The Haunted DC-4

In a previous post, I told the harrowing story of the near-tragic flight of a Grumman Goose amphibian seaplane enroute to Catalina Island back in the late 1940s. The same pilot of this flight had another, similar flirtation with disaster during the same post-war golden age of air travel.

Robert Hanley was one of Catalina’s more colorful historical characters and flew seaplanes for a period of nearly 20 years, at one point even owning his own airline, Catalina Channel Airline.

But before his first gig on Catalina, Hanley was a DC-4 pilot flying regularly scheduled air service around the nation.

On one memorable night flight from Chicago to Oakland with a full load of passengers, Hanley and his crew were enjoying the spectacular view as they flew their ship high above the snow-capped peaks of the Rockies. That snow was there for a reason, for there was a tremendous amount of very ugly weather far below them. But high above the maelstrom, they marveled at the moonlit landscape below.

“We didn’t seem to be moving,” wrote Hanley in an account that appeared in Martin Cadin’s book Ghosts of the Air: True Stories of Aerial Hauntings (Fall River Press, 2007).

“We were suspended in night space, and the earth rolled slowly toward and beneath a nearly full moon.” It was a sight that Hanley described as “not afforded to many mortals.”

Then, straight out of an Arthur Hailey screenplay, the conflict component of the story began. It seems one of Hanley’s passengers, described as a “very pregnant young Chinese woman,” began to go into labor.

There were, of course, no doctors on board, so Hanley and the stewardesses (as we called them back then) stretched the now-unconscious young woman in the cabin aisle and began administering bottled oxygen to her.

They radioed their situation to the flight station at Fort Bridger, Wyoming, and were given the distressing news that they would need to descend into the awful weather and land at Salt Lake City where they might get the poor mother-to-be to a hospital.

To get there, they would have to descend into a blizzardy Diablo Canyon (Spanish for “Devil’s Canyon”) on their approach to Salt Lake, flying not by visual means, but only by the highest tech navigational equipment of the day. That “tech” consisted of twin radio signals that when properly aligned theoretically informed the pilots they were right where they were supposed to be. Or not.

Unfortunately, as Hanley describes in the book, heavy snow storms can often distort the radio beams and in the narrows of Diablo Canyon that could prove fatal to one and all.

Without being able to see anything in the stormy night, however, Hanley had no other choice than to align the two beams into a single one and hope there wasn’t too much distortion going on.

“We were hanging onto that beam like a drowning man clutches a plank,” wrote Hanley. That was when the beam started to “weave” forcing Hanley to try to chase it back to its “null” position.

This is where things really got weird. It was at this point that Hanley says a “voice appeared to emanate from over my shoulder.”  Someone, wrote Hanley, was behind him and speaking to him. “Bob, get over to the left,” commanded the voice.

Hanley then looked over his shoulder to see who was giving this command. That was when he said he felt he had been struck “a terrible blow.”

“An old pilot friend stood by my side,” he wrote.  “A man I had spent many hours training to fly flying boats.”

It was “unmistakable,” said Hanley, that the man was his friend Harold Tucker. “We’d flown together too many hours to not notice every detail of his face.” Problem was, said Hanley, “Harold Tucker had been dead for many years.”

The apparition spoke once again, this time with greater urgency. “Get over to the left,” insisted “Harold.”

Having then evidently dispatched his other-worldly duties, the specter then vanished, leaving Hanley “ice cold.”  But Hanley did as instructed and drifted the plane to the left of the beam much to the astonishment of the co-pilot who apparently had not been privy to the ethereal vision.

Now at the bottom of Diablo Canyon, the plane suddenly emerged from the clouds where Hanley noted the right wing of the plane was “barely a few feet from the rocky wall of the canyon.”  Within minutes, the DC-4 was skidding to a stop on the icy runway at Salt Lake. They had landed safely.

There are two epilogues to this story, one tragic and one happy. Since I prefer to end on a happy note, we’ll start with the sad ending. Sometime after Hanley’s successful landing, a DC-3 cargo plane that had been faithfully following the deceptive radio signal on its approach to Salt Lake flew straight into a mountain, killing the entire crew.

The pleasant ending is that the Chinese woman not only survived her ordeal, but successfully gave birth at a local hospital. She and her relatives were delighted with Hanley’s heroics and, yes, they named the baby after him.