Some of the flying boat captains were outrageous characters. Captain Steve Bancroft was a practical joker who had a fetish for snakes. He collected them — boas, pythons — on his trips to South America and brought them back in his baggage. Bancroft enjoyed standing at the customs counter and watching a new inspector search his baggage for contraband.
The effect was always the same. The agent would rummage through the bag. Then he would bound into the air as if he’d been shot from a catapult. “Aiiiyeee! It’s—it’s a goddamn—”
“Snake,” Bancroft would explain. “My new constrictor. Do you like him?”
It didn’t take long for the customs agents to learn about Bancroft. On one trip an agent told Bancroft that if he had any snakes in his bag today he would find himself in jail.
“Horseshit,” said Bancroft.
“All right, smart-ass, what’s in your bag?”
“Horseshit,” said Bancroft.
“Okay.” The agent was prepared for any kind of serpent. He held a machete in his hand. “Empty the suitcase on the counter.”
“The whole thing?”
“The whole thing.”
So Bancroft dumped the entire contents of his suitcase on the counter. The suitcase was filled with manure. “See?” said Bancroft. “Just like I said. Horseshit.”
Ed Schultz was a boat captain who was very attached to his dog, a Great Dane. He missed the dog on the long flying boat trips. When Schultz reached his hotel room in Rio, he would have a few drinks and think about his dog. After a while he couldn’t stand it any longer. He would telephone his wife in Miami.
“Put Ralph on,” he would tell her.
Schultz’s wife would put Ralph on the phone.
Captain Schultz would bark into the phone. The Great Dane would bark back. They would go on like that for twenty or more minutes, Schultz and Ralph, barking back and forth on the telephone between Miami and Rio.
Captain Bob Ford was in Auckland with the Pacific Clipper, a Boeing B-314, the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Ford wondered how he was going to get back home now that a war had begun. The Pacific Ocean was a battleground. And then Ford made a command decision. He would take the Pacific Clipper home the long way—around the world in the other direction.
For nearly a month, Ford and his crew were out of contact. For all the world knew, they had dropped off the edge of the earth. In radio silence they flew across the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, the continent of Africa, the South Atlantic, and up the coasts of South and North America. On the morning of January 6, 1942, the startled duty officer in New York heard the radio transmission: “Pacific Clipper inbound from Auckland, New Zealand. Captain Ford reporting. Due arrive Pan American Marine Terminal La Guardia seven minutes.”
Bob Ford had made it home. He had also made history. He and his crew had just completed the first round-the-world flight with a commercial airplane.
Because Trippe was a pilot, he respected his airmen’s skills. But it was not in his peculiar chemistry to actually fraternize with them. Never would Trippe, the aloof tycoon, consider loosening his tie and walking into a crew room to join a flying-with-the-hands bull session.
More often than not, Trippe was at odds with his pilots. To Trippe, pilots were pampered specialists who complained too much about work rules and pay and benefits. In the thirties he had to endure the specter of a union on his property—ALPA, the Air Line Pilots Association. As ALPA members, pilots were no longer hired and fired at the company’s whim. Their salaries and working rules were negotiated for them by their union. Their place on the company roster was fixed by a seniority list. Their grievances were adjudicated by union and company mediators.
Gradually Trippe distanced himself from the crew room and the cockpit and the seaplane ramp. More and more he became the aloof executive. To oversee Pan American’s flight operations, he hired a small, gnomelike Dutchman named Andre Priester.
As chief engineer, Priester was given autonomy over all Pan Am’s flying hardware. During the next three decades he stamped the airline with his own ethic of hard-nosed, conservative, meticulously planned operations. It was Priester who laid down the specifications for each of Pan Am’s new flying boats. Priester plotted new routes and wrote operations manuals and calculated aircraft performance. Priester invented Pan Am’s operational philosophy.
Whereas Trippe was seldom seen by the rank and file, Priester was omnipresent. He popped up everywhere, snooping, inspecting, running a finger over surfaces, asking questions. His English was still not good. “Vat are you dooink?” he would ask a loitering mechanic. If the man said he was taking a break, Priester would say, “It iss not your chob to take breaks. Work or you vill be fired.” He forbade drinking or smoking on Pan American Flying boats, even for passengers. He would fire a pilot for smoking in public, or a mechanic for having a dirty toolbox.
Once he boarded a flying boat that had just docked. He ordered a steward to pick up the abandoned newspapers. The steward replied that it wasn’t his job to clean airplanes. “Dat’s right,” the Dutchman said. “You haffen’t got a chob.”
In his office Priester kept a photograph of every pilot in Pan Am’s employ. Whenever an incident occurred, he could match a man’s face to the problem. He sent Christmas cards to every airman, usually with a subtle message about engineering efficiency or a new year’s operating goal for the airline. One pilot, Horace Brock, remembered “rather obscurely on the card one year could be found two little numbers, perhaps .87 in one corner and .55 in another. For those with aeronautical training the meaning would eventually sink in: one number referred to propeller efficiency, and the other to specific fuel consumption, efficiencies not yet attainable.”
Pilots, being pilots, resisted Priester’s autocratic ways. They mimicked his Dutch accent: “Ve vant to fly ze airplanes in a zafe manner.” They stuck up cartoons of the diminutive, baldheaded Dutchman.
The pilots feared Priester. They resented his uncompromising perfectionist attitude. But in their secret hearts they took pride in what he made them accomplish.
The first Skygod, master of all the Masters of Ocean Flying Boats, was a slender, ungodlike man named Edwin Musick.
People seldom noticed when Ed Musick walked into a room. He was a man of unimposing countenance, over forty, completely lacking any of Lindbergh’s youthful charisma. He had thinning black hair and a permanent five-o’clock shadow. Musick spoke only occasionally, and when he did it was with a frugal use of words. Ed Musick was a pilot, which was all he had ever aspired to be. It was only when he entered the cockpit that Ed Musick seemed to grow in stature. His brown eyes would come alive, flicking over every instrument and control in the compartment. He would settle himself into the left seat and then, with thumb and forefinger, he would straighten the creases in his trousers. With a handkerchief he would clean the glass face of each instrument. He would adjust and readjust his seat, making sure his hands reached the controls at just the right angle.
This ritual would go on for a while. Not until everything was adjusted to his satisfaction would Musick order, in his soft voice, “Start number one.”
The line pilots called him “meticulous Musick.” Musick was one of them. They held him in special esteem because he was not flashy, not interested in personal publicity, not ambitious for a job in upper management. He was the most professional pilot any of them had ever met.
Ed Musick became Pan American’s chief pilot. In 1935, Musick received the most important assignment of his life: he would fly the world’s most advanced airplane, the China Clipper, from San Francisco all the way to the Far East. By the end of the China Clipper’s epic voyage, Ed Musick was the most famous airline pilot in the world. His life had changed forever. His face appeared on the cover of Time. He was presented with the Harmon Trophy, an award for aviation achievement shared only by Lindbergh and Wiley Post. His comments were sought by reporters on every subject, aeronautical or otherwise.
Musick’s shyness and laconic commen
tary, however, were the bane of Pan Am’s publicity department. During the proving flight of the Sikorsky S-42B to Hawaii, the press director pleaded for newsworthy reports. Would Ed, please, transmit something—anything—that was publishable?
Musick balked. “I’m a pilot, not a newspaperman. I wouldn’t know what to send.”
“Send something about the sunset over the Pacific.”
Okay, Musick said. He would send something. From out over the ocean he radioed to the anxious world a typical Musick message: “Sunset, 0639 GMT.”
Ed Musick was a man who almost never used profanity, but when he gazed down for the first time at Pago Pago, he used the most common expletive in aviation: Oh, shit. They expected him to land a twenty-ton flying boat in this teacup of a harbor. Whose stupid goddamn idea was this?
Pago Pago was a bad place for a flying boat. The green Samoan hills swelled to 1,500 feet at each end of the harbor. The wind off the ocean piled up the waves in a white froth at the mouth of the bay. To land in Pago Pago harbor, Musick would have to descend along the slope of the encircling hills, using full landing flaps to keep his speed down, then break his descent at the last instant and slap the big Sikorsky flying boat down on the water before he ran out of harbor. If he glided too far, he would crash into the breakers at the mouth of the bay.
Pan American was surveying the new route from San Francisco to Auckland, New Zealand. Everyone knew it was a dangerous mission. Musick, typically, reasoned that as chief pilot it should be his assignment to fly the trip.
Their S-42B, the Samoan Clipper, had to be specially outfitted for the trip. Its cabin was stripped of all its seats, fixtures, and passenger accommodations. Extra fuel tanks and a new fuel-jettisoning system were installed. Because of the ever-present reek of gasoline in the cabin the crew called her the “flying gas tank.”
Musick landed the flying boat in Pago Pago harbor. The next day he took off again for Auckland. Twice more he came to Pago Pago, liking the little island no more than the first time he saw it.
On the morning of January 11, 1938, Musick powered the Sikorsky flying boat once again across the confined harbor, barely clearing the breakers at the mouth of the bay, and set course for New Zealand. Two hours and forty minutes later he radioed that he had an oil leak in number four engine and that he intended to jettison his huge load of fuel. He wanted the flying boat down to minimum landing weight so he could safely alight back in the teacup-sized Pago Pago harbor.
He never made it. As Musick jettisoned the high-octane fuel, vapor gathered in the wing of the big Sikorsky boat—then ignited. The Samoan Clipper exploded like an incendiary bomb. It fell to the sea in a ball of flame.
The news flashed around the system. At Pacific island bases and in cockpits and in crew lounges, pilots shook their heads and spoke in hushed tones. The great Musick was dead.
Musick may have been gone, but thirty years later the Skygods were still around. The new-hire pilots would catch glimpses of them. The ancient airmen, living artifacts from another age, could be observed striding down the hallway to attend to their worldly business in the crew scheduling or personnel departments. Their heels clacked like hammers on the marble floor. Their penetrating gazes fixed like laser beams on the earthlings they encountered on their daily rounds.
Even their uniforms were distinctive. The gold on their cap visors and the four stripes on their uniform sleeves had a weathered, saltsprayed dullness. The white caps rode atop their graying manes with a windward tilt. In their double-breasted, gold-encrusted Pan Am uniforms they looked like ancient mariners.
Their trademark was the Look. Skygods squinted at the world over the tops of half-frame spectacles, down the lengths of their leathery noses. Wearing the Look, they would lock their imperious gaze on whatever subspecies happened to warrant their attention.
From a distance, the new hires watched in awe. Like everyone else, they knew these ancients had practically invented aviation. Back in the boat days, these heroes had braved a thousand storms, alighted on mountainous seascapes, flown over the vastness of great oceans.
And the Skygod ethic, the new pilots were learning, wasn’t found just in the cockpit. It began at the top, in the corporate sanctum of the chief executive. Juan Trippe was the Supreme Skygod.
Chapter Four
Jets
Always bear in mind that airplanes get bigger. Don’t make a decision now that doesn’t allow you to increase the capacity of your airplane. Don’t limit yourself. Get the most out of your airplane.
—CHARLES A. LINDBERGH
While Juan Trippe was still dispatching trimotor mail planes to Cuba, his thoughts had turned to flying boats. And when his great flying boats were still crossing the oceans, he was thinking about jets. That was Trippe’s innate gift. The Supreme Skygod could read the future as if it were tomorrow’s appointment book.
But they always fought him. The Primitives—myopic bureaucrats and bankers and slow-witted industry moguls—came out from under their rocks to oppose him. In 1935 they fought him over the China Clipper and the new Pacific service. In 1939 they fought him over Pan American’s monopoly on the North Atlantic route. At the end of World War II they opposed his proposal for a single flag-carrying American overseas airline.
Now it was 1955, and the Primitives were fighting him again. This time it was over jets.
Few airline chiefs in the early 1950s believed they could make money with the newly invented, fuel-guzzling, screamingly noisy jet-engined airliner. At a quarter of the cost, nearly half the speed and twice the range, propeller-driven transports like the Douglas DC-6 and DC-7 and the Lockheed Constellation made far more sense than dangerous vehicles like the jet.
Several authoritative studies, including one by the Rand Corporation, declared that the jet did not—and for many years would not—possess the range to cross the ocean nonstop. Nor could its seats be sold at reasonable fares to guarantee a profit for the operator. Further, to carry both a payload and the great store of fuel required to fly any distance, the jet would require impossibly long runways both to take off and to land.
C.R. Smith, the boss of American Airlines, stood up at an industry meeting and said, “We are all of us still intrigued by the glamour of the jet airplane, but neither we nor you, the consumer, can now afford it.” The price of a jetliner—not yet built—was estimated to be $4 million per airplane. “We can’t go backward to the jet,” Smith declared. There were amens from his audience.
The logical next step, according to Smith and his disciples, was the turboprop. The turboprop was a jet engine with the compressor shaft connected to a conventional propeller. Airliners built around the turboprop made more sense. They were cheaper to build than a jet. They were cheaper to operate. Best of all, at least for wary passengers, they looked and felt like conventional propeller-driven airliners powered by conventional engines.
Claptrap, snorted Juan Trippe. Smith was leading the chorus of the Primitives.
To Trippe, the jet was imminently logical and inevitable. Never mind the whining about development expense and cost per copy and revenue-passenger-mile cost and noise and range and economy. Those problems would be solved. They always were.
Speed, for its own sake, was not the most important factor. Flying the Atlantic in half the time of its propeller-driven predecessors meant the jet could transport many more passengers in the same time frame. To Juan Trippe, jets meant faster travel, lower fares, more passengers, expanding airlines—and thus profit. Why did the Primitives never understand that?
Charles Lindbergh was Trippe’s advance scout. Even before the war was over, while he was still working for Pratt & Whitney, Lindbergh had entered collapsing Germany to sniff out secret new developments. He was looking primarily for jets, and he found them. He discovered advanced jet engine production. He found the startlingly advanced twin-engine Messerschmitt Me 262, the world’s first operational jet fighter. He came upon a swept-wing aircraft, evidence that the Germans were already exploring the real
ms of transonic and supersonic flight. He even found Germany’s leading builder of exotic aircraft, Willy Messerschmitt, living in a cow barn next to his house in Munich.
Charles Lindbergh had an association with Pan Am that went back almost as far as Juan Trippe’s. Lindbergh had served as the captain on the inaugural flight of the American Clipper, Pan Am’s first great Sikorsky flying boat. It was Lindbergh who surveyed the airmail routes across Latin America.
When Trippe was thinking about the Pacific, he dispatched Lindbergh, with his young wife Anne flying as radio operator and navigator, on a survey mission. In their Lockheed Sirius floatplane, the Lindberghs flew the Arctic route to Asia, all the way to China. Two years later they flew the same floatplane to Europe. They explored the coasts of North America, Greenland, and Scandinavia, criss-crossed Europe as far as Moscow, then flew down the west coast of Africa. From the Gambia River in West Africa, Charles and Anne Lindbergh crossed the South Atlantic, nonstop, to Natal, up the Amazon to Manaus, over the jungle to Trinidad—and home. Their epic journey lasted five and a half months.
Lindbergh reported to Trippe that the best flying boat route to Europe was via Bermuda and the Azores. Just like the North Pacific, the northern route over Greenland and Iceland would be ice-locked and murderous in the winter.
Lindbergh was already thinking that the big, romantic flying boats themselves were the real problem. Flying boats required safe harbors, free of ice and flotsam and heavy seas, wherever they alighted. They needed docks and jetties and boarding launches to handle passengers. Salt water ate like acid through their vital components. They were fascinating anachronisms. It was just a matter of time, Lindbergh said, before they were replaced by long-range land planes.
Skygods: The Fall of Pan Am Page 3
