JERRIE MOCK IS SHOWN THE NEWLY INSTALLED LONG-DISTANCE RADIO ANTENNA
Susan Reid collection
BERMUDA BOUND
FLYING AT an altitude of 7,500 feet, Jerrie finally felt at peace, alone in her plane. She flew over mountains and marveled at the patchwork of land below her. As she flew past Richmond, Virginia, she tingled with excitement at the thought of finally living her dream of flying over the Atlantic Ocean. Jerrie reached down and released the long-distance radio antenna wire. The wire, one hundred feet long, unraveled and hung below the plane, but the radio stayed silent. Jerrie looked down at the needle on the meter. It should have been moving, searching for a signal, but it remained motionless. She leaned in closer to the meter, but all was silent. She heard nothing, not a peep.
Jerrie wondered if she needed a long-distance radio to make a safe crossing over the ocean. She had never discussed the possibility of a radio failure with Lassiter or Weiner, so she had no idea what to do. Should she land in Richmond? Should she turn back and go home? After all the planning and all the excitement, how could she possibly let so many people down? Jerrie looked down at the triangles that marked the course on the charts of her flight plan. She was told to report at each triangle. Now what would she do? So many people were counting on her. She just couldn’t turn back before she even left the country. She felt that she would rather face her first flight over the ocean without communication than to turn back and go home a failure.
Jerrie got on her short-range radio. She informed the air traffic controller that she was on the proper channel, but had no contact with New York Oceanic, one of the four major international airspaces of the United States. The controller in the tower gave her another frequency to try. Jerrie tried it, knowing all the while that it wouldn’t work. Her long-range radio was dead. But communicating with the controller gave her time—time to make a decision. Would the Air Force be angry if she tried to fly over the ocean without a radio? If she told someone what was happening, would they tell her to turn back? As she considered all the pros and cons of flying without a long-range radio, the transmission to the tower nearly faded away. Jerrie’s hands shook as she picked up the microphone and called the controller one last time. She told him she would call again when she was close to Bermuda. With the decision made, she took a deep breath and pointed Charlie over the vast blue ocean before them.
With more than a thousand miles to go, the drone of the engine comforted Jerrie as she flew in and out of clouds above the endless ocean. But she remained nervous. Jerrie had lots of concerns about flying over the Bermuda Triangle. She later wrote, “I was flying over the mysterious Bermuda Triangle, where so many ships and planes have disappeared without explanation or any trace of debris, as if they were caught in a whirlpool and pulled down in a hole in the ocean floor. . . . Remember the World War I collier, U.S.S. Cyclops, that vanished in clear, calm weather with never a trace? Remember the whole flights of Navy patrol planes that flew into the void, never to return?”1 As she flew over the Bermuda Triangle, alone and without radio communication, she recalled how they had all disappeared forever, just like Amelia Earhart.
To avoid her feelings of doom and gloom, Jerrie forced herself to keep her mind on navigation. She turned on the automatic direction finder (ADF) in hopes of picking up a signal from the Bermuda beacon. There were two sets of needles and they pointed to different locations. Which one was giving the correct direction? She remembered how the addition of the fuel tanks made it necessary to relocate the antenna of the number two ADF while the plane was serviced in Wichita. The number one ADF hadn’t been moved. With no radio and no one to talk with about the situation, she made an educated guess and followed the undisturbed ADF.
Jerrie searched for blue skies after flying in a sea of clouds for some time. She dipped down out of the cloud cover and both ADF needles spun like mad. Then, as she was heading east, the needles stopped spinning and indicated Bermuda was behind her, to the southwest. She turned the plane around, and there before her was the island of Bermuda!
. . .
VISUAL FLIGHT RULES (VFR) VERSUS INSTRUMENT FLIGHT RULES (IFR)
PILOTS FLYING under visual flight rules (VFR) can operate an aircraft in conditions clear enough to allow them to see. VFR is regulated by distance from the clouds, a reference to the ground, and a minimum visibility. Pilots assume the responsibility to avoid obstruction and other aircraft. Pilots who seek additional training can obtain an instrument rating to fly instrument flight rules (IFR). For training purposes the pilot wears foggles, a type of goggle that blocks the field of vision and allows the pilot to see only the instrument panel of the aircraft. With an IFR flight plan, the pilot is in constant radar contact and is governed by the air traffic controller. IFR is used in bad weather, cloud cover, and fog. Any pilot flying over eighteen thousand feet is required to use instrument flight rules.
. . .
She contacted the person in the control tower at Kindley Air Force Base and he recommended a surveillance radar approach. The man in the tower wanted to guide her in for a landing using radar. Jerrie preferred to land visually, but she was exhausted from her stressful day. Every muscle tensed as she prepared for her first landing using instruments without an instructor beside her. She followed the directions from the control tower and came in for a smooth landing.
. . .
1 KNOT = 1.15077945 miles per hour
Miles per hour and knots are speeds that indicate the number of units of distance covered during a certain amount of time. The speed of an aircraft is measured in knots.
1 knot = 1 nautical mile per hour = 6,076 feet per hour
1 mph =1 mile per hour = 5,280 feet per hour
For example, if a car is moving at 50 mph on a highway, how would you represent this speed in knots?
Convert the speed in miles per hour that the car is moving to the speed in feet per hour. This is accomplished by multiplying by the number of feet in a mile.
50 (mph) x 5,280 (feet/mile) = 264,000 (feet/hr)
Now, convert the feet per hour to knots by multiplying by the knots conversion factor: 1 (knot)/6,076 (feet/hr).
264,000 (feet/hr) x 1 (knot)/6,076 (feet/hr) = 43.4 knots
. . .
Once on the ground, Jerrie realized that the terminal at the airbase was still miles away. Strong winds battered the little plane as she tried to steer it to the terminal building. The wind pushed at the back end of the plane, threatening to whip the tail end around. Jerrie stood hard on the brakes, trying to keep the plane from spinning in the wind. No matter how hard she stood on the brake pedal, it wouldn’t stick. Her brakes were not working! The left wheel kept rolling faster than the right. In the rush to get in the air to circle the globe before Joan Merriam Smith, could the brakes have been overlooked? Now, when she needed them the most, she realized she didn’t have any brakes.
Charlie’s back end whipped around and they went into a spin. After a 360-degree rotation, she let the plane roll onto the grass, hoping the friction of the grass could keep it from spinning again. A bunch of airport attendants came running out, grabbed onto the wing struts, and guided them in. When they finally came to a stop at the terminal, Jerrie took a deep breath and shut the plane off, almost too exhausted to open the door.
After Jerrie met with the press, Mrs. Bill Judd, the wife of a Trans World Airline captain, invited Jerrie to stay at her house since her husband was on a flight bound for Europe, and wouldn’t be home for a few days. Jerrie accepted the invitation and, after a good night’s rest, woke excited with anticipation about the big day ahead of her. On her list was getting the long-distance radio to work, having her brakes fixed, obtaining a weather forecast for the North Atlantic, getting gas for Charlie, filling out forms, and writing an article for the newspaper back home. Before even getting out of bed, she phoned the Kindley AFB for the weather forecast. The news of hurricane-strength, gale-force winds made her high spirits plummet. She looked out the window at the waves crashing against the rocks and she decided she had better stay grounded. Besides, there were plenty more items on her to-do list to take care of.
Jerrie hopped in a taxi and took a scenic drive along the coast to the offices of Bermuda Air Services. She was informed that Joan Merriam Smith was heading to San Juan, Puerto Rico. Jerrie needed to leave the island as quickly as possible, so she decided to have someone look at the long-distance radio, and she would worry about the brakes later. Luckily, she found a radioman who had worked at Pan American World Airways. He checked the plane and agreed that the radio was dead; he believed that the problem had to be in the wires behind the gas tank. By late afternoon, the plane was stripped of its cargo. Once the gas tanks were removed, the radioman declared, “Well, there’s a wire disconnected, all right. And it just didn’t come off—the raw lead is all taped up and tucked away. The radio could never work like that.”2
So many thoughts popped into Jerrie’s mind. The radio had been installed in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It had been tested multiple times and had worked just fine. Was there someone out there who wanted her to fail? After fifty years, Jerrie Mock felt she could say what she couldn’t say then: “It was sabotage!”3
DID YOU KNOW?
The three points of the Bermuda Triangle are Miami, Puerto Rico, and Bermuda. The first person to document strange things going on in the area of the Bermuda Triangle was Christopher Columbus. He reported mysterious lights and claimed odd things happened to his compass in this area.
