“Flight 7 Is Missing: The Search for My Father’s Killer”

By Ken H. Fortenberry

Fayetteville Mafia Press, $24.99

On Nov. 8, 1957, Pan American Stratocruiser “Romance of the Skies,” carrying 37 passengers and a crew of seven, crashed while on a routine flight from San Francisco to Honolulu. Nineteen bodies and a small amount of wreckage was recovered. There were no survivors. The Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) investigated, briefly considered several possible causes for the crash, and was unable to reach a conclusion or establish a probable cause. Reports were filed, promises of future investigation were made and broken, and the world moved on.

That’s where it would have remained had it not been for Ken H. Fortenberry. His father, William Fortenberry, had been the navigator/radio operator/relief pilot on the flight. Although Fortenberry was only 6 years old when his father died, he decided several years later that he would solve the mystery. “Flight 7 Is Missing: The Search for My Father’s Killer” is the result of his six-decade search for information.

Fortenberry found that the CAB investigation had been less than thorough. PanAm didn’t want its maintenance records to be investigated; the airline’s Pacific-Alaska Division was losing money and PanAm had cut back on aircraft maintenance and inspection. Boeing wanted to make sure that crash was not attributed to any design flaw in the aircraft. The Transportation Workers Union opposed any suggestion that the crash could have been caused by crew error. The FBI officially refused to investigate, apparently — Fortenberry suggests — because FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover thought that if the FBI didn’t solve the case it would make the agency look bad. Leads to persons of interest weren’t followed.

In the decades that followed Fortenberry let no possibility go unexplored. He researched PanAm maintenance records, the service history of “Romance of the Skies” and other Stratocruisers, and the personal histories of the other members of the crew. Had the plane been sabotaged by a mentally unstable PanAm employee or as part of an insurance fraud scheme? Had it been sabotaged to kill a politically important passenger? Or as revenge for a recent attempt to assassinate Chinese Premier Zhou ­Enlai?

Fortenberry also investigated the possibility that the plane had encountered a UFO — there had been numerous UFO sightings, several involving aircraft, the week of the crash — or that the plane had been hit by a meteor. He even worked with clairvoyant “remote viewers” to get their perceptions of what caused the crash, and to explore the possibility that a suspect who was on the passenger list had somehow left the plane before take-off.

Fortenberry excels in capturing the human cost of the tragedy — not only for his own family, but for the other families as well. He documents the ups and downs of his investigation in a gripping style. Some agencies refused outright to help him, others falsely claimed that they had no information. One person told Fortenberry that they might be killed if they told him what they knew. Others decided late in life to share their knowledge.

Fortenberry adds a poignant personal touch by including some of the letters his father had sent home while overseas on previous flights. (His father’s body was one of the 25 that was not recovered; it remains with most of the aircraft somewhere on the bottom of the Pacific.)

For more information, go to flight7ismissing.com.