“This is a torture of cold trails, frightened relatives, and the heroism of a loving son who refused to give up. If you’ve ever loved an aviation-based whodunit you’ll treasure the genuine nature of this book.
This is a must-read!”
– Capt. John J. Nance,
N.Y. Times bestselling author & ABC-TV aviation analyst.
Ken Fortenberry was only six years old when his pilot-father left their San Francisco home and never returned. Eight years later Fortenberry began a one-man lifelong journey of detective work to determine why his father’s plane simply vanished without warning in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, a few minutes after the crew reported that everything was normal.
Among the passengers aboard Pan American World Airways Flight 7: the president of Renault Europe; a Dow Chemical executive and his entire family; an Air Force intelligence officer bound for Burma on a secret mission; a nervous first-time flyer headed to his mother’s funeral in Honolulu, and a sailor returning to Tokyo to marry the woman he had met during the war.
The sudden disappearance of the Boeing 377 Stratocruiser – nicknamed Romance of the Skies – prompted the largest sea-air search since Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra had been declared missing twenty years before. How could the biggest, fastest and most luxurious aircraft of it time simply vanish?
Federal aviation investigators never determined why the airliner (N90944) went down, and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover spurned their repeated, desperate pleas for help in solving the puzzling case.
But Fortenberry – a Don Quixote who doggedly fought for answers across six decades – refused to accept the fact that the case was left unsolved and chased down every conceivable angle in his quest to end the nightmare of his father’s untimely and unresolved death. During his journey he determined that key people and critical pieces of evidence had been overlooked or ignored.
Did the plane crash because of mechanical failure? Were the communist Chinese paying the United States back for a CIA-foiled plot to assassinate Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai a few years earlier?
Strange as it may seem, did a UFO somehow interfere with flight controls of the plane and bring it down? The week of the crash was one of the most prolific in UFO sighting history.
Or was the crash an intentional act of mass murder-suicide committed by one of the people aboard?
All of those questions haunted Fortenberry in his seemingly impossible task, but his perseverance from childhood to his senior years paid off with a remarkable conclusion to a fascinating story.
Join the author, an award-winning investigative journalist, in his relentless quest for answers across six decades in this well researched, emotion-packed true story.
Pan Am Flight 7 to be memorialized in the City of Millbrae, CA.https://www.gofundme.com/f/memorialize-those-lost-on-pan-am-flight-7