Skygods: The Fall of Pan Am

by Gandt, Robert

  Martinside had never seen such grief. They were weeping, not in the way people commonly cry in airports, but in an ancient, intuitive way women have always wept when their men went off to battle. Each of the women looked as if she had just seen her husband for the last time.

  A heavy silence hung over the cockpit. None of the pilots felt like talking. They all wanted to leave Honolulu. “We’re cleared to push,” said the voice on the ground interphone.

  “Good,” said the captain. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Darkness had fallen over South Vietnam.

  “Clipper eleven-oh-one,” said the Saigon approach controller, “you’re advised to fly a high approach.”

  “Clipper eleven-oh-one, roger,” acknowledged Martinside, the first officer. A high approach into Saigon was a good idea, especially at night. It meant that you descended to the runway at a steeper than normal angle to increase the vertical distance between you and any unfriendlies outside the airport perimeter.

  They were still twenty-five miles out when they saw the flashes.

  “What’s going on down there, approach?” Martinside asked.

  “Uh, we think it’s incoming fire, Clipper. Don’t know yet. We’re checking.”

  They could see Ton Son Nhut from the cockpit. Orange belches of flame were erupting along the northern airport boundary. Then, a brilliant flash inside the perimeter, near the operations complex.

  “Did you see that?” said the captain.

  “Uh huh,” said Martinside.

  More flashes on the airport. Downtown Saigon was lighting up with scattered explosions. It looked like a major fireworks display.

  A silhouetted object swept past the nose of the 707, trailing a torch of flame.

  “What the hell was that?”

  “I don’t know,” said Martinside. “A fighter, I think.”

  “Uh, Clipper eleven-oh-one,” said the controller, his voice an octave higher than before, “they’re launching F-4s from Ton Son Nhut and also from Bien Hoa. We’re not controlling them.”

  “Shit!” said the captain. “Turn on the landing lights.”

  “Lights on,” replied Martinside, reaching for the switches. The jetliner would he illuminated like a lighthouse. What was the biggest risk? he wondered. Being rammed by a friendly fighter or being hit by ground fire?

  They could see parachute flares descending on the airport. The landscape around Ton Son Nhut airport was lit bright as day.

  “Clipper eleven-oh-one this is Pan op.” It was the Pan Am operations office at Ton Son Nhut on the company frequency. “Message for you. Divert. Red Brick instructions. I repeat, divert, Red Brick instructions. Copy that?”

  “Roger, Pan op, we copy Red Brick. We’re diverting. Can you say what’s going on?”

  “Negative. We don’t know, and we’re getting the hell out of here. See you later.”

  “Red Brick” was company code. It meant an emergency was in progress at the destination airport, and the inbound aircraft was instructed to divert to another airport. In this case, they were supposed to go to Hong Kong.

  Climbing into the night sky over South Vietnam, Martinside peered back in the direction of Saigon. It looked like the city was in flames. Orange spurts of fire were blossoming across the blackened countryside.

  When the radio chatter had subsided and the new flight plan was received, they talked about what had happened. “I must have missed something in the briefing package,” said the captain. “Was there anything about expected fighting around Saigon?”

  “Nope,” said Martinside, leafing through the sheaf of papers. “All it says here is that this is a Chinese holiday. Things are supposed to be quiet. Something called Tet.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Boy Scout

  He was a man of a hundred and ten percent integrity—as a man who trusts a slide rule ought to be.

  —AN ASSOCIATE OF HAROLD GRAY, 1968

  People who had known Harold Gray for years thought of him as a cold man, almost as cold as Juan Trippe. But Gray possessed a different chemistry. He lacked Trippe’s facility to charm, to slither and dissemble. While Trippe thought in terms of influence and political gain, Gray disdained such tactics, preferring to concentrate instead on product. He was a pragmatist. White was white, black was black. Anybody with any sense ought to know the difference. “All we have to do is be good, and people will recognize it,” he liked to say.

  Harold Gray lived by statistics. Any problem ought to be reducible to hard numbers, and then it could be solved. Gray’s talisman at staff meetings was his slide rule. Boil the problem down to digits, put them on the slide rule, let the results speak for themselves.

  As the new chairman of the board, Gray inherited the problem of the 747. The Everyman airplane was behind schedule for delivery—it was supposed to be on line by early 1970—and the deadline was coming up for options on eight more. The biggest problem was the engines. A newer, more powerful version of the JT-9 engine had to be produced by Pratt & Whitney in order for the 747 to meet the specifications agreed to by Trippe and Allen.

  But who should pay for the redesign? Throughout mid-1968 Boeing, Pan Am, and Pratt & Whitney engaged in a running fight over who would pick up the tab. Not until late summer was a compromise finally hammered out.

  In the meantime, Gray was pondering the matter of the options on more 747s. The $175 million tab for the eight additional jumbos was just for starters. Pan Am’s terminal at Kennedy would have to be rebuilt to handle the new jumbo jets at a cost of $126 million. And there was the matter of a new maintenance facility, also at Kennedy Airport. Yet another $98 million.

  It was a monstrous outlay—the greatest in airline history. Gray ran the numbers across his slide rule, and they made sense to him. As a formality, he sought the concurrence of his executives, including the new president, Jeeb Halaby, who had headed a committee to study the feasibility of increasing the order. Halaby agreed with Gray’s judgement.

  Chairman Gray put his pen to contracts for eight more 747s, making a total of thirty-three, and for the glittery new Kennedy Worldport and for the sprawling jumbo maintenance base. When he was finished, Pan Am’s indebtedness for its new jumbo jets and facilities had swollen to over a billion dollars.

  Meanwhile the statistics for the 1968 annual report were coming in, and they didn’t look good. Earnings were down by nearly 19 percent. From its l966 peak of $39 a share, Pan Am stock was selling in the middle twenties.

  An odd malaise seemed to be settling over the Imperial Airline. No one could put his finger on it, but there it was. Everyone from top to bottom in the airline knew it, from Harold Gray all the way down to Marty Shugrue.

  Riding sideways in his engineer’s seat, Marty Shugrue sometimes wondered why he had gotten out of the Navy.

  In the Navy he had flown S-2 anti-submarine aircraft off carriers. He had flown them in the left seat, facing forward, not riding sideways as he was now. There he had been in charge. That was what Shugrue had liked about the Navy. At a very young age they made you responsible for airplanes, weapons, personnel. You got to run the show.

  When he left the Navy Shugrue took a job with the Hamilton Standard Company, an aircraft components manufacturer, in Hartford, Connecticut. It was an office job and had nothing to do with flying. He was in charge of nothing. He lasted eighty-nine days before he quit to join Pan Am.

  For Shugrue, being an airline pilot took some rationalization. Everything in a pilot’s career—promotion, furlough, pay, vacation—was dispensed by seniority. You took a number when you were hired, and there you stayed, relative to your fellow pilots, for the rest of your career. It wasn’t like the military, which was a pyramidal hierarchy where you could pass your peers—or be passed—depending on how well you played the game. In the airline it didn’t matter how well you played. No passing. No merit promotions.

  And that was okay with Shugrue so long as he made a steady ascent on the seniority ladder. That would occur naturally,
he figured, as long as the airline was making money, growing, adding pilots to its roster.

  Lately he was having doubts. There were a lot of things Shugrue didn’t understand about Pan American. When you didn’t understand something at Pan Am, it was said that you just didn’t have the Big Picture.

  One thing he didn’t understand, for example, was Rock Sound. Here he was on a Sunday morning, riding sideways in his flight engineer’s seat down to Rock Sound on the island of Eleuthera in the Caribbean. Pan Am maintained a regular 707 service to Rock Sound. The flight was almost always empty.

  Why was Pan Am flying to Rock Sound?

  And then one day during the transit in Rock Sound, Shugrue suddenly understood. They boarded two passengers who had a home on Eleuthera. Their names were on the manifest: Mr. and Mrs. Juan T. Trippe. Pan Am was providing what amounted to a private 707 to carry the boss back and forth to Eleuthera. On most days the flight’s only purpose was to deliver Trippe’s Wall Street Journal.

  Ooookay. . . that cleared up a tiny piece of the Big Picture. But what about all the other profitless flights? Pan Am was flying empty airplanes to places like Pago Pago, Rabat, Monrovia, Lagos. The airline had just announced that it would offer nonstop 707 service to Moscow. Moscow? In the Soviet Union? Who in 1968, other than the odd tourist and a few spies, would pay to travel to Moscow?

  Whenever Shugrue asked someone who was supposed to know— someone who had the Big Picture—he would get a shrug. It was just the way it was. Pan Am was supposed to fly to exotic places.

  That was the kind of thing that bothered Shugrue. How, he wondered, could Pan Am make money flying empty airplanes to unprofitable destinations?

  New hires, he was informed, weren’t supposed to trouble themselves with such matters. It was over their heads. Don’t worry about it, kid. You just don’t have the Big Picture.

  And then came something that was even harder to understand. It was the F word.

  Shugrue stood in front of the bulletin board. The board was covered with several printed pages containing pilots’ names and seniority numbers. It was a furlough notice. Shugrue found his name two-thirds of the way down the list. With the furlough notice was a message from Jeeb Halaby to the effect that he was sorry it had to happen, but everyone should understand that it was only temporary. As soon as Pan Am completed its period of retrenchment, all furloughed airmen would be recalled and the hiring would resume.

  The F word.

  Furlough was the flip side of the new-hire process. You began your career at the bottom of the seniority list. That was okay as long as your airline was growing. That’s why it hired you, and that’s why you came aboard. But when the airline stopped growing and began contracting, the process reversed itself. It furloughed you, which was to say it threw your expendable, newly hired carcass back on the street whence it had come. In reverse order of seniority. Last in, first out.

  Shugrue was angry, just like the others. No one was taking it well. Pilots were clustered around the board, jaws clenching, fingers jabbing at the glass-covered board.

  “The bastards! They knew all along. They damn well knew they were going to furlough us when they hired us.”

  “Nobody else is furloughing. Why Pan Am?”

  “I knew I should have taken the job with Braniff.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “No idea. Look for a job, I guess.”

  They were right about one thing. Pan Am had known it would have too many pilots, even while it was still hiring. The airline had been developing new technology that would eliminate the need for navigators altogether. The Doppler system was an onboard electronic device that could be operated by the captain and first officer. No longer was it necessary for an airborne navigator to plant his eyeball in the socket of an octant, Magellan-like, tracking the jetliner’s progress over the ocean. The Doppler system would eliminate the need for several hundred pilot-navigators.

  And it would get worse. It didn’t take much calculating to figure what would happen when the 747, with two and a half times the seat capacity of the 707, came on line. Fewer airplanes, fewer pilots.

  More of the F word.

  Shugrue wondered what he would do. He knew how to land aboard an aircraft carrier, which didn’t count for much in civilian life. He possessed a degree in economics from Providence College, which carried little weight in the real world.

  The truth was, he liked the airline business. And he particularly liked Pan American. He still thought it was a classy airline, despite its Skygods and its recent propensity for losing money. He would like to help straighten it out.

  And then someone told him that Pan Am was recruiting management trainees. They would be junior managers sent around the airline system as troubleshooters. Furloughed pilots would be given first consideration .

  Hell, thought Shugrue, why not?

  The next week, when he learned he had been hired, he packed away his Pan Am pilot’s uniform. He showed up for work as a junior management trainee. And that’s where Marty Shugrue stayed. He never wore the uniform again.

  In San Francisco, Rob Martinside and Jim Wood stood looking at the furlough notice. Their names were not on it, but the reduction in numbers meant that they had descended uncomfortably close to the bottom of the roster.

  “I guess this means we won’t make captain this year,” said Martinside.

  “It means we’re lucky to have a job,” said Wood.

  The furlough notice gave everyone an uneasy feeling. Something was slipping away. Hadn’t they been told they would be SST pilots? Pan Am had been aimed at the stars. Now it was pointing back to earth. Something was going wrong.

  The SST was in trouble, too. The project had fallen into the grasp of Congress, which was being lobbied heavily by both sides. Boeing, which had won the contract for the prototype, was pushing for further allocations. Organized labor, in the person of crusty old George Meany, was using its huge influence. Washington State’s two powerful senators, Scoop Jackson and Warren Magnuson, were twisting their colleagues’ arms.

  But the timing of the SST was all wrong. It was a season of protest in the United States. Not only were Americans resisting the war in Southeast Asia, they were disenchanted with government in general. They were angry with government’s use of technology in making weapons and launching space vehicles—and constructing unwanted supersonic transports.

  The SST finally died at the hands of a mob. A coalition of groups as diverse as the Sierra Club, Zero Population Growth, Friends of the Earth, and the United States Senate put the futuristic airplane to death in November 1970. In a vote of fifty-two to forty-one, the Senate voted against the expenditure of another $290 million on the SST. In the spring of 1971, both houses of Congress voted to terminate the project.

  In Seattle, the immediate result was a layoff of five thousand workers. The SST mockup, which had cost $12 million, was sold for $43,000 to a promoter, who moved it to a roadside park near Disney World.

  At Pan Am, among the not yet furloughed airmen, there was a dismal shrug of the shoulders. The loss of the SST was mostly symbolic. Everyone knew the day was past when Pan American could afford to be the torchbearer for new aviation technology.

  But for the new hires, it was the death of a promise made on the first day of their careers: Congratulations, gentlemen. You’re going to be SST pilots. . .

  Chapter Fourteen

  Besieged

  We have an unround situation.

  —EVERETTE WEBB, Boeing 747 project engineer

  Well, maybe they wouldn’t be SST pilots. But Pan Am had the Everyman airplane, and it was almost ready to fly.

  On a cold January day in 1970, Pat Nixon followed the example of First Ladies since Herhert Hoover’s wife launched Pan Am’s first S-40 flying boat, back in 1931. “I christen thee Clipper Young America,” she said, then yanked the handle of a device that sprayed streams of red, white, and blue fluid over the nose of the new jumbo jet at Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C.
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  The 747’s first commercial flight was scheduled six days later. It was a bitterly cold and bleak night in New York. No movable jetways had yet been constructed at Kennedy Airport for the boarding of jumbo jets. The passengers climbed the exposed boarding stairs, shivering, clutching their collars against the lashing winter wind.

  Bob Weeks, New York chief pilot, was the captain for the inaugural flight. Weeks and his crew started the engines and taxied toward the runway. While they were still out on the windswept taxiway, the flight engineer, watching the engine gauges on his panel, saw the exhaust temperature of one engine shooting off the scale. The blustering wind off Jamaica Bay was raising hell with the sensitive JT-9D engines. The wind was blowing into the tailpipes, from back to front, restricting the flow of compressed air and exhaust gas through the big engine. The new JT-9Ds were surging and exceeding their temperature limits.

  The flight engineer shut down the engine. Minutes later, another engine stalled. It was no use. Back to the terminal limped Clipper Young America, her engines stalling and overtemping. The inaugural flight was postponed.

  A reserve airplane, Clipper Constitution, was summoned. Seven hours behind schedule, the first 324 passengers of the jumbo jet era finally took off for London.

  Clipper Young America’s engine troubles were the precursor of a bigger problem. During the 747’s flight testing, the Pratt & Whitney JT-9D had revealed a nasty trait. It was prone to stalling. In a jet engine, this meant an interruption in the flow of air from the front, the compressor section, to the aft, which was the turbine section. Sometimes the stall was silent. The only indication was a sudden rise of the exhaust gas temperature gauge toward the red-marked danger zone. On other occasions, usually in flight, it stalled thunderously— kabloom!—rattling the entire airframe and belching a twenty-foot sheet of flame. The phenomenon was known to make experienced passengers faint and grizzled flight engineers soil their underwear.