Corsair in Congo

Last March Imperial Airways, then run by dour Sir John Reith, tersely announced that its flying boat Corsair had made a forced landing in the Belgian Congo, "but all aboard are safe." Last week, uninformative Sir John having become British Minister of Information, and the Corsair having returned to Great Britain, the story of its African saga was told.

The Corsair, flown by Captain Edward Samson Alcock, younger brother of the Empire's late famed pioneer Transatlantic Flier Captain Sir John Alcock, was bound last March from Kisumu to Cairo, on the South Africa-to-England run. Young Alcock was rocketing along over the jungle at 200 m.p.h. when he found he was running out of fuel. Instead of flying over Juba, he was 150 miles to the southeast. The Dangu River, swarming with hippos, crocodiles and water snakes, hedged by high and slippery banks, yawned beneath him.

In desperation Pilot Alcock set the Corsair down with a sickening crunch that stove in her bottom. As she started to flounder, he deliberately hurtled her at full throttle against the steep shore. While his five frightened passengers jumped to safety he kept his engines roaring wide open, managed to hold the ship against the bank until his crew unloaded the mail, jumped clear. As the 2,960-h.p. engines finally sputtered and died, some $200,000 worth of flying boat sank back into the tropic Dangu.

Young Alcock, his passengers and three of the crew were carried overland to Juba, and from there the crestfallen pilot was recalled to London while thrifty Sir John rushed salvage engineers to the jungle. In three months, despite jungle fever, they completed repairs, and in July, when the Dangu rose to flood, they prepared to take off. With her four giant engines scaring up a bright cloud of fluttering parakeets, the patched Corsair lumbered majestically downstream. Before she rose, there was a disheartening rip and she tore her bottom out on a jagged rock.

Sir John Reith figured the twice-floundered Corsair still worth a muckle. He sent a fellow Scot, braw George Halliday, Imperial Airways sectional engineer, out from Cairo. By this time the river had gone down and there would not again be enough water for a take-off till spring of 1940. Scot Halliday figured Congo weather would have ruined the Corsair utterly by then.

Engineer Halliday decided to hire enough black bucks to dam the Dangu and create an artificial lake. A whole village, more than 200 blacks, were hired at a shilling and tuppence (27-c-) a head per week. In the sweating jungle Congo belles wheedled out of their bosses split piston rings for their noses, rivets for their ears. Duralumin rings for bracelets. Soon blacks and whites were so friendly that each Briton had a nickname in native dialect. Radioman James Wycherley was named "King of the white men" because he sat at his dials instead of working.

Trouble with the bucks was that, as soon as they were paid a few coppers, they got gloriously drunk and ran off. One way to tempt them back was for First Officer W. L. Garner to perform his amateur conjuring tricks. On Christmas night, with the dam nearing completion, Conjurer Garner, performing in the glare of truck headlights, made a Belgian five-franc piece disappear from the hand of a small native girl. She let out a piercing scream, her arm became completely stiff, and the natives grew menacing. "She knows the money is inside her arm," grunted the native chief. "Makes her sick." Conjurer Garner hastily improvised a new trick: extracted the coin from the flesh of her arm and all was well.

With the river finally dammed, the water rose rapidly and Jan. 13 was set for the takeoff. Suddenly the dam started giving way. Britons and blacks pitched in together, toiled side by side all night, finally stopped the leaks. Meanwhile the water level had sunk, the Corsair was sitting upstream, on her bottom. Tearing his hair was Imperial Airways Ace Captain Kelly Rogers, first pilot to land in New York harbor at night, who inaugurated the British north Atlantic mail service. Said he afterward: "To lift the Corsair from the water we had to sink huge petrol tanks under the wings and then turn them into lifting camels by emptying them. Where we started, the river was only 50 yards wide and the Corsair spans 38 yards. We took careful soundings, adjusted the load and let her go. When she started lifting, I knew somehow we were going to make it but I don't think anyone else did."

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