Jet Set : The People, the Planes, the Glamour, and the Romance in Aviation's Glory Years (9780345536976)

by Stadiem, William

  How could the jet, a seeming sure thing, be anything but a no-brainer? In a word, danger. In the early fifties, the passenger jet was perceived as a high-risk death machine. The British had long beaten the Americans to the punch, with their small (forty-nine seats) but beautiful De Havilland Comet, which entered commercial service in 1952, a tribute to British postwar resilience. But the Comet was better suited to the Museum of Modern Art than to the airways. The sleek silver birds just kept falling out of the sky, twice over India, twice over Italy. It took years to trace the disasters to metal fatigue, but pending the endless investigation, the British took the plane out of service, and despite an attempted comeback later in the decade, its fate was sealed.

  Jets seemed hubristic to America’s airline chiefs other than Hughes and Trippe. Based on the British experience, the Yanks felt they were witnessing a case of Icarus. The Brits were flying too fast, too soon. It could take years to work out the kinks. Meanwhile, the American airlines were planning to bet their houses on the halfway house that was the turboprop—that is, using a jet engine to turn a propeller. Lockheed was building one called the L-188 Electra, and both Eddie Rickenbacker of Eastern and C. R. Smith of American had just placed major orders. But Boeing’s Allen was not deterred. His coffers brimming with armed-forces cash, and facing a huge tax bill, the balance-sheet lawyer decided he could take a big write-off and gave the green light to the passenger-jet prototype. It was assigned the model number 707.

  The 707’s specifications were impressive: a speed of 600 miles per hour, a capacity of up to 120 passengers, far superior to its nonjet predecessor the Stratocruiser (350 miles per hour, 80 passengers). It could fly as high as 50,000 feet, far above the weather. It would be able to reach Europe from the East Coast in just over six hours, compared to the current eleven. But there were still big problems to overcome, particularly fuel and noise. The 707 was a deafening machine, its screaming engines sure to be the bane of every airport-adjacent community. Furthermore, it was no cheap date. Each 707 had a prospective price tag of $4 million. C. R. Smith of American, the most hard-core realist of the Skycoons, poured ice water on Bill Allen’s Dreamliner, justifying his turboprop order to The New York Times by declaring, “We can’t go backward to the jet. I’m interested in cheap transportation and a more efficient machine, not in more expensive machines.”

  Smith was a great street fighter, the first airline chief to play the fear card. In 1937, he issued his notorious “Afraid to Fly?” ads, advertising American as “The Sunshine Route to the West” across the cloudless deserts of New Mexico and Arizona. The unstated here was that arch-competitor United’s more northerly routes over the snowy, stormy Rockies were more dangerous. The low blow landed hard, and American doubled its revenues that year. Smith was perfectly capable of playing the safety ace again where the jets were concerned, and the British Comet disasters gave him a full hand.

  Another powerful naysayer was, second to Lindbergh, the most respected man in aviation. This was Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, the head of Eastern, a key member of America’s domestic “Big Four,” with American, United, and TWA. The swashbuckling Rickenbacker had every intent of leading America’s charge into the jet future. He had put his money where his mouth was by placing a huge $100 million order for thirty-five of the De Havilland Comets in 1952, far out-Trippe-ing Juan Trippe, who had just put his toe in the water by ordering three of the planes. When the Comets began crashing, Rickenbacker, the least faint of heart of all Skycoons, canceled his commitment. He had legal grounds. The defective Comet had literally cooled his jets, and his cooling cooled the entire airline industry.

  Rickenbacker was a genuine oracle. When he spoke about flying, the whole world listened. He was also the anti-Trippe, a sixth-grade dropout who didn’t know Skull and Bones from skin and bones. Edward Reichenbacher was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1890 to poor Swiss immigrant parents. His father was a construction worker. Rickenbacker changed the spelling of his name during World War I to improve his “war cred” in fighting the Germans, adding a middle name, Vernon, he said, for “a touch of class.” But by then he was already famous as “Fast Eddie,” one of the nation’s highest-paid auto racers, after starting at the bottom as a lowly mechanic. In the war, he was the chief nemesis of “Red Baron” Manfred von Richthofen, and scored a record twenty-six “kills,” shooting down twenty-two enemy planes and four dirigibles.

  ACE HIGH. Eddie Rickenbacker, America’s greatest air hero and president of Eastern Air Lines, 1920. (photo credit 3.3)

  Just as Trippe had hired Lindbergh as a huge publicity coup, Eastern Air Transport, the struggling air arm of General Motors, in 1934 tapped Rickenbacker to give it a shot of fame in its unglamorous arm. The ex–World War I ace had been working as a sales manager for Cadillac after losing his own fortune in a car company that produced the first American auto with four-wheel brakes but failed nonetheless. Eastern controlled the highly lucrative New York–Miami route, from whence Pan Am jumped off into the Caribbean and points south. Rickenbacker came in and lent Eastern his name, his fame, and his expertise. In addition to his executive duties, from 1935 to 1940 Rickenbacker had his own comic strip about a self-styled aviator, Ace Drummond, which became a successful film and radio serial.

  In 1941 and ’42, Rickenbacker’s great celebrity became even greater when he became an action hero not once but twice more. The first event came when an Eastern DC-3 that Rickenbacker was traveling in crashed in a Georgia forest on its landing approach to Atlanta’s airport. Eight of the sixteen passengers died on impact. Rickenbacker, though fifty years old and critically injured with a skull fracture, countless broken bones, and a left eyeball knocked from its socket, located all the survivors, tended their wounds, and carried each of them to a forest clearing where ambulances could reach them.

  Sixteen months later and barely recovered, he had another near-death experience when touring the Pacific theater for President Roosevelt and General MacArthur. His B-17 Flying Fortress had to ditch in the middle of the ocean, thousands of miles from anything. The eight survivors had to subsist at sea for twenty-four days, a real-life version of Hitchcock’s Lifeboat; Rickenbacker took charge and kept everyone sane and alive. Their only provisions were four oranges, which Rickenbacker supplemented by catching fish as well as seagulls, and dividing the rainwater as it fell. Though America mourned the loss of its hero, who was reported dead, only one person actually perished before a navy plane spotted them and came to the rescue. A book recounting the adventure became a huge bestseller, enshrining Rickenbacker as a household name for courage.

  At Eastern, Eddie Rickenbacker was anything but a publicity hire. Hands-on in every department, from advertising to maintenance to pilot training, he turned the airline into a cash machine. Although he was financed by Laurance Rockefeller, Rickenbacker never made Eastern glamorous; glamour wasn’t his thing. He liked to say he was selling “seats and safety,” not service. The aviator was running America’s first no-frills airline, and it worked. He rescued Eastern from looming bankruptcy and transformed it into the most profitable of the Big Four. His modus operandi was simple: to fly the most planes, with the greatest capacity, at the least cost. His thumbs-down on the jet was as dispiriting as that of a Roman emperor at the Colosseum. And he put his money where his mouth was. He wrote a check to Lockheed for $100 million for fifty of its turboprop Constellations. The oracle had spoken. Who was going to listen to Bill Allen?

  Just as realistic and as dispiriting as both Smith and Rickenbacker was Pat Patterson of United. As World War II ended, the ex-banker Patterson commissioned an in-depth study of the potential of foreign travel, with a special focus on what was called the “Blue Ribbon Route” across the North Atlantic. What he concluded was that if you somehow emptied all the first-class cabins of every great liner crossing the ocean and transformed these sailors into fliers, the whole rich lot would fit into a grand total of fifty planes. Patterson assumed Europe was a “millionaire’s market,” a big waste of time f
or the Big Four. Accordingly, he officially deferred to that darling of the millionaires, Juan Trippe. Let Pan Am be America’s “chosen instrument,” Patterson conceded, to compete with the nationalized foreign carriers, the BOACs and Air Frances and KLMs. Let Trippe have those headaches.

  Juan Trippe didn’t get headaches; he gave them. While he may have been the biggest dreamer in aviation, he also had an eye for statistics. While Smith and Patterson were content to focus on domestic matters, what mattered to Trippe were foreign affairs. Trippe believed that where Patterson had gone wrong was by defining the European market through the demographics of the Yale Club. Trippe wasn’t blinded by his residence in Greenwich. He was well aware of middle America and where it was going, which was up in the air. His 1952 brainstorm of cheaper-than-economy, advance-purchase “tourist fares” had caused a huge spike in air travel across the North Atlantic. In 1948, three quarters of a million people crossed that ocean, a third of them in planes, the rest in ships. By 1954, the air figure had doubled, and the ship crossings had declined to near-parity with the planes. Heartened, Trippe doubled down, creating a fly-now-pay-later installment plan; within a year, it generated another hundred thousand new Euro-fliers. Postwar Europe remained dirt-cheap; five dollars a day was a doable goal, and a European vacation had become as integral a part of the Eisenhower Dream as leaving your suburban split-level to see the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet. Trippe’s dream was a big, fast plane to ferry lots and lots of these dreamers to their dream, and Bill Allen proved to be his genie in a bottle.

  THE 707 WAS KNOWN BY BOEING’S ENGINEERS AS THE DASH 80, AFTER ITS MILITARY model number, 367-80. Whatever they called it, the passenger prototype was up in the air by 1954. Given the powerful naysayers like C. R. Smith, Bill Allen knew he couldn’t sell the jet on concept alone. The plane had to be flown to be believed; res ipsa loquitur, “the thing speaks for itself,” was one of the jurisprudential buzz phrases that Harvard Law had instilled in Allen. It spoke even louder in August 1955, when Boeing’s chief test pilot, Alvin “Tex” Johnston, strapped himself in at the controls of the canary yellow–chocolate brown, swept-wing 95-ton Dash 80. He revved up its four behemoth state-of-the-art Pratt & Whitney J-57 jet engines and taxied to the runway to show off the Dash in a test flight before 350,000 people assembled for the Gold Cup hydroplane race, Seattle’s answer to the Henley Regatta. Bill Allen was right there, watching from a small boat, as proud as any new father as the ex-barnstormer Johnston flew his $20 million baby into the heavens at 450 miles an hour, then plunged it back to earth, holding up at a mere 300 feet above the lake. Allen nearly died when Johnston threw the Dash into a 360-degree complete belly roll. Allen turned to one of his companions, who had heart trouble, and asked if he could borrow one of his nitroglycerin tablets. The “thing,” the 707, had spoken for itself.

  Hearing that banshee whine a thousand miles away down the Pacific Coast in Santa Monica, California, was Bill Allen’s only potential jet competitor, Donald Douglas. While Boeing’s bread and butter had been the military, Douglas was the dominant figure in commercial aviation. Ever since the British Comets started flying, he had been playing for time. The great “decider” of aviation was for once as indecisive as Hamlet. Donald Douglas’s problem was that he was a thrifty Scot. Yes, he was born in Brooklyn, but to first-generation Scottish parents. His father had the perfect cliché job for a Scotsman—a bank cashier.

  Born in 1892, Donald Douglas had the genes of an accountant but the genius of an aeronautical engineer. Douglas earned one of the first degrees in that new field from the vaunted Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1914, and he stayed on at the school for a year as an instructor. Douglas wore a kilt and played bagpipes for fun. He also slept with an adding machine next to his bed, so he could wake up and worry about numbers. Those $20 million for the Dash Eighty were sleepless numbers.

  Douglas had worked his way up inch by inch to become the Flying Scotsman. He started at Annapolis, but after getting in trouble for hitting an admiral in the head with a toy glider he had built (shades of Juan Trippe in Central Park) and was flying from his dorm roof, he transferred to MIT. After MIT, he worked as an engineer for several airplane designers, including the top one, Glenn Martin, in Cleveland. But Douglas wanted to live in California, where the perfect weather meant flying year-round. Again in shades of Trippe, he found a rich backer, a young L.A. playboy named David Davis, who had the fantasy of becoming a pre-Lindbergh Lindbergh by flying nonstop across the United States. Opening an office in a barbershop on Pico Boulevard, the four D’s, David Davis and Donald Douglas, started the Davis Douglas Co. in 1920. Douglas soon designed the plane called the Cloudster that would fly Davis into history. Davis put up the $40,000 to build it.

  Sadly for Davis, the engine of the Cloudster conked out over Texas. A downcast Davis left the company. Nonetheless, the Cloudster entered the record books as the first plane to carry a payload greater than its own weight. Davis may not have been impressed, but the U.S. Navy was. They hired Douglas to design torpedo bombers for them. Douglas Aircraft was born. Its 1936 DC-3 was considered the first modern airliner. It seated 21, slept 16, had men’s and women’s lavatories, and could fly coast-to-coast, with just three refueling stops, in only fifteen hours. By 1939, 90 percent of all American passengers were flying on DC-3s.

  However, Donald Douglas wanted not only America but the world. He wanted Boeing to do his dirty work, his legwork, for him. It had happened once before. In the early thirties, Boeing, while still part of the United monopoly, had developed the 247, the first all-metal (aluminum) plane. It had lots of first-ever features, such as retractable landing gear, deicers, autopilot, and trim tabs. The 247 was as radical a leap forward in its day as the 707 was now. However, because Boeing’s entire production of the new plane was devoted to United, Donald Douglas was able to tap in to the demand of all the other airlines for the 247 by creating the DC-2, basically the same plane but 25 miles per hour faster (Boeing’s speed was 180 miles per hour), which added up to an hour less on the New York–Chicago run. Time was money, lots of money, for Douglas, whose plane vastly outsold Boeing’s and paved the way for his dominance with the DC-3, which was twice as fast as the 247. It wasn’t patent infringement; Hollywood might have called it an homage. For a while Douglas sat back and tried to do it again, waiting for Boeing’s jet prototype to make a few false moves that he could then improve on.

  NEW DEAL. Donald Douglas, founder of Boeing’s chief rival, Douglas Aviation, shaking hands with President Franklin Roosevelt, 1936. (photo credit 4.1)

  Juan Trippe wouldn’t let Douglas get away with it this time, needling him with the motto on the Scottish coat of arms that dominated Douglas’s Santa Monica office: Jamais Arrière, it read, Never behind. Trippe needed both Boeing and Douglas to fight it out, gladiator-style, for aerial Darwinism to generate the best survival-of-the-fittest result for Pan Am. Boeing was already in the game. To get Douglas in, Juan knew that he would have to show the Scotsman the money. Accordingly, Trippe went back to Wall Street and put together a consortium of insurance companies, which was where the big money was. With Metropolitan, on whose board Trippe conveniently sat, and Prudential giving him a thumbs-up, sixteen other insurers joined in to give Trippe a $60 million line of credit at 3.75 percent interest, to buy jets. Trippe assured the underwriters that the new planes were the best collateral their big money could buy.

  Inspired by Trippe’s newly deep pockets, Donald Douglas got off the dime. In 1955 he finally commissioned his own prototype for what he would call the DC-8, and the race was on. The DC-8 looked suspiciously, if not surprisingly, like Boeing’s 707. Both planes had Pratt & Whitney J-57 jet engines. The problem for both companies was that there was only one prospective customer—Juan Trippe. All the other Skycoons passed, Rickenbacker with his $100 million bet on the Lockheed Electras, C. R. Smith with his $64 million wager on thirty-five of the Lockheed planes. Those numbers chilled both Allen and Douglas; each Skycoon knew he’d better jump thro
ugh whatever hoops Trippe was demanding. The question was who, Allen or Douglas, would jump higher, because the loser could end up with the biggest embarrassment in the history of aviation, a very fast and fancy party to which nobody came.

  The biggest contest was speed. Trippe declared that neither the Boeing nor the Douglas jet was fast enough. The populist Eddie Rickenbacker’s avowed philosophy of flying the most planes with the most people wasn’t that different from that of Trippe, the perceived elitist. The P&W J-57 engines, Trippe believed, were simply too weak to lift those loads of package tourists, the sugarplums that danced in Trippe’s global head. Trippe always had aces up his sleeve, even if they were someone else’s cards. In this case, he had inside information that P&W was developing a new and even more powerful jet engine, the J-75. He told Boeing that was what he wanted.

  But Boeing was all set to fly with what it had. Allen told Trippe that even if the engines were more than just a gleam in P&W’s eye, he couldn’t afford to retool his entire plane around them. Even though the competing DC-8 was still on the drawing board, redesigning the 707 to make it faster might end up delaying the finished plane. Allen the gambler was gambling that Trippe would rather have a slow jet than no jet. He was also gambling that Douglas was so far behind the jet curve, with not even a plane but only a concept, that he could never catch up.

  Not comprehending the word no, Trippe flew to Santa Monica to see Douglas again. Since the DC-8 hadn’t been built, he pressed the Scotsman: Isn’t this precisely what you wanted, to wait out Boeing and then make a better plane out of their design and hard work? Trippe laid it out plainly: Make your jet around the J-75 engines, and I’ll buy it and not Allen’s. Only with the J-75s could Pan Am live up to Trippe’s desire to call itself the Intercontinental Airline, just as it was naming its new hotel chain InterContinental Hotels. Otherwise, the “weak” J-57s would have to make stops, and Juan Trippe viewed himself as a nonstop messiah. Douglas just sat there smoking his pipe. And then he did what few people ever did: Just like Bill Allen, he turned Juan Trippe down. The J-75 was pure speculation. Trippe was talking Buck Rogers to him. It had never been flown at all. The Scotsman was no gambler. He wasn’t about to commit his company’s future to an untried engine that might never take his DC-8 off the ground.