Empires of the Sky

by Alexander Rose

  In this case, he noticed that from small, scrappy beginnings, the railroads and shipping firms had forged huge stable oligopolies; could the same be done for airlines? For months, he pored over dense manuals detailing their economics (operating costs, break-even points, logistics management) and regulatory environment, and he concluded that if aviation were ever to succeed as a business, three conditions needed to be fulfilled.

  First and foremost, an airline needed capital to invest in new equipment. That was actually the easiest problem to fix, because it wasn’t really a problem for Trippe in the first place. His college buddies like William H. Vanderbilt, John Hambleton, and Cornelius (“Sonny”) Vanderbilt Whitney were wealthy in their own right and, as fellow members of the Yale racing club, were almost as airplane-obsessed as he was. Without a doubt, they would help finance any new enterprises Trippe asked them to, if only as a bit of fun.25

  Second, the carrier had to be able to charge a rate that would ensure a profitable return, not only to stay in business but to fund further expansion. On Coney Island, since anyone could take people for thrill rides, Trippe’s many other rivals squeezed out any possible profits in a race to the bottom. Market competition was fine and good, of course, but not, as Trippe believed, when it came to establishing an untried and expensive new form of transportation.

  Trippe determined that an airline—if it were ever to amount to more than providing joyrides in increasingly geriatric aircraft—had to own the exclusive right to operate between given destinations. Such a right could be granted only by government regulation (as had been the case with the railroads) so as to protect the fragile business against overcompetition.26 Given the free-for-all of the barnstorming era, this seemed a rather remote possibility, but some politicians were already talking about introducing legislation to improve safety standards and to shore up the Air Mail.

  And last, there had to be an urge and a need to fly among the public. To see if he could pump up demand, Trippe adapted his planes by replacing their engines with larger ones and moving the fuel tanks from the inside to the outside to make room for an extra person. Instead of beach flights, he began renting out airplanes for charter trips to Atlantic City, the Hamptons, and Newport for affluent couples heading to their weekend houses. Income accordingly rose for a brief time, but Trippe was bedeviled by the same underlying issue: Few people relied on airplanes when trains, boats, and automobiles, despite their time disadvantages, were already servicing their needs. Airplane trips were still regarded only as occasional extravagances with no larger purpose. People went aloft, told their friends how exciting it was, and never flew again.

  Like so many others, LIA shut down operations several months later, but the information Trippe had picked up about the perils and pitfalls of running an airline was priceless. He would try again.

  In a sense, Trippe had seen too far into the future to make the present a success. But he had put his finger on the nub of the problem. Airplanes were too small and underpowered to serve as anything more than summertime rides, but anyone who tried to build larger and more expensive ones to accommodate more passengers would get eaten alive by the costs because the demand simply was not there. It was impossible to fill several seats consistently at an acceptable price.

  Seen in this light, it’s clear why Eckener was so certain that he was right in believing that airplanes would never threaten his airships’ supremacy. The Bodensee was a magnificently designed aerodynamic marvel expertly captained and crewed, whereas the barnstormers were nothing but stuntmen flying creaky deathtraps. The DELAG carried passengers, cargo, and mail imperturbably, almost profitably and (one day) internationally, whereas the U.S. Air Mail was a maniac-piloted, high-fatality money loser requiring several stops just to get a letter from New York to Chicago. And the Zeppelin Company built machines capable of flying thousands of miles, whereas Long Island Airways and its bankrupt ilk considered it a major accomplishment to take a couple of passengers on a twenty-minute trip.

  Compared to airships, airplanes were nothing more, surely, than a gnat is to a lion.

  * * *

  —

  EVEN LEAVING ASIDE the success of the DELAG, the airplane and the airship were hardly competitors. In the days when Zeppelin had competed against the Wrights, the two forms of air transport had been considered as an “either/or” question: Either the airship or the airplane would survive. The answer, it had turned out, was “and/but”: The airship and the airplane existed but would play separate roles.

  As Ladislas d’Orcy, an influential editor at Aviation and Aeronautical Engineering, put it, the “airplane is mainly a high-speed short-distance carrier” while “the large, rigid airship is essentially a medium-speed long-distance carrier.”

  Airships—luxurious, reliable, safe, efficient—would be used to carry heavy payloads and large numbers of passengers on flights between Europe and America or Cairo and Delhi.27 Airplanes—small in terms of both size and carrying capacity, as well as supremely uncomfortable but fast—would be employed shuttling high-salaried businessmen between regional cities and transporting lightweight, time-sensitive objects (documents, securities, newsreel films, and so forth).

  In other words, as one magazine explained, “airplanes and airships have their own peculiar powers and limitations; and because of their differences actual rivalry cannot seriously exist between them.”28 The airship’s real competitor, then, was the oceangoing passenger liner, and the airplane’s, the intercity railway train.29

  On this last point, the big question of airships versus ocean liners, it was now a matter of “instead.” Eckener was confident that it would be a matter of people gradually converting to traveling quickly by air instead of slowly by water. If airships’ speed could be pushed to 100 mph—not so much more than their current capability—the travel time between San Francisco and New Zealand (6,500 miles) would be cut from the prevailing twenty-two days by ship to just six.30 And why restrict oneself to sea, lake, and river when these and mountains and jungles and deserts and plains meant nothing to an airship? Anywhere on the face of the earth was within reach.

  Eventually, inevitably, the Zeppelin must dominate the world.

  * * *

  —

  BY FOCUSING ON ocean liners, however, Eckener, like so many others, had fundamentally misunderstood the real threat posed by the airplane by looking only at its present condition and assuming that that state of affairs would continue, unchanged, into the future. The possibility that one day, not long in coming, the airplane would vanquish the airship (and the ocean liner and the train) as a safe, comfortable, large, high-speed, long-distance passenger carrier was unforeseen by virtually everyone.

  The very idea of building an airplane big enough to make the transatlantic jump in a single bound, let alone roomy enough to accommodate numerous passengers and valuable cargo, was almost universally deemed ludicrous.

  Juan Trippe was among the very, very few who believed in the airplane’s potential. As early as May 1919, while still a student, he had written perceptively of the navy’s attempt to bridge the Atlantic by airplane (the one culminating in NC-4’s success at the end of that month). A crossing, he predicted, would “demonstrate that a flight across the Atlantic Ocean is a perfectly safe and sane commercial proposition and not a gigantic gamble in which the prospective transatlantic pilot or passenger has big odds against his safe arrival.”31

  Trippe had been influenced by the views of the American writer Alfred Lawson, a frequent contributor to aviation magazines. In 1916, he’d written a piece prophesying that by 1930 passenger airplanes would be crossing the Atlantic nonstop at more than 180 miles an hour. Aside from Trippe and a few other enthusiasts, no one believed him. Then again, Lawson was a hard man to believe in, having also predicted that by 1970 there would be so many people flying that some kind of air traffic control system might be required.

  Neither did it help Trippe’s
case that his fellow zealots were widely perceived to be mad. Lawson, for instance, said that by 10,000 A.D., there would be godlike, ethereal superhumans he called “Alti-Men” living in the upper atmosphere who would control the weather and rule pitilessly over the mere mortals existing on earth.32

  While the perspicacity of that forecast remains to be seen, Lawson himself was a well-known egomaniac who claimed that his emergence from the womb “was the most momentous occurrence since the birth of mankind,” though he at least pretended to have the modesty to say it under a pseudonym. Just as fantastically, in 1920–21 Lawson built a prototype of what he dubbed an “airliner” for between eighteen and twenty-six passengers for a planned thirty-six-hour New York–San Francisco service. Unfortunately, it promptly crashed and “Lawson Airlines” went belly-up. (Undaunted, Lawson later founded the University of Lawsonomy, which banned books not written by himself. It was later investigated for fraud.)33

  Given the eccentricity of Trippe’s bedfellows and their not altogether successful record, it was understandable that most people considered the prospects of a large, long-range passenger airplane to be very dubious.34 In fact, it simply could not be done, at least not until perhaps 1980, thought one aeronautical expert.35

  Granted, the airplane had already made astonishing advances in its short life. In 1909, for instance, competitors in the international James Gordon Bennett Aviation Cup race had to complete a 12.4-mile-long course; just four years later, range and endurance had improved so greatly that it was extended tenfold, to 124 miles.36 During the war, the airplane made additional leaps. A British B.E.2c fighter of 1915, for instance, had a maximum speed of 72 mph and a service ceiling of 10,000 feet, whereas a Sopwith Camel of 1918 could make 113 mph and ascend to 19,000 feet.

  As impressive as they were, some pointed out, these improvements were surprisingly modest compared to the Zeppelin’s gains. In 1914 a typical airship’s engine power had been 630 hp, but by 1918 it had tripled to 1,820 hp. In the same period, maximum range had shot from 2,000 to 7,500 miles, useful lift had more than quadrupled from 9.2 to 44.5 tons, the altitude ceiling had risen from 6,000 to 21,000 feet, cruising endurance at a steady 45 mph had leapt from 20 to 177.5 hours, and speed had increased from 47 mph to 77 mph even as the ships had tripled in gas capacity.37

  The airplane’s best days were already behind it, was the aeronautical world’s conventional opinion. Its technical development was slowing and soon would plateau. That of the airship, in contrast, was accelerating.38 The critical factor, as the nineteenth-century aeronauts had discovered, was believed to lie in the fact of the airship’s deriving its lift from the cubic feet of volume whereas the airplane did the same based on its square feet of wing area.

  Scientific American, using some questionable figures, explained why the airplane was destined to fall ever further behind: For an airplane to carry as much as a contemporary Zeppelin could, it would need a wing area of nearly half an acre (17,700 square feet). To put that figure into perspective, the then-largest civilian American airplane—the Curtiss F-5L—had a wing area of about 1,400 square feet. Building such a mammoth was an impossibility.

  Even if one could, it wouldn’t matter because as an airplane’s wing area increased so too did the vehicle’s gross weight, not only owing to the greater quantity of material required but to the need to make the larger structure stronger. Mathematically speaking, it was thought that if one doubled wing area an airplane’s lift would quadruple (good)—but to obtain adequate structural strength weight would have to rise eightfold (bad). There would necessarily be a point beyond which every additional square foot of wing surface weighed more than it could lift (very bad).

  To multiply an airship’s lift by the same amount, however, it was a matter of lengthening just the body by the cube root of four (or by about 1.5 times), as a result of which total weight would only quadruple while maintaining the same proportional structural strength.

  Owing to the Zeppelins’ insuperable dimensional advantages, all Eckener had to do to make a world-beating airship, it followed, was to add some girders to the framework, pump in several more million cubic feet of cheap hydrogen, and soup up the engines a bit.39

  It was not quite as easy as that, because when it came to airships, politics would always get in the way of physics, as Eckener was beginning to realize after the DELAG shutdown, the confiscation of the Bodensee and the Nordstern, and the end of Colonel Hensley’s scheme to acquire the proposed LZ-125. If he wanted to build a transatlantic airship, he was going to have to learn to play the game.

  Juan Trippe was reaching the same conclusion by a different route. He didn’t care about scholastic disquisitions on theoretical aerodynamics. For him, the problem was quite simple: In the real world, why go to all the trouble to square wing area when he could just square politicians? Then they would allot him profit-protected routes, and if he had those then he could open service to underserved or difficult-to-reach destinations to stimulate demand in other communities for the same. Once people realized the benefits of fast and convenient flights to places they wanted to go, he would just build a bigger airplane to take them and charge accordingly. The mysterious workings of politics would somehow make the physics work.

  Trippe was almost unique in believing that airplanes could double their capacity—and then double it repeatedly without major penalty. Had he not, with but a modicum of effort, increased his passenger load at Long Island Airways from one to two? All he had done, really, was add a bigger engine and carve out a bit more space behind the pilot.

  Technology, for Trippe, served politics. Where he had previously failed was in trying to compete in an unregulated environment (i.e., Coney Island) amid falling prices. Trippe wasn’t the type to make the same mistake twice. Next time he would play for position.

  26. The Stolen Horse

  AFTER THE ARMISTICE, Japan, a wartime ally of the United States, Britain, and France, had acquired some German possessions in the Pacific as its spoils. These included the isolated Marshall, Caroline, and Mariana Islands, which happened to lie astride the route from the American naval base at Pearl Harbor to its glittering colonial jewel, the Philippines. If war ever broke out between the two rising Pacific empires, then, Japan could blockade the Philippines and use its island outposts to launch attacks against Guam, Hawaii, and other American assets.

  It was up to the U.S. Navy’s battleships, the mightiest weapons afloat, to destroy the Japanese fleet before that happened. In the vast open spaces of the Pacific, however, finding the enemy was almost impossible without the ability to scout thousands of square miles around. That’s where airships came in handy. With their long ranges, low fuel consumption, and ability to see to the horizon, airships would be invaluable in searching for the Imperial Japanese Navy.1

  To that end, in mid-1921 the navy was intent on becoming the world’s number-one airship power, a minor problem being that it didn’t have any airships. Previous American attempts to acquire a good one had been frustrated: L-72 had been allocated to the French after the sabotage at Nordholz and Wittmundhafen, and the scheme to commission LZ-125 from Eckener had been scuttled by Air Commodore Masterman and his Inter-Allied Commission.

  An obvious solution was to build its own, so the navy opened a naval air station near Lakehurst, New Jersey, where work was set to begin on ZR-1, the USS Shenandoah (“Daughter of the Stars”), an airship based on the downed German L-49 in 1917.

  Another was to buy one. Luckily, the British had just the thing: R-38, a remaindered wartime airship in so-so condition that the long-suffering Air Ministry was eager to sell for a song. The budget-minded navy quickly signed the contract—an American admiral crowed that the fire sale price amounted “to practically a gift of the ship”—and the British agreed to deliver R-38 to Lakehurst.2

  That summer of 1921, excitement built as R-38—rechristened ZR-2 by the Americans, with the name still to be decided—was r
eadied for its flight to Lakehurst. The public was as thrilled as the admirals by their airships. The Shenandoah was going to be proudly “Made in the U.S.A.” while ZR-2, at 2.7 million cubic feet and 700 feet long, was so big, it must be the best.3

  Fueling the excitement was the news that the navy’s airships were not going to be ordinary airships, they were going to be the world’s first helium airships.

  By any definition, this was an astounding development considering that in early 1917, just four years earlier, the entire world’s supply of helium had been kept in three small glass flasks—about sufficient to fill a child’s birthday balloon—perched on the top shelf of a chemistry laboratory at the University of Kansas.

  Until America’s entry into the war that April, nobody had known what to do with it, but the realization that the gas might be used in the Allies’ airship program turned helium into a strategic natural resource, jealously guarded. The U.S. Bureau of Mines and the Linde Air Products company financed an experimental helium-processing plant, as a result of which extraction costs fell from an eye-popping $6,000 per cubic foot to $1,700. By the Armistice in 1918 the United States had 750 steel cylinders filled with 147,000 cubic feet of helium sitting on the docks in New Orleans ready for export to Europe. That amount would barely fill a small weather balloon, admittedly, but had the war continued production would soon have risen to 50,000 cubic feet per day.

  A year later, Major General George Squier (the first military passenger carried on an airplane, by the Wrights in 1908, and the man who would later bless the world with a system of piping music to businesses he called “Muzak”) informed the American Institute of Electrical Engineers that the cost of helium was predicted to plummet to ten cents per cubic foot, or $100 per thousand cubic feet, by 1920.4