okay, Ford thought, that gives us about five knots to play with to get some climb out of this baby. Gently he exerted enough back pressure on the yoke to raise the nose and drop the airspeed to eighty knots.
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