When Pan American Airways' Atlantic Clipper crashed at Lisbon last February, killing 24 people, one of the brightest reputations in transport aviation crashed with it. Last week the crash report of the Civil Aeronautics Board marked "official" what airmen already knew: the Atlantic's chief pilot, 50-year-old Captain R.O. D. Sullivan, was responsible for the crash.
Stocky, weatherbeaten Robert Oliver Daniel Sullivan had more than 14,000 hours in his logbook, more than 3,200 of them in Pan Am's great Boeing clippers. But despite his long experience of sea and sky, he could not explain later what happened when he thundered over the dusk-bound estuary of the light-pricked Tagus, what went wrong as he squared away for his landing between the waterborne runway lights.
At 400 feet, under a 5,000-foot ceiling, the roar of the 314's four big engines suddenly died away to a mutter. The Clipper went into a glide. Almost on the water, Rod Sullivan unaccountably wheeled into a turn, brushed a wing on the water. This was his first bad crash in 101 transatlantic flights.
When CABmen got to Lisbon, Rod Sullivan tried to help them solve the mystery of the crash. But he could not understand what had happened. The plane, he said, had suddenly gone into a steep dive. He had pulled the throttles, turned to make an emergency landing. He agreed that a better remedy would have been to increase power to pull the plane out of its unusual attitude. He could not say why he had not done it.
But other crew members who survived remembered no steep dive. Their accounts were all the same; the engines had been throttled, the plane had gone into a normal glide, turned, crashed. They had thought Rod Sullivan was making a routine landing.
CAB technicians followed Rod Sullivan's story to the end. They examined the control cables and machinery, found everything intact and in good order except for one small part. In exhaustive flight tests in Long Island Sound, with Rod Sullivan aboard, they proved that, even if that part had failed before the crash, the plane would have been perfectly safe to fly.
In the end there was only one thing to do. Rod Sullivan knew the verdict. He knew his own self-respect would not let him fly the ocean again. The Navy, which had trained him, wanted him back. Almost any airline would have been glad to have him for what he could do and what he knew.
But Sullivan, as much seaman as airman, said no to all offers. He left Pan American, left his country. Few weeks later airmen heard that Rod Sullivan was the master of a Portuguese coastwise steamer. More recently they heard that he had gone to Africa, was working for the Liberian American Development Co. on the steaming West Coast. No one knew for certain.