Empires of the Sky

by Alexander Rose

  Betty was quickly taken by this odd young man, so very different from her boring suitors at the local country club. To better fit in, Trippe had turned himself into an excellent golfer; after Betty hit a fine drive on the fourth hole at Piping Rock, he summoned up the courage to inquire, “Do you ever come to town on Saturdays or Sundays?” It was a curious question to ask of a debutante—no decent person went into the city during the summer, especially on a weekend—and in asking it Trippe accidentally let slip the mask he habitually wore. Betty decided to come to town.

  At dinner a few days later, Trippe showed a different side. Recalled Betty, he “was so quiet, yet so dynamic, full of interesting, intelligent conversation, yet with a real twinkle to his eye and a great sense of humor.” The two were soon courting.

  In the years to come, Betty would complement Trippe’s otherwise habitual taciturnity with her engaging, cheerful disposition. Whereas Trippe could only, with some effort, be the soul of bonhomie when he needed something from someone, Betty softened his social utilitarianism with a genuine interest in others’ well-being. A manager who worked thirty feet away from Trippe for years never heard a “Good morning” when he walked in, but Betty made sure he received a birthday card and asked about his kids.

  Because he needed them more than they needed him, Trippe had a harder time persuading Betty’s mother and her older brother William of his potential. They were very protective of the lass, and while they considered Trippe a nice young man, he seemed thoroughly impractical. Airy dreams of aviation’s future were all very well, but why didn’t he have a real job on Wall Street like everyone else? Being in charge of an airline with no airplanes was no way to provide for a family.

  Betty indignantly defended Trippe, but the decision was made: No match could be approved until “Juan has a business,” and until such time as Trippe made a success of himself at Colonial she would be dispatched to Paris under the care of her formidable Aunt Hazel.2

  * * *

  —

  LOST ON THE Stettinius clan was Trippe’s penchant for calculated risk-taking and a habit of presenting fait accomplis to get his way. Within weeks of the Eastern-Colonial merger going through, he committed to buying—without bothering to ask the board—two as-yet unbuilt Fokker F-7 airplanes and two new Fokker Universals as the airline prepared to start its Boston–New York service.

  When Trumbull heard about the purchase, he was furious. Colonial was an exclusively air-mail operation, which required small, cheap, single-engine airplanes, but these Fokkers were three-engine beasts designed for a specific purpose: carrying between four and eight passengers. What on earth was Trippe playing at?

  He’d have been angrier still if he knew that Trippe had recently returned from a secret visit to Havana, where he had met with General Gerardo Machado, the new president of Cuba. Machado had run on a modernization program for his country, and Trippe seized the opportunity to pitch the idea of operating a Key West–Havana service.

  The visit was an experiment in applying the lessons of domestic Air Mail privatization. The Post Office was contracting out its routes on an exclusive basis to eligible bidders, like Colonial. Once a route, such as Boston–New York, was allotted no one else could compete. What Trippe wanted to know was, could you do the same internationally for the mail and, potentially, passengers?

  What Trippe understood, years before anyone else, was that, no matter the idealistic intentions of those who declaimed upon the freedom of the air, the air is not free.

  It had been once, sometime before the war, but no longer by the mid-1920s, when a body of aviation law was taking shape. From the pre-1914 utopia was emerging a system of air sovereignty that differed from the age-old law of the sea, which allowed that no merchant vessel in peacetime could be excluded from calling at any port in the world. But since airplanes, unlike ships, could cross borders at will and penetrate far inland, countries were making sure they controlled all air movement above their territory. This meant that every airline had to acquire legal permission before landing.

  Trippe grasped that those landing rights were priceless, for they could only be acquired by international agreements or by private arrangements with the relevant governments. If you owned the exclusive rights, your rivals were locked out of competing against you.3

  Which is why Trippe treasured a letter from General Machado he kept tucked in his pocket. The letter gave him exclusive landing rights at Campo Colombia (a military training field outside Havana), tax exemptions, and preferential use of customs and immigration facilities. By fixing Machado—some money might have changed hands—Trippe had quietly prevented anyone else from landing in Cuba. He had acquired his first Holy Grail: a government-protected international route—albeit without the means to fly it.

  In typical Trippe style, he kept this rather important information to himself and his allies on the voting trust. His ambition was to expand Colonial from its Boston/New York base to Florida and the Caribbean, but he knew full well that he would never get the New England “old fogies” (as he called them) to approve any such scheme.4

  The reason was that the Kelly and Air Commerce Acts had been intended to liberalize the Air Mail, not to create a passenger industry. No airline in the United States at this time, aside from the odd local sightseeing operation, regularly transported people between destinations. That was what trains, boats, and cars did.

  It was not unheard of for one or two people, such as the newlyweds who spent $2,000 for a short honeymoon flight, to take a one-off trip on a tiny, juddering mail plane. But the law was that the mail always came first. It was permissible, even encouraged, to strand a passenger, no matter how much he or she had paid, at some remote airfield in the dead of night if there was a mailbag waiting. One poor fellow was left behind to take in the delights of Omaha for five days before he could be picked up.5

  You also took your chances with the weather: Since mail didn’t feel cold or heat, airplanes were not insulated against the elements, and the brave soul who wangled a “seat”—a rough canvas mailbag—had to put up with searing blasts in the desert or icy winds above the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains. That is, if you could actually get into the airplane, whose door was designed to accommodate mailbags, not humans, who had to fold their bodies with origami-like precision to enter or exit.

  Airlines actually went out of their way to discourage passengers, whose revenue per pound was less profitable than air mail. (And neither did mail whine about being uncomfortable.) So unenthusiastic was one company, National Air Transport (NAT), about providing passenger service that it doubled the price of a one-way ticket to $200 to intimidate all but the most determined travelers. The tactic worked: In 1926, NAT was gratified to discover that just 168 passengers had decided to fly with them.6

  Colonial was of a piece. Aside from Trippe, for whom Colonial was a vehicle to greater things, its board members had many other investment interests, and the airline was for them just another. All they wanted Trippe to do was deliver the mail and hand them government checks.

  For the moment, Trippe let the matter rest and focused on making the Post Office deadline to begin airmail operations. All went well, and on July 1, 1926, a Colonial Fokker Universal took off from Boston at 6 P.M., right on time.

  Much to Trippe’s irritation, though, the board had refused to install seats in the Fokker Universals and had bought a couple of Curtiss Larks (small single-engine biplanes) to round out the fleet. Even using the cheap Larks, however, Colonial could not make money. As summer turned to fall and winter, fog and snow too often delayed flights or forced cancellations. To break even, the airline needed to carry three hundred pounds of mail per month but was currently achieving just thirty. For businessmen, the time saved versus the money spent to send a letter 220 miles was not worth it, not when mail-express trains ran hourly. Trippe, following a common practice (or scam) known in the trade as the “airmail-augmentati
on program,” ordered employees to send one another one-ounce letters in one-pound pouches to inflate the government’s weight-dependent subsidies. (Put it this way, there were an awful lot of bricks sent by airmail in those days.)7

  But such tricks could only postpone a financial reckoning. Trippe agitated to change the board’s disposition and pursue passenger revenue to save the company, but he succeeded only in alienating its already skeptical members, who began to believe they had made a mistake in hiring such a young man. With the Fokker F-7s’ scheduled delivery date approaching, they recalled him to Boston to answer for his decision to buy them on credit. To deflect criticism, Trippe proposed installing Major General John F. O’Ryan as Colonial’s president; placing such an eminent “senior man” in charge would do much to calm worries as to the airline’s financial condition.

  On September 1, 1926, O’Ryan was duly appointed. Trippe, in one of his few strategic errors, had labored under the misapprehension that O’Ryan, like Trumbull, was just another foolish old duffer he could easily manipulate. But O’Ryan, who had commanded the 27th Division in France during the war (and thought he still did), proved a stickler for hierarchy and intended to keep Trippe in his place.

  At first, Trippe and O’Ryan seemed to get along, even if the general irritatingly called Trippe his “assistant” (and Trippe called O’Ryan “my assistant” behind his back). Relations quickly deteriorated to the point where O’Ryan downgraded Trippe to “lackey,” and the latter told anyone who would listen that he lacked any “confidence whatsoever in [O’Ryan’s] ability to successfully manage an air transport company.”

  Tensions erupted into open warfare in January 1927, when the Post Office announced that it was opening bidding for the prime New York–Chicago line (CAM-17), the most lucrative and prestigious of the mail routes.

  O’Ryan was seemingly intent on acquiring the route for Colonial but, in a strange move, pushed for entering an absurdly low bid—so low that Colonial would go bankrupt if it won the contract. As it was, Colonial was losing $8,000 a month, its cash reserves had fallen to $100,000, and the banks were owed $75,000 for the two Fokker F-7s.

  Trippe suspected something was up, but he couldn’t understand exactly what. He also wanted Colonial to win New York–Chicago, because businesses would surely pay a pretty penny to save days over the train, but Colonial obviously needed to bid higher, even if it meant risking losing the route to a competitor.

  In mid-March O’Ryan called a board meeting in Hartford when he knew Trippe was in New York. The members approved the O’Ryan plan, and it was only then that Trippe and his allies belatedly realized its true objective. O’Ryan had no intention of ever delivering the mail. Simply by securing New York–Chicago with a bid lower than anyone else’s, asset-rich Colonial would be a prime target for a sale to a larger and richer rival like National Air Transport that could afford to take a temporary loss on the route, thereby allowing the board to get out of the aviation business at a profit.

  After “Old Man Weicker” told him that “you can count on me,” Trippe triggered his trap: the voting trust, now assured of a 4-3 majority. At 12:01 A.M. on March 24 (the last day of bidding) at the Greenwich train station, Trippe summoned his tame trustees, who obediently voted to approve his own bid. A few minutes later, Trippe and Hambleton caught the early milk train to New York, commandeered a company Fokker, and flew to Washington. At 11:30 A.M., half an hour before the deadline, they ran into the very surprised O’Ryan and Trumbull outside the Post Office building, barged past them, and submitted their bid.

  The next morning, a Colonial lawyer called Trippe to inform him that the voting trust was illegal: It had been drawn up for a term of ten years whereas Connecticut law stipulated a maximum of seven for such an entity. The new bid, therefore, was invalid and the New Englanders were going to sell Colonial.

  Trippe was purged from the company, along with Hambleton, Whitney, and Rockefeller. As a parting gift, O’Ryan permitted him to take, at cost, the two accursed, and still undelivered, Fokker F-7s that had been at the heart of Trippe’s troubles.

  Trippe’s ousting was so sudden that few outsiders even knew that he was gone until they visited the office. When a manufacturer, accustomed to seeing Trippe there, stopped by shortly afterward, he asked what had happened. “He got too visionary,” O’Ryan explained. “He couldn’t keep his feet on the ground any more and I had to let him go. Too much youth and enthusiasm.” (As for CAM-17 to Chicago, the route went to National Air Transport, and Colonial was merged into what would become American Airlines soon after.)8

  Trippe was coming up to his twenty-eighth birthday and was unemployed. The prospect of marriage to Betty seemed further away than ever.

  But he still had that letter from Cuba’s President Machado.

  32. The Boom

  TRIPPE HAD BEEN exiled from the airline business just as it was about to experience its Big Bang. He mooned about New York for a few months but happened to travel to Roosevelt Field on Long Island on Friday, May 20, 1927. It was a rainy day, but something exciting was in the offing. An obscure former barnstormer and Air Mail pilot, twenty-five-year-old Charles Lindbergh, was attempting the impossible: to fly across the Atlantic to France, by himself, nonstop, in a small Ryan single-engine airplane.

  Trippe was acquainted with Lindbergh. The two had met sometime the year before, when Lindbergh was still flying domestic mail. Trippe had considered Lindbergh ripe for recruitment to Colonial, but the young aviator had bigger things in mind. Now at least Trippe knew what those “bigger things” were.

  When he took off at 7:52 A.M., Lindbergh was widely ridiculed as the “Flying Fool.” After he landed in Paris thirty-three and a half hours later, he arguably became more famous than anyone in history. The New York Times devoted five full pages, including its front page, to the flight, and the city’s papers would print no fewer than three hundred thousand stories about Lindbergh, his astounding feat, his family, the weather, his navigation techniques, his views on aviation, and his love life over the coming months.

  The demand for Lindberghiana was insatiable. Movie cameras recorded 7,430,000 feet of newsreel footage, significant portions of which were shown day in and day out in the nation’s thousands of movie theaters. He received a ticker-tape parade attended by some four million New Yorkers (Trippe watched from the windows of the Union Club), the Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and the “Man of the Year” cover of a new magazine called Time. Hundreds of songs were written about him (“Columbus of the Air,” “Eagle of Liberty,” et cetera), and readers sent the Times more than two thousand poems of widely varying quality.

  After his return, Lindbergh embarked on an eighty-two-city national flying tour, during which up to thirty million Americans—a quarter of the population—saw the great aviator. Even Henry Ford, who owned an airline but had never flown, agreed to take his first flight on the Spirit of St. Louis with Lindbergh at the controls.1

  Eckener had experienced a similar phenomenon, albeit on a smaller scale, after delivering ZR-3 Los Angeles, but he, like most other Germans, wrote off the Lindbergh venture as just another one-off, publicity-driven stunt, like the navy’s NC-4 trip and the British R-34 crossing. In France, Lindbergh may have received the laurels once reserved for Roman emperors returning from their latest conquest, but Eckener dismissed him as a dollar-hungry entertainer whose feat could hardly be said to mark the beginning of profitable, sustained transatlantic air travel.2

  And once again, Eckener was not wholly wrong. The Spirit of St. Louis was an exception to the rule that airplanes were not up to the rigors of long-distance flight. Lindbergh’s aircraft was a thoroughly customized job attuned to his exacting specifications. To be capable of making the 3,600-mile trip—a range easily within a Zeppelin’s reach—the Spirit of St. Louis had been stripped down to the barest essentials in order to carry the required fuel. Even Lindbergh admitted that his airplane was e
ssentially “nine barrels of gasoline and oil, wrapped up in fabric”; to further reduce weight he’d brought only a few sandwiches, sat on a compact wicker stool, foregone a radio or life raft, and obsessively cut off unnecessary parts of his maps to save a couple of ounces more.3

  What Eckener had not accounted for was that the plane didn’t matter; it was Lindbergh’s clean-shaven, go-it-alone individualism that attracted Americans. Lindbergh, uniquely for a barnstormer or an Air Mail pilot, didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t womanize, and didn’t curse. He was self-taught, modest, stoic, and idealistic, a Minnesota man who as a boy had hunted and fished like Tom Sawyer and resembled a skyfaring cross between Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone. There had been plenty of pilots before, but none had ever transfixed the American imagination like Charles Lindbergh.

  It also mattered to many that, in an era when membership of the Ku Klux Klan ran into the millions, Lindbergh, a lanky, six-foot, blond Viking type, had the “right” blood flowing through him. Yet the cult of Lindbergh overcame even racial boundaries. Josephine Baker, then in Paris, had interrupted her cabaret show at the Folies Bergère to greet Lindbergh, forgetting that he “was a white man and that he came from [heavily segregated] St. Louis and might not have liked Negroes,” she said in 1952. “I only remembered that he was an American and that he had done something great for the progress of the world.”4

  Lindbergh transformed Americans’ perceptions of aviation. Despite the immense dangers involved with flying, Lindbergh demonstrated that it could be made safe if one analyzed the risk factors rationally, compiled checklists, and applied skill and knowledge to the mission, as he had done.

  Until Lindbergh, pilots had resembled storm-tossed sailors of old, adrift and helpless amidst the roiling ocean of America’s mountains, forests, valleys, and plains; they were hostages to the gods of good fortune to see them to their destinations. After Lindbergh, who advertised the benefits of “blind flying” (using instruments alone for guidance), pilots increasingly began to rely on a host of new navigational aids, such as directional gyroscopes, radio-homing devices, barometric altimeters, and artificial horizons, to avoid dangerous terrain and stay aloft. Initially, there was some resistance from pilots, a hardy breed suckled on the principle that real flying meant hands-on control and “feeling my way around the sky like a prowling cat,” as one fondly said, but, as they adjusted to the changes, crash rates began to fall.5