Producer – Steve Lyons

In Development

Across the Pacific is a 90-minute documentary about one of the great milestones in the history of aviation: the crossing of the Pacific by a Pan American Airways flying boat The China Clipper that would become one of the most famous airplanes of all time. Across the Pacific’s take-off from San Francisco Bay in November 1935 was one of the most-anticipated, most-listened-to events in history to that point.

Broadcast live over nine radio networks reaching millions of listeners on four continents, it was a forerunner of the rocket launches from Cape Canaveral a quarter century later. People everywhere sensed this was a pivotal moment in human history, for if the Pacific could be crossed, there would be no place on earth that could not be reached by airplane. The world would suddenly be smaller.

But as with the space program, the real drama in this story is not in the flight itself; it’s in the effort it took to reach this point. The Clipper’s maiden voyage was the culmination of eight years of explosive innovation and growth, involving hundreds of men and women, both famous and unknown. Like the NASA engineers and astronauts who would later put a man on the moon in less than a decade, these earlier aviation pioneers built new aircraft, invented new technologies and overcame innumerable obstacles. They had begun in 1927 with a single, 90-mile airmail route. Now, inconceivably, they stood at the water’s edge, poised to conquer the final frontier of flight by hop-scotching across 8,700 miles of the mighty Pacific. How did they do it? That is the story of this film.

In telling this story, Across the Pacific will focus on three fascinating characters:

• Pan Am’s brash young chief executive, Juan Trippe
• Igor Sikorsky, the Russian émigré who designed most of the flying boats that fueled Pan Am’s meteoric rise in the 1920s and ‘30s
• And an unsung radio engineer named Hugo Leuteritz, who invented the navigational systems that guided Pan Am’s planes safely to their destinations.

The program will combine dramatic re-enactments with lines drawn from the writings of the three main characters; interviews with scholars and people who participated in the building of the Pacific skyway; and films and photographs drawn from the rich archival record about Pan Am and the early years of commercial aviation.

The film is intended for broadcast on PBS or cable television in 2010, marking the 75th anniversary of the Clipper’s flight.

The writer, producer and director of Across the Pacific is Stephen Lyons, whose latest film is “Forgotten Genius,” NOVA’s award-winning two-hour biography of the late African American chemist Percy Julian. Also producing is Doug Miller, a longtime producer and videographer who has been researching the Clipper story for more than a decade. The Director of Photography is Gary Henoch, a Boston-based cinematographer who shot most of the re-enactments for the Julian film. The team recently received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.