At the celebrations in July, just a few minor functionaries attended, but the big news was Eckener’s announcement of what he called the Zeppelin-Eckener Spende des Deutsches Volkes (the Zeppelin-Eckener Fund of the German People), which was quickly abbreviated to the Eckener Spende.3
Eckener rousingly reminded Germans of Zeppelin’s heritage and prospects for the future, and embarked on a national publicity tour in which he gave hundreds of speeches, sometimes six a day. Schoolchildren went door to door shaking their collection tins, volunteers sold postcards, and foremen made the rounds in factories on Fridays to coincide with payday.4
In naming the fund after himself, as if he were the main selling point, Eckener had made the mistake of believing his own adulatory press in America. The likening of him to Columbus, the White House handshakes, the talk of airships dominating the world, all of it had gone to his head, and he was about to learn a sharp lesson in humility.
A huge amount of money certainly flowed into Zeppelin’s coffers, about 2.5 million marks—but Eckener’s announced goal had been 7 million. Several factors contributed to the shortfall, but the primary one was that this wasn’t the good old days, when the count more or less jerry-rigged his small airships, his staff worked for a pittance, kings were tapped for gifts, and noble estates could be remortgaged to pay a few bills. In the modern era, Zeppelins were simply too expensive to build, maintain, and operate without major government and corporate financial support—at least not until Eckener had a large fleet in service that could exploit economies of scale and leverage his monopoly power to turn a profit.
It fell to the always annoying Colsman to point out that a money-making airline would need at least 70 million marks of start-up capital to pay for six airships and nine hangars.5 Yet Eckener had been stuck selling postcards and rattling collection cans to render his dream a reality.
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WORSE NEWS ARRIVED on September 3 concerning the Shenandoah, then beginning a routine publicity tour of midwestern county fairs.
On its way to Ohio, Shenandoah had encountered a powerful wind gust and suddenly began rising 200 feet per minute. Frighteningly, the rate accelerated up to 1,000 feet per minute—greater than any experienced by any airship anywhere before. When Lieutenant Commander Lansdowne ordered all engines to be run at full power and the elevators pushed down as far as they would go to try to regain control, Shenandoah’s nose steeply declined to a nearly unheard-of 25 degrees.
The airship’s climb slowed, but the engines overheated. Lansdowne had run out of options but wind velocity was increasing, and Shenandoah was lifted, as if by an invisible hand, to 6,060 feet as the crew heard girders crumpling and wires snapping. Then a blast of icy air blew through the ship, shoving it downward at 1,500 feet per minute. The angry 55-mph gust that then slammed into the ship’s underside and rolled it severely to port was its death knell.
The colossal stress on the infrastructure tore Shenandoah apart. Crewmen were thrown out (their bodies were found half a mile away) as the control and engine cars were wrenched away from the stricken ship, disintegrating as it fell. Luckily, sections of the bow and stern formed rudimentary balloons and the men in them (including Lieutenant Commander Charles Rosendahl, the second officer) landed in a field. Twenty-nine men survived the Shenandoah, and fourteen didn’t—but all of them would have died in an explosion had the airship been filled with hydrogen.
That helium had saved some lives was the sole consolation Americans could draw from the disaster. The subsequent Court of Inquiry found no evidence of incompetence or negligence on the part of Lansdowne or the crew, judging instead that “the final destruction of the ship was due primarily to large, unbalanced, external, aerodynamic forces arising from high velocity air currents.” In other words, Shenandoah had run into a massive flow of cold air from the northwest that had overrun the warm air from the southwest.
The inevitable question, then, was whether the resulting fatal turbulence had been a unique fluke. If it was, then airships could be considered sound in concept and design. The problem, unfortunately, was that these kinds of extreme superadiabatic conditions were determined to be relatively common in the eastern half or two-thirds of the United States, where the solar heating of large inland areas and walls of mountain ranges forced air masses upward to produce thunderstorms characterized by deadly vertical currents.
It was an extreme weather pattern unfamiliar to Eckener, who was accustomed to the milder storms of Germany and the Atlantic, and he had failed to account for it when talking up Goodyear-Zeppelin’s proposed transcontinental flights. As Karl Arnstein later said, “No [German] airship was designed for [such] gusts—there weren’t supposed to be any,” adding that “no European designer could possibly imagine the violence of weather conditions in the American Midwest.”6
During the Court of Inquiry, Eckener escaped censure for the accident, and justly so, for Shenandoah was American-built and American-crewed, and he could hardly be held responsible for the navy’s basing its design on a wartime Zeppelin originally intended for the very different geography of Europe.
He also remained diplomatically silent when it came to judging Lansdowne’s response to the gust. Based on wartime experience, Eckener’s habit in high wind was to cut the engine speed and let the airship function as a kind of free balloon, secure in the knowledge that he could always get back on course in calmer weather. Lansdowne, however, following textbook American practice, fought the gods at full power in order to keep control over the vessel and lost.7
In his heart, Eckener knew the loss of the Shenandoah was a major setback to ever establishing a New York–California route. No matter how fortified Zeppelins were, they would still be subjected to the Midwest’s unpredictable gusts and moving walls of air.
He needed the Midwest, and he could not have it.8 Crossing the Midwest was the fastest, most direct way to get to Los Angeles or San Francisco, but it was rather unlikely, at least not while the horrible deaths suffered by the crew remained uppermost in their minds, that many passengers would be eager to buy a ticket.
Adding to Eckener’s sense that the bloom had come off his rose, American newspapers trumpeted ominous headlines like “No More Zeppelins” and “Why Not Abandon Airships?” in the days following the disaster. There hadn’t been such negative reactions toward the airship since the darkest days of the wartime bombing campaign. Thankfully, the papers soon calmed down and decided that “it is not the American way to give up in the face of defeat.”9
Nevertheless, the military romance with airships experienced a sharp dip. Admiral Moffett at the navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics was severely criticized for his penchant for publicity flights—Lansdowne’s widow accused him of murdering her husband—and naval airshipmen, so recently the belles of the ball, found themselves marginalized by a new school of strategists arguing that aircraft carriers equipped with scouting aircraft, torpedo planes, fighters, and dive-bombers represented the future of fleet operations. Two years later, the navy’s first carriers—Lexington and Saratoga—put to sea.
The aftershocks of the Shenandoah disaster were felt most immediately by Goodyear. The plans to build passenger airships for cross-country travel were put on hold, and many of the Zeppelin personnel (including Ernst Lehmann) returned to Friedrichshafen. The Goodyear-Zeppelin partnership fell into dormancy.
The year 1925, which Eckener had misguidedly believed to be his year of destiny—of taking the first steps toward a transcontinental route, of raising enough money to build his own airship—had ended in despair. Worse, he was condemned to the sidelines at the precise moment the airplane business began taking off.
30. The Fox
AS REVOLUTIONS SO often are, this one was sparked by an otherwise minor and rather banal incident: the big railroad bosses complaining that the Post Office’s transcontinental airmail route was eroding their profits. Since instituting day-an
d-night runs, the Post Office airplanes had been beating their express trains by seventy-two hours, and the intercity air routes were stealing their bread-and-butter mail—all with the apparent connivance of the government. Representative M. Clyde Kelly, Republican of Pennsylvania (a major railroad state), took up the cause and proposed privatizing the Air Mail to put trains and planes on an even footing. No more lavish Washington subsidies for the Post Office.1
The Post Office would contract out most of its routes to private firms that would bid, on a per-ounce or per-pound basis, for a license to carry the mail by air. To placate small-government conservatives, who had long disliked the European-style direct subsidies being paid to the perennially money-losing Post Office, the plan stipulated that the Post Office would pay the winning carriers 80 percent of the revenue generated by customers purchasing air-mail stamps.
In this way, the financial burden would fall on the users of air mail rather than on the American taxpayer. If people decided not to use pricey air mail, well, the carriers would see reduced income and eventual bankruptcy. Obviously, since aviation was in such a mess, railroad executives were pleased as punch to be seen posing as great liberalizers of the economy even if the scheme was really a protectionist play to keep airplanes from taking their business.
That the Airmail Act, better known as the Kelly Act, of February 2, 1925, would inadvertently create an immensely powerful airline industry and transform the little putt-putt airplane into a world-changing dynamo was an irony these railroad executives appreciated too late.
That measure, and its follow-up, the Air Commerce Act of May 1926, gave the country’s struggling aviation industry a reason to live. Each renewable air-mail contract was to last for four years, in which time the carriers were expected to have invested enough money in route development, training, and equipment to stand on their own two feet, financially speaking.2
In order to accumulate that money, the first order of business was to reduce risk, the primary obstacle to growth. Because flying was so dangerous, insurance was exorbitantly expensive—when it was even offered. At this time there was just a single company left in the country willing to write a policy, and its premiums alone ate up nearly a fifth of one fledgling airline’s annual expenses.3 Without insurance to cover losses, few respectable businessmen had been tempted to invest in any aerial venture. And without capital to fund research, development, and expansion, aviation would remain mired in its primeval state.
To make flying safer, air advocates demanded stringent new rules to ensure their own products’ safety. At this, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover dryly noted that aviation “is the only industry that favors having itself regulated by government.”4 To that end, William MacCracken, the assistant secretary of commerce, was appointed to serve as the nation’s first civil-aviation regulator. He quickly established a committee to investigate accidents, recommend improvements, impose pilot-certification procedures and equipment checks, and accredit flying schools.5
As a result, insurance soon became much cheaper and more available—within a few years, a person could buy $5,000 worth of personal coverage for just two dollars—even if a number of MacCracken’s innovations ran into ground-level resistance.6 His inspectors often alienated barnstormers with arbitrary determinations as to airworthiness. One took a pocketknife and slashed some wing fabric, saying, “I don’t think this is strong enough,” while another inspector judged, “I don’t like that plane and I’ll tell you why—I just don’t like it.”7
The pilots’ complaints went unheeded; they only proved the reforms were working. MacCracken’s intention was to impose uniform regulations and to do that he had to, as he said, “ride herd on…barnstorming” because “the time had come for a new kind of aviation to emerge in this country, perhaps less colorful but certainly more responsible.”
Wing-walking, among the most dangerous of feats, was the first target. MacCracken mandated that henceforth wing-walkers had to wear parachutes, which sucked all the fun out of it. Spectators now also had to be fenced off well away from the aerobatics to avoid accidental deaths when a pilot crashed his plane. Jessie Woods, a barnstormer, grumbled that the government “had so many rules, just choking us down. They got very nasty about us being there. Every time we did something [an inspector] would jump into the cockpit to check and see what we were doing.” Within a few years, most of the barnstormers had quit and gone to work as Hollywood stuntmen, where their skills were put to good use in such movie epics as 1927’s Wings and 1930’s Hell’s Angels.8
The reforms came not a moment too soon, for the country’s war-surplus airplanes were literally falling to pieces, often in mid-flight: By 1925–26, wartime aircraft were suffering severe structural failure at twice the rate of postwar ones, themselves of uncertain manufacture. Compared to even the older Post Office airplanes, which though unreliable themselves nevertheless benefited from stricter maintenance, private aircraft were nearly thirty-six times more prone to fatal accidents.9
One of MacCracken’s key allies was the philanthropist Daniel Guggenheim. In early 1926, he and his son Harry (who’d flown bombers during the war) established the Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics with an endowment of $3 million to “realize for humanity the ultimate possibilities of aerial navigation, and to give America the place in the air to which her inventive genius entitles her.”
Their money funded a host of new aeronautical schools, as well as technical research and development into engines and airplane design, heralding a technological shift from traditional wood-and-fabric biplanes to streamlined modern monoplanes. Thanks to Eckener, Arnstein, and Jaray, the Zeppelin had already undergone the equivalent updating in the war; now it was the airplane’s turn.
Within three years, from just ninety-six students in the entire United States undertaking degrees in aeronautical science and engineering, enrollment would rocket to 1,400, and American R&D, which had lagged behind the rest of the world by a decade or more, gestated a host of innovations.10 Giant new wind tunnels allowed pioneering advances in, among other things, retractable landing gear, propellers, flaps, wing design, and high-octane fuel. New radial, air-cooled powerplants like the Pratt & Whitney Wasp and the Wright Whirlwind boasted dramatically better performance than the wartime, water-cooled Liberty engines they replaced.
Overall, the concerted campaign to reduce risk and increase innovation inspired a tsunami of investment into the privatized aviation business. Ford, for instance, introduced the revolutionary three-engine Trimotor plane in late 1925, with Henry and his son Edsel personally loading the mailbags for newly founded Ford Air Transport’s first mail route between Dearborn and Cleveland a few months later.11
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JUAN TRIPPE, TOO, seized his opportunity. With Long Island Airlines disbanded, he set up a new outfit, Eastern Air Transport, intending, like hundreds of other hopefuls, to apply for one of the new airmail routes being spun off by the Post Office—in this case, the Boston–New York line. But he soon realized he didn’t have a chance. With no assets, Eastern existed only in name. There was a likelier contender for Contract Air Mail Route No. 1 (CAM-1), and it was called Colonial Air Transport.
Colonial was owned by a group of well-heeled New England worthies, with the current Connecticut governor, John Trumbull, serving as chairman. Like Eastern, it owned no airplanes and was little more than a shell company, but it was still the odds-on favorite to win CAM-1 thanks to its board’s connections in Washington. In that event, Colonial would have to find someone to run it, and men with hands-on experience were few and far between.
In mid-1925, Trippe approached Trumbull with an idea to merge the two airlines, with Trippe coming on board as a vice president and operations manager.
From Trumbull’s point of view, it was an easy deal to make. Little did he know he was letting an insatiable fox into his comfortable henhouse.
31. The T
rap
TRIPPE’S FIRST MOVE was to instruct his lawyer to “fix it so that our crowd is in control.” By “our crowd” Trippe was referring to his college friends and LIA backers, John Hambleton, William A. Rockefeller, and Sonny Whitney. After the merger, Colonial’s board had swelled to no fewer than thirty members, giving their meetings something of an enjoyable country-club flavor, but the arrangement was hardly efficient. Trippe helpfully set up an executive “voting trust” to make the important decisions and allow the board to get back to playing golf.
This trust comprised seven members, divided between four New Englanders under Trumbull and three New Yorkers (Trippe, Hambleton, and Rockefeller) so as to balance the Colonial-Eastern blocs. On the face of it, Trumbull controlled the majority, but Trippe had seen to it that one of the New Englanders was a potential fifth columnist. His inside man was Theodore Weicker, the father of one of his old fraternity friends. Weicker was pliable enough to throw his weight against his own side if necessary; with the turn of his single vote, then, Trippe could take over Colonial any time he wanted.1
In booby-trapping the voting trust, Trippe was playing for greater stakes than mere control of a company. He had to have Colonial to win the wife he wanted. Ed Stettinius, a fraternity pal, had recently invited Trippe to stay at the family’s Gatsbyesque estate at Locust Valley, Long Island. There he’d met the aged patriarch of House Stettinius, Edward, a partner at J. P. Morgan & Co., and the two men had chatted about the future of aviation. Edward senior would die shortly afterward, but not before advising his delightful daughter, Betty, that this Trippe fellow knew his onions. If anyone could find a way to make money in airplanes, Trippe could.
Empires of the Sky Page 31
