Has there ever been a successful emergency landing on water by a wide-body aircraft?

It wasn’t a wide bodied aircraft, but it has a curious history, but it did make a successful ditching, and I thought it might be fun to tell it hear.

In 1956, an international Pan Am Flight 6 (also known as 943) out of Honolulu

on its last leg to San Francisco, suddenly found itself in trouble when they attempted to throttle back the No. 4 engine.. It wouldn’t. In fact, it sped up. The plane itself was a Boeing 377 Stratocruiser, a civilian spinoff of the war time B-29. As the pilots struggled to control it, the drive shaft suddenly sheared and broke. They were left with a dead engine, causing a lot of drag, costing them a lot of fuel, and losing altitude. They were in trouble.

Fortunately there was nearby, a US Coast Guard cutter, the Pontchartrain, that was performing as a weather station ship. They were able to tell the Pan Am flight local weather condition and the the local sea state.

With No. 4 gone, and the power increased to the other three to stay aloft, it wasn’t long before No.1 began to cause trouble as well. The pilots declared an emergency and began making plans to ditch. Their intention was to circle till morning, dump fuel and land in the vicinity of the Pontchartrain.

The pilots biggest worry was, if they didn’t do it right, the tail would break off upon contact of the water and sink immediately. This had happened before with another Stratocruiser.

At 5:04 in the morning, with the help of the Pontchartrain help by spreading foam on the water, the plane came in with only two engines, as slow as they could, and as light as they could.

photo by Walter Simpson of the USCG

Everyone made it. The only casualties was a baby girl getting conked on the head as they ditched. And yes, the tail did break off, but because they were ready for it, it proved not to be a problem.

The crew and passengers went on to San Francisco several days later.

The incident was turned into a movie called Crash Landing (1956).

Curiously, there was a John Wayne flick called The High and the Mighty (1954) which had come out two years prior, which was eerily similar: A flight out of Honolulu on its way to San Francisco, has a bad engine, endangering the flight, imperiling the passengers and crew, considers ditching, and along the way they are helped by a radio operator on a ship at the half way point.