What could Suzy expose that would get attention, the sex lives of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X? When the whole world was imploding and exploding, the fun and frolic of the Jet Set seemed archaic, if not irrelevant, even as a mode of escape. The LBJ administration was done in by a combination of warfare and welfare, creating an inflationary spiral that was inimical to the travel boom of the JFK glory years. Inflation, which was at 1.6 percent in 1965, quadrupled to 6.5 percent in 1970. Meanwhile, the Dow, which had risen 86 percent from the 1962 crash that sent Eddie Gilbert fleeing to Rio to an all-time high of 995 in 1966, began falling and plummeted to 669 in 1970.
Following JFK’s lead, LBJ refused to raise taxes for his seemingly limitless liberal social programs like Medicare and for the seemingly bottomless conflict in Asia. Chastened by the 1962 stock swoon that became known as the “Kennedy Crash” and chastised for his quote “My father always told me that all businessmen were sons of bitches,” JFK had held out an olive branch to Wall Street in the form of tax cuts that LBJ left in place. The absence of revenue, however, left no way out but for the Yankee dollar to become the victim of inflation. Not only was Europe more expensive to get to, since airlines kept raising ticket prices to compensate for the overall decline in passengers, but also, the weaker dollar made Europe more and more expensive for whoever managed to get there. It was all bad news for the approaching 747.
The campus rage at the Vietnam War and urban unrest may have impelled Americans to go to Europe just to get away from home, but with the stock market going down and airfares going up, the 707s began to fly with an increasing number of empty seats. As the 747 got closer and closer to completion, the Everett plant was resembling a modern version of the construction of the great pyramids at Giza, with thousands of workers spread across a vast space, creating giant monuments to the heavens. Even the irrationally exuberant Juan Trippe was starting to sense an occasional sinking feeling that the jumbo could be his own personal Frankenstein monster, his great white whale of a plane with nobody on board.
With this giant specter of failure looming above him, the reality of competition was also staring Trippe in the face. Its Wall Street lenders having effectively banished Howard Hughes from the airline he had built, TWA in 1966 stole the airlines’ profitability crown from Pan Am and began carrying more passengers across the Atlantic. The “Hollywood Airline” had gone even more Hollywood by pioneering in-flight movies. Its airborne premiere came in 1961 with By Love Possessed, a melodrama starring Lana Turner and Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., on a 707 flight between New York and Los Angeles.
The public loved it. These films, bland as they had to be to avoid offending any market segment, became one of the greatest gimmicks in the history of aviation, right up there with the minibottle cocktails and galley-cooked steak dinners. For once, Trippe wasn’t first, and this TWA scoop hurt him grievously. TWA scooped him again in 1962 by creating the first “architectural” terminal at Idlewild Airport, the sci-fi-ish “space hub” designed by the trendy Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen. And in 1967, with Conrad Hilton nearing eighty, TWA seduced his son Barron into a merger that young Hilton thought would facilitate his family’s dreams of owning an airline. As it turned out, the merger facilitated TWA’s dreams of owning a hotel chain—one with 42 properties in 28 countries, to be exact—that dwarfed and outclassed Pan Am’s heavily South America–weighted InterContinental chain. All of a sudden, the Hollywood Airline was displacing Pan Am as the international carrier.
Leading the TWA charge was its new president, Charles Carpenter Tillinghast, Jr., a Vermont Yankee who had never worked for an airline until he was recruited away from Bendix, a Detroit brake-shoe manufacturer. On New Year’s Eve 1958, Tillinghast had been stranded in Paris when the prop-driven TWA Constellation he was booked on broke down and no replacement was available. Somehow he got on one of the new Pan Am 707s; it was a revelation. Tillinghast vowed to fly only Pan Am for the rest of his life, until one day in 1961, when he got a call asking if he wanted to be TWA’s new president. The caller was Ernest Breech, a former president of Bendix and one of Ford Motor Company’s whiz kids with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Breech was representing the Hughes trustees and basically browbeat Tillinghast into taking the job. He had just turned fifty and represented a new generation of often Ivy-educated technocrats devoid of roots in the air; they would be replacing the barnstorming Skycoons who had built the business.
Despite his New England roots, Tillinghast had grown up in New York, where his father had been the headmaster of Horace Mann, the fancy alma mater of Eddie Gilbert and Jack Kerouac. A middling student, “Till” went on to Brown, where he was a big man on a small football team, playing center. The English major picked up his academic game and went on to Columbia Law School, then to the august New York firm of Hughes Hubbard & Reed. The Hughes there referred to Charles Evans Hughes, Jr.—son of the Supreme Court chief justice—not Howard. Howard would come into Tillinghast’s life later.
In Wall Street circles, Howard Hughes was known as the “spook” of American capitalism. At TWA, notwithstanding his flying feats as a younger man, he spent more time redesigning overhead bins than he did studying his airline’s unbalanced balance sheets. His last president of TWA, Carter Burgess, a former assistant secretary of defense, had been dismissed after eleven months of never having met with his boss. Meanwhile, Tillinghast, who had been hired to run Bendix after doing a stellar job on the legal work, was brought to TWA with one of the biggest golden parachutes in history—to protect him if Hughes rose from the mists, retook TWA, and summarily fired him, as he had done with his last five presidents. Instead, in 1966, Hughes quietly cashed out, selling his TWA shares for $550 million, a sixfold increase in their original value thanks to Tillinghast’s brilliant stewardship, proof that you didn’t need to fly a plane to run an airline.
In 1968, perhaps seeing the economic handwriting on the wall, Juan Trippe suddenly retired as chairman of Pan Am. He didn’t leave the Pan Am Building. He just moved down the hall to a small office, bestowing his famous antique rolltop desk on his designated successor Harold Gray, sixty-two, an Iowa-born company man who had begun his career piloting flying boats across the Pacific and had entered company folklore as the pilot of Pan Am’s first transatlantic flight in 1939. In another sign of the times, Gray unceremoniously removed the Trippe rolltop, put it in storage, and installed a modern desk of his own.
In appointing Gray as his successor, Trippe was aware that Gray was battling lymphatic cancer and receiving debilitating radiation treatments. A more obvious choice would have been the healthy Najeeb Halaby, fifty-two, whom Trippe had hired away from the FAA in 1965. Halaby had one of the greatest résumés in aviation. Born in Dallas, he was the son of a Syrian immigrant who sold rugs at Neiman Marcus together with his Southern-belle wife, whose grandfather had been a Confederate war hero. Halaby had graduated from Stanford and Yale Law and had been a much decorated navy jet test pilot in World War II.
After the war, Halaby had joined the State Department and become chief adviser to King Ibn Saud in developing Saudi Arabian Airlines, before being picked by JFK to run the FAA. He was a staunch advocate of the SST. Halaby’s biggest problem at Pan Am was that he didn’t get along with the old-fashioned Harold Gray. But with Juan Trippe, it was always age before beauty. He remained loyal to his star pilot, cancer or no cancer, and kept Halaby cooling his heels as Pan Am’s man in Washington while Gray shepherded the 747 into service. Company insiders have said that the 747 made Gray even sicker than he already was. His illness was compounded by having to fight off a hostile takeover by Charles Bluhdorn’s Gulf and Western (Engulf and Devour, per Mel Brooks’s Silent Movie), a threat that made Trippe emerge from his office and fly back into action. He buttonholed new president Richard Nixon into leaning on Congress to pass legislation preventing such a takeover without approval of the new Civil Aeronautics Board. The bill passed, and it drove Bluhdorn away.
In 1969, an enervated Harold G
ary stepped down as chairman (he would die three years later). Trippe at last transferred the reins of power to Halaby, who, appalled by the antimanagement chaos of Trippe’s one-man rule, commenced a corporate purge, firing three dozen top managers (and demoting Trippe’s son, Charles) and trying to turn Pan Am into a Harvard Business School case study. Juan Trippe himself moved twenty-three stories down to a relative cubbyhole in the Pan Am Building, to stay out of Halaby’s and harm’s way as the 747 made its debut, never giving voice to his darkest fear that, in this newly recessionary and turbulent climate, his big new bird might end up being the biggest turkey of all time.
On January 15, 1970, following a long Pan Am tradition, First Lady Pat Nixon christened the 747 Clipper Young America at Dulles Airport in a ceremony nearly as grand as her husband’s inauguration, attended by almost all of Congress and the Supreme Court, as well as many leaders of Wall Street and big businesses around the country. Everyone except Juan Trippe, whose absence spoke volumes. Things got off to an inauspiciously rocky start when Mrs. Nixon pulled a huge gold lever that unleashed a jet spray of red, white, and blue “christening water,” which was not the traditional champagne but a combination of food coloring and aviation deicer. When the first lady pushed the lever back to stop the flow, nothing happened. It was like a bad Peter Sellers movie, the toxic patriotic spray that wouldn’t end, splashing all over the dignitaries, all ninety gallons of it, until it petered out. The air force band played—and played—“The Stars and Stripes Forever,” forever, it seemed. When someone later asked Mrs. Nixon why champagne wasn’t used, her curt reply was “Why waste good champagne?”
Najeeb Halaby gave a slightly off-color speech. Rather than Trippely windbagging away about how the 747 would end the Cold War and the Vietnam War and make the world safe for capitalism, he told a salty tale that invoked the ghost of John F. Kennedy’s concupiscence, something that the press was still discreetly keeping under wraps in 1970.
When we were dedicating this airport eight years ago, I recall President Kennedy passing before some of these very attractive stewardesses, and at that moment there was a little controversy in the FAA about whether or not stewardesses should sit on the laps of the pilots in flight. And, the President paused before one of these girls and she said, “Do you know, Mr. President, I think that you ought to instruct Mr. Halaby to put out a new rule—Fly now; play later.”
Halaby spoke on a dais below the towering four-hundred-seat 747, which was parked next to a tiny Ford Trimotor. The twelve-passenger all-metal three-engine plane, first built by Henry Ford in 1925 and known as the “Tin Goose,” was a utilitarian Model T of the air and enjoyed a nine-year run until the far-advanced Douglas DC-2 toppled Ford as the kingpin of commercial aircraft manufacturing, a warning to all present that even the mighty could fall. The Goose had been flown in its day by the intrepid chairman emeritus Harold Gray, standing behind Halaby on the dais. The Ford cost $55,000, the 747 $23 million. After the speeches, Pat Nixon toured the Young America, recalling having taken flying lessons herself as a young woman in Los Angeles in 1937. She marveled at how high the cabin in the hump was off the ground—a full six stories. “You fellows have a seat near heaven,” she told the pilots, admiringly puzzling how “anyone can keep track of all these instruments.”
A week later, at seven o’clock on a frigid January evening, a whole planeload of jumbo passengers—332 of them—began asking the same question when the same Young America had to abort its inaugural commercial departure from Kennedy Airport (Idlewild had been changed to honor the late JFK) to London. The flight was already a half hour late when the pilots, taxiing for takeoff, found a problem with one of the big Pratt & Whitney engines and, preferring shame to flame, steered the mighty ship back to the gate. Buses took the stranded voyagers to a Queens restaurant called the Chelsea Lobster House, as gallows humorists joked that this was probably as close to the London borough of Chelsea as the group was going to get.
What good was all that extra space (economy seats were a whole two inches wider than those on the 707s) in the 20-foot-wide, 8-foot-high cabin that could accommodate Wilt “the Stilt” Chamberlain if the plane couldn’t get off the ground? Forget the 747, one of the frustrated fliers jibed the chagrined ground crew. Get us a 748. Pan Am luckily had a backup that worked, the Clipper Victor, one of the three 747s that Boeing had delivered. Eight hours later, at around two in the morning, the Victor managed to get airborne, at just the time the Young America was supposed to have landed at Heathrow.
The problems of the 747 had only just begun. By the summer of 1970, Pan Am had taken delivery of its twenty-five jumbos, and none of them seemed to work. There were engine and other mechanical problems that caused a domino-effect cascade of delays, returns, thwarted takeoffs, and emergency landings. Pan Am admitted that 10 percent of its 747 flights had been delayed in some way, but frequent travelers had much higher estimates of malfunctions. Not that it mattered to that many people, as the new planes were flying half empty, not half full. The nation was mired in the quicksand of recession. No one was traveling for fun. Fun was positively un-American in these early Nixon years. The protest anthem of the era summed up the general prospect: It felt as if the country were on the “Eve of Destruction.”
The 17 percent annual growth rate that Juan Trippe had assumed in order to justify his decision to buy the 747 had dropped to 4 percent and was still falling. At the same time, the jumbos gave Pan Am nearly 20 percent more seats to fill. The expected groundswell of orders for the 747 never happened. Boeing had to lay off so many workers because of curbed demand that Seattle became a disaster area. Boeing employment plunged from 84,000 in 1968 to 20,000 in 1970. An endlessly photographed billboard near the Boeing plant read “Will the last person leaving Seattle turn off the lights?”
The fact that the economies of Europe were doing even worse than Seattle’s, not to mention the continent’s civil unrest, served to compound the airlines’ problems. Of course, the glories of the Old World were there for the New World to see, but when you were teargassed in front of Notre Dame or trampled in a riot at the Pantheon, the glory of the glories could easily get lost in translation. When Temple Fielding made the cover of Time in June 1969, it was estimated that more than two million Americans would be visiting Europe that year, recession and Vietnam be damned. That cover marked the high point of the Jet Set and of the travel boom. The attitude was definitely eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow … the stock market would crash. Fielding sold 100,000 guides that year, Frommer twice that many. Yet neither of them could entice enough travelers to fill next year’s 747s.
The bad situation that greeted the inauguration of 747 service in 1970 got far, far worse with the emergence of a new wild card that Juan Trippe, the ultimate cardplayer, had never seen coming. That wild card the Skycoon missed was the skyjacker. Nothing could chill a ticket sale like the specter of a mad terrorist at 30,000 feet. In December 1969, two weeks before the 747’s grand Washington, D.C., christening, a striking twenty-nine-year-old Lebanese schoolteacher and her two handsome consorts boarded a TWA 707 bound for New York at the Athens, Greece, airport. They were dressed like Jet Setters, maybe a little too Jet Set. The three carried identical expensive large leather briefcases.
A suspicious ground crewman called the Greek police, who boarded the plane and inspected the fancy satchels. They hit the mother lode. The three chic voyagers were carrying a commando cache of pistols, hand grenades, and other explosives. They were arrested and discovered to be members of a terrorist cell known as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Their thwarted plan had been to hijack the 707 to Tunis and blow it up, unless TWA agreed to stop flying to Israel, where the flight had originated. The three were given life sentences by a Greek court. Justice was done, and the jets roared on.
Juan Trippe didn’t lose any sleep over this one. Pan Am didn’t fly to Israel. Besides, the terrorists literally didn’t get off the ground. The other Skycoons shrugged off the threat as well
. But six months later, the collective tossing and turning began. This time the PFLP struck gold. Six of them, minus the matching valises, had no trouble boarding in Beirut one of Aristotle Onassis’s Olympic Airlines Boeing 727s, bound for Athens, and skyjacking it to Cairo. Their quid pro quo for not blasting the jet and its passengers to oblivion was freedom for the three life-imprisoned terrorists, and for four other jailed PFLP bombers who had tried to blow up the Athens El Al office.
The price was paid and a Greek tragedy averted by blackmail. But it was only a matter of time until it happened again. The PFLP, an offshoot of the Palestine Liberation Organization, had a radical Marxist-Leninist ideology. They were committed to destroying what they called “global imperialism.” What could have been more imperially global than the big airlines? Pan Am and its beleaguered fellow imperialists had to face the fact: They shared a terrible new problem that was not going to fade away.
Skyjacking was a jet-age phenomenon. Between 1948 and 1957, there was a grand total of fifteen airline hijackings worldwide, about one annually. Once the jets took off in 1958, in the next decade, that total jumped to forty-eight. Once Castro took over Cuba, the numbers exploded. In January 1969, there were eight hijackings to Havana in a year that saw a total of eighty-two diverted planes. Luckily, on the Cuban runs, there were no fatalities or even injuries. A side trip to Havana was joked about as a booby prize for going to Miami. But then the Palestinians, smarting from their humiliating defeat by Israel in 1967’s Six-Day War, changed the game. They got their bright idea from the Cuba hijackings. What they added to the formula was death and destruction. They demonized all of Israel’s rich Western allies as the ultimate in capitalist piggery. What could be more symbolic than destroying the jets that were those nations’ techo-trophies?
Jet Set : The People, the Planes, the Glamour, and the Romance in Aviation's Glory Years (9780345536976) Page 32
