The Tribune

By DIANE PHILLIPS

ERIC Wiberg doesn’t remember exactly when his fascination with downed planes or doomed ships began, but he remembers the moment he made a promise to a friend to find the oldest plane crash in Bahamian history.

And he has been chasing that promise ever since.

If Wiberg’s name is familiar, so should his face and prose be – his column often appears opposite this one in The Tribune. He has written more words than can fit into a slim version of the dictionary. He’s authored more than 45 non-fiction books on boats, planes and U-2 submarines.

Every crash, every sinking is fodder for his mind and material for his keyboard. Wiberg grew up in Nassau, son of the former Swedish Ambassador to The Bahamas Anders Wiberg. His restless spirit has taken him round the world on 10,000-mile treks. Even his education was extraordinary – five universities followed by a stint in the corporate world and then discovering his true passion, researching the causes and calamities of voyages by air or sea that had to be explained by someone with a passion for closure.

But for all the triumphs and tragedies that he has covered and uncovered the roots and causes of, none has compared to the mission he has been on for his friend, and another historian he (and this columnist) truly admires – Paul Aranha.

It is the 1930 crash of PILOT RADIO.

“When Paul Aranha said ‘I am entrusting you to find this’, I knew I had to do it,” says Wiberg. If Wiberg documents the history of aviation, Aranha is the history – the man known as Island Airman, founder of Trans Islands Airways, an historian and author. For decades, Aranha has been the pilots’ pilot who helped shape the modern Bahamas by making travel by air accessible to and through the islands of The Bahamas.

So when the honorary statesman of aviation asked Wiberg, the researcher with a pendant for mysterious ends, to locate the historic plane that was believed to have crashed somewhere in the bushes of the Exumas, Wiberg took a deep breath, said yes, and hasn’t exhaled yet. 

Aranha’s fascination with PILOT RADIO triggered Wiberg’s commitment to a man who is a national icon and hero.

He began the search high on hope and short on cash. He needed sponsors, in kind or in funds. He found several. They funded trip after trip. There have been nearly 10 since the quest started.

So what, I asked him, makes the search for PILOT RADIO so important? The Bahamas has seen its fair share of plane crashes. There are two or three silhouettes of planes visible from the surface of Lake Killarney right now, others near LPIA and at least one not far from almost every runway in the Family Islands, not to mention the famed wrecks of Norman’s Cay, Exuma or Spanish Wells, North Eleuthera.

Here is the back story as told by Wiberg.

PILOT RADIO was a company ahead of its time, launched by two men who created the  first radio designed specifically for pilots to communicate with ships and with the ground. To promote the product, they grabbed a third man, a cripple who was partly paralyzed, and flew it across the globe.

“It was an extraordinary feat, an advertising campaign that took them 19,000 miles around the world,” says Wiberg. This was 1930, remember, almost 100 years ago. The plane had a Wright Bros. engine.

They were on the last leg of that journey.

“This was the victory lap. All they had to do was get a couple hundred miles to Miami. She left Puerto Rico and was flying on her way to Miami. They flew over the Dominican Republic and Cuba and then passed over Ragged Island.”

That’s when they heard it – the sound of metal clanging.

It was a metal strut. The banging got louder, the plane started to shake. The plane was literally falling apart.

“The navigator tells the pilot what to do. He is on the radio now, communicating with a ship in the Exumas, shouting, ‘We are screwed. We have to land.’ Then you hear the ship to plane transmission: ’God bless you. May the spirits be with you.’”

It is 3:50 pm. They know if they overshoot Rolleville, they are truly, as the ship said, ‘screwed.’

They search frantically for a place to put the plane down and they find it in the bushes between the mangroves and sand west of Great Exuma at the boundary between Telfair & Clarke land.

Several weeks ago, on the most recent expedition Wiberg “was struck by the odd shape of a metal frame found in metal debris in a creek usually under water….”

It matched the hollow steel tubing, windows, panels and doorways of the missing plane. To ensure that they are not parts from something else – abandoned vehicles, construction materials, the pieces and parts have been sent to museums and experts in separate locations elsewhere for scientific confirmation.

“What we believe we have is a corner of the window and about eight pieces of pipe, metal reservoir or engine part, small bits of metal,” said Wiberg.

“The engine was said to have been seen in about 2016 on its side in mangroves partly visible. In the meantime, we can thank backers and say with confidence that we have found the PILOT RADIO in 2026, 96 years after it became the oldest plane crash in Bahamian history.”

He needs to make one more expedition to explore the muck and waters around his latest finding searching for what he calls the Holy Grail, either a sparkplug from the engine or the engine itself.

“One day we will find the Wright Brothers engine,” he predicts.

These days he travels with his teenage son, Felix, and a very small troupe. They all but live in the bush, no frills. He is a man on a mission and he is nearly there, ready to deliver on a promise.

As for those three men aboard at the time of the crash, they ditched the plane, walked away disheartened and battered, but alive, only to return to New York where they spent the rest of their lives drinking themselves to death and suing one another.