Pan American Airways' Philippine Clipper, a Martin M-130 identified as NC-14715, logged 14,628 hours in the air over eight years of flying the Pacific Ocean. After being strafed by Japanese aircraft at Wake Island on December 8, 1941, the flying boat crashed near this site on the morning of January 21, 1943, while trying to let down through bad weather en route from Pearl Harbor, Oahu, Hawaiian Islands, to San Francisco Bay. On board were nine Pan American crew members and ten U.S. Navy passengers, and there were no survivors.