Empires of the Sky

by Alexander Rose

  Scientists focused their attention on several key parts of the plane. Cowlings to cover open engines, for instance, had become a top area of interest after it was discovered that the exposed, spokelike cylinders of air-cooled radial engines alone were responsible for nearly a fifth of all drag. Indeed, on some models of aircraft, the addition of a cowling reduced drag by almost two-thirds, resulting in dramatic increases in speed at negligible cost. In one experiment, an open-engine Curtiss AT-5A, whose maximum speed was 118 mph, was modified with a cowling and hit 137 mph on its next outing. The cowling had cost a mere twenty-five dollars to build and install.

  Similar advances were made in developing retractable landing gear (after takeoff, the wheels were mechanically tucked underneath the wing) to further reduce drag, supercharging engines, thickening and adapting the airfoils of the wings to improve lift, and inventing variable-pitch propellers (where the pilot controlled the angle of the blades to adjust speed and power during different phases of flight). Taken individually, each of these parts would have tweaked airplane performance; combined, they added up to far more than their sum, making for a revolution, or rather, an interlinked series of small revolts that overthrew the existing order. The airplane was being reinvented.

  With an improvement in one part synergistically affecting the others, airplane technology accelerated in a matter of years, rather than decades. By using low-cost models in laboratories, aerodynamicists could run dozens of tests on minutely varying versions of, say, an airfoil or a flap, until they found a promising solution. Real-world trials took a matter of days or weeks, and if successful, were rapidly integrated into existing and fast-spawning new generations of airplanes.

  Zeppelins, on the other hand, were the size of ocean liners, cost millions to build, and were too rare to risk introducing overly innovative improvements without huge amounts of study and a series of lengthy trial flights. Eckener’s switch to Blau gas, for instance, had required years’ worth of calculations to ensure it would not only work with the Maybach engines but also not throw off the delicate balance between the Graf Zeppelin’s hydrogen and ballast. For each new Zeppelin, then, there would generally be only one or two enhancements, whereas each new type of airplane combined a fresh palette of technologies.

  If lumbering Zeppelins bred like elephants and nimble airplanes like rabbits, then the airshipmen were ostriches with their heads in the sand. Even as the revolution was happening around them, they were curiously oblivious to it. Eckener, for instance, was still relying on the cube law to maintain what he regarded as the airship’s superiority over the airplane.

  Going back to the nineteenth century, the rule stated that an airship’s lift—which determined how much it could carry—was based on its cubic feet of gas volume, whereas an airplane was regulated by the old square law, its lift being directly derived from the square footage of its wings.

  Eckener was not wrong in believing that the cube law continued to hold, but he was blithely incognizant that the square law was in the process of being “annihilated,” as one knowledgeable observer put it. In aviation circles the new buzzword was the wing-loading (W/S) ratio, defined as the total weight of the airplane divided by the square footage of its wings. Put another way, a higher wing-loading ratio meant that a smaller, better designed modern wing could lift relatively more pounds of weight (including fuel, passengers, mail, and so on) than an older, larger one could. The traditional assumption that to have any hope of competing against the Zeppelin airplanes would need wings so colossal they couldn’t even take off would soon be rendered obsolete as ratios rose. Because you now needed a much smaller wing to lift disproportionately greater weight, ever-higher W/S figures meant that airplanes could get a lot bigger than anyone had ever thought.

  So it was certainly true that by making airships bigger, Eckener would be able to accommodate more passengers, install bigger engines, bring additional fuel, and take more mail and cargo, all of which allowed his airships greater range, speed, and profit. But what he had not realized, even as Trippe, Lindbergh, and Sikorsky did, was that the airship’s advantages were quickly eroding relative to the capabilities of the airplane. The ancient paradigm that airplanes were necessarily limited in size, range, and power was vanishing despite Eckener’s reactionary insistence that he “had been hearing this tune for the last thirty years” and considered it nothing but a “vague hope” based on “figuring with miracles.”

  Taking their cue from Eckener, other airshipmen may have continued to claim that airplanes were “inherently restricted to moderate size and capacity” and that flying “over seas…is the [exclusive] field for the airship,” but in just the eighteen months between launching the S-38 and presenting the plans for the S-40, Sikorsky had tripled takeoff weight, improved the W/S ratio by 25 percent, and increased range by half.6

  In short, the cloud, in the fortressed minds of the airshipmen, remained superior to the bird—even as airplane designers were approaching or even exceeding the capabilities of birds, fulfilling the age-old dream of these machines replicating their ornithological equivalents in grace, form, and function.

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  FILLED WITH ILL-FOUNDED confidence that his lead was unassailable, in mid-1930 Eckener began work on LZ-128, a successor to the Graf Zeppelin, intended to be five million cubic feet, equipped with no fewer than ten Maybach VL-2s, and accommodating up to twenty-four passengers. LZ-128, Eckener bragged, would be the first of a new generation of giant airships for the Atlantic crossing, but he was quickly disabused when he showed the blueprints to his IZT partners and Goodyear.

  The airship, they said, was already out of date. For one thing, it was designed to use hydrogen, and the Americans wanted helium airships for safety reasons. For another, whatever else LZ-128 was, or was supposed to be, it was hardly a wonder of the world, the kind of flagship that would wow in the looks department. The coming airship age was supposed to be one of awe, glamour, and excitement, but LZ-128 resembled a fat version of the aging Graf Zeppelin, being almost exactly the same length but containing half as much gas again. It showed a lack of imagination and demonstrated evidence of being a rush job—which it was.

  To his credit, Eckener recognized his error and ceased further development of LZ-128. He needed something better. In his office, he started a new file for what he called “Projekt LZ-129.”7

  40. The Duelists

  VOLUNTARILY MOTHBALLING LZ-128 had happened not a moment too soon, for Eckener would have been forced to do so anyway shortly after 2:10 A.M. on Sunday, October 5, 1930.

  That was the moment a British airship, R-101, crashed and exploded near Beauvais in France on its maiden voyage. Of the fifty-four men aboard, all but eight were killed, including the secretary of state for air, Lord Thomson (who’d declared the ship “as safe as a house—except for the millionth chance”). In short order, the British grounded R-101’s sister, R-100, steamrolled the infrastructure, and sold the remains for £600 (it was rumored that Eckener had purchased the scrap duralumin).1 The British had tried time and again to launch an airship program, only to fail disastrously, and the latest catastrophic loss was insuperable.

  Eckener had long been skeptical of R-101, which to his mind was a piece of junk, a sad relic of a saga that had been dragging on since 1924, when the British had approved the construction of the two five-million-cubic-foot airships. It had been a mess from the start, with R-100 being built by a private firm and R-101 by the government. Whereas Zeppelin (and Pan American) had a single Presiding Genius at the helm, the British employed different design and engineering teams for each airship, who competed for resources, never visited each other’s workshops, and sniped at each other in the press. Work, accordingly, was not so much duplicated as multiplied.2

  Even if its interior was quite nice, British aesthetic tastes leaning toward a look that called to mind a Ye Olde Tea Shoppe at a small seaside resort, R-101 turned out to b
e a combination of a white elephant, a giant albatross, and a fat turkey. Aside from its ceaseless construction and mechanical problems, R-101 had been disastrously overweight by at least a quarter more than planned. R-101’s underpowered engines alone had weighed seventeen tons, and it was questionable whether some homey touches, like a carpet that weighed a thousand pounds, were truly necessary.3

  Eckener traveled to London to attend the state funeral at St. Paul’s Cathedral and was asked to testify before the British Court of Inquiry, which judged that a forward gas cell had suddenly deflated, leading to a nose-down crash, with electrical sparks igniting a devastating hydrogen fire.

  For Eckener, the destruction of R-101 was a Pyrrhic victory. Yes, it removed the British from the airship business once and for all, but it also made the business climate for airships uncomfortably chilly. In public he remained confident, saying that “the disaster will not affect the course of Zeppelin building any more than the sinking of a steamer causes an end of shipbuilding,” but while his American partners did not walk away from IZT, they requested Eckener to slow down with his expansion plans until the dust settled and memories grew hazy.

  A worrying sign of ebbing airship enthusiasm came in early December, when Senator McNary’s revised Merchant Airship Bill dealt a blow to IZT’s and PZT’s fortunes by stipulating that instead of federal loans being extended to Goodyear-Zeppelin to defray the enormous cost of building airships, they would have to be self-financed. That meant that Goodyear could not enlarge its facilities without first raising money from its reluctant partners, but United had originally promised to supply any necessary capital only on the surety of federal backing.4

  The Depression had hit United harder than anyone had anticipated. Company profits had dropped by nearly 70 percent since the 1929 crash, and its stock had fallen to all-time lows. Strapped for cash, Frederick Rentschler wasn’t eager to sink millions of dollars into expensive projects until the storm passed.5

  And it wasn’t as if Eckener could help Goodyear. The Zeppelin Company was itself in terrible financial straits as Germany was suffering through its own terrible economic crisis. Bank failures were mounting, and by mid-1931 corporate bankruptcies were averaging more than 1,700 per month. Unemployment rose to 4 million, up from 2.6 million a year earlier, as the metal industry fired a third of its workers and construction firms nearly two-thirds. Fully a fifth of German shipping was laid up in dry dock, and exports and output in every sector were drastically down. Any hopes, then, that Eckener had of building more Zeppelins in Friedrichshafen for the IZT project were in deep freeze.

  Eckener was disheartened by the developments, but the future still seemed bright. The Depression would eventually pass, and when it did surely the Merchant Airship Bill would be amended to restore the federal loan guarantee and money would flow from a reinvigorated United as Zeppelin geared up for production. In the meantime, the USS Akron—the first of the two navy airships—was due for completion, with the Macon soon following, thereby allowing Goodyear-Zeppelin to start building the PZT and IZT fleets when the funds arrived.

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  WHAT ECKENER DIDN’T know about was the extent and dexterity of Trippe’s wire-pulling. It had been his Washington lobbyists who had persuaded Senator McNary to remove the federal loan guarantee to buy him time to organize his own Atlantic service.

  Then he used an old trick: Beat them by joining them.

  PZT had always been the smaller, poorer sister to the Rentschler-dominated IZT, which was forever off-limits to the likes of Trippe—Rentschler had the measure of the Pan American boss—but PZT was a soft target. Of course, Trippe had no great interest in airships, but he was greatly interested in knowing about Eckener’s next move, so he pretended that Pan American might be thinking about launching a Hawaii route in collaboration with PZT.

  The well-meaning, naive Jerome Hunsaker, in charge of PZT at the time, was only too delighted when a prestigious all-American company like Pan American came calling, and he invited the ever-emollient Trippe to join the PZT board without talking to Eckener first. Trippe quickly signed on as a minor investor, putting in just enough to indicate good intent but not so much as to trigger his name being mentioned in newspaper articles.

  This was a grievous error on Hunsaker’s part. Just having a place at the table, even if it was the children’s one, was sufficient to allow Trippe access to confidential intelligence about Eckener’s plans and progress, while Eckener had none about his. Playing both spymaster and spy, Trippe was soon in receipt of such valuable documents as PZT’s annual reports, technical data, and financial records, allowing him to try to piece together exactly what Eckener was up to over at IZT/Zeppelin.

  In return for allotting him the board seat, Trippe promised Hunsaker he would back an amended version of the Merchant Airship Bill reintroducing the federal-funds guarantee. It was then being examined by the House and Senate Committees on Commerce, and Trippe had only one small request: Would Hunsaker mind terribly if the word aircraft were substituted for airship in it to cover airplanes, as well?

  Hunsaker did not mind terribly—another error. Paul Litchfield, chairman of PZT and Goodyear, compounded it when he was asked by a puzzled senator during the hearings whether he was amenable to the change. Not wanting to sound unappreciative of Trippe’s efforts on his behalf, he replied, “We have no objections to having heavier-than-air included.”

  His gentlemanly sop to Trippe had just put airships and airplanes on an equal footing if the bill passed, thereby negating the original intent of giving Goodyear a financial leg up in its effort to build airships. Now it meant that Pan American would also receive federal loans to add to its own fleet if the bill passed.

  At the time, Pan American was, against all odds, doing very well. In 1931, even after figuring in the costs of breakneck airport expansions, extending service throughout South America, and aircraft purchases, Pan American posted its first-ever profit. It wasn’t a lot, a mere $105,452, but it was better than the $305,271 the company had lost in 1930 and, in relative terms, much, much better than any other major U.S. airline was doing. Indeed, at a time when the revenue of the domestic airlines was falling fast, Pan American’s had increased by more than $2 million from 1930 to 1931.

  Which raised a very good question: Why on earth would any politician want to give Juan Trippe more money when he was already flourishing? A natural reluctance to open the federal spigot when so many other industries were suffering from the Depression meant that the chances of passing the Merchant Airship Bill, even if it also helped Goodyear, fell drastically.

  This was exactly what Trippe had intended. The full horror of what Trippe had done slowly dawned on poor Hunsaker after he was tipped off that, as he reported ruefully, “several Senators had been approached by Pan American agents to prevent action” on the Merchant Airship Bill. Trippe wanted it to die, and the change to aircraft from airship had been designed to ensure that. There was still a slight chance that the bill could be put to a vote the following year, 1932, but the best that Hunsaker could hope for was to cross his fingers. Trippe, flashing that guileless grin of his, pleaded innocence when Hunsaker confronted him.6

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  PLEASED WITH A job well done, Trippe turned his attention to the Atlantic while Eckener and his allies were on the ropes. He quickly discovered that breaking into the European market was much more difficult than cracking South America.

  In South America, there were many small countries run by either strong men or weak governments open to various “inducements” to cooperate. Europe was a continent, conversely, of strong governments, a few large states, and many worldwide interests, all of which made Trippe the weak man. Like it or not, he had to make reciprocal deals, for each country had its own national airline and those governments considered their airlines instruments of statecraft. The kinds of tricks Trippe had played in South Americ
a were out of the question when negotiating with the mandarins at Whitehall, the Quai d’Orsay, or the Foreign Ministry in Berlin.

  Great Powers had no truck with the exclusive landing rights and tax concessions Trippe demanded in Form B. They could at any moment withhold permission from Pan American to bring its planes in to their airports at home or at their possessions overseas.

  Complicating matters still further was how the European flag-carriers were organized. Britain’s Imperial Airways was particularly idiosyncratic and needed special handling. The clue was in the name.

  In 1924, the British government had forcibly merged the country’s major carriers into a single entity—Imperial—with an inimitably British muddled mandate: The new airline was a private monopoly with a public subsidy. Put another way, while it wasn’t state-owned, it was state-funded, and its shareholders received dividends from taxpayers. In exchange for this beneficence, Imperial had to buy exclusively British airplanes, hire British pilots, and develop routes to India, Canada, the Middle East, Australia, and South Africa to service the Empire’s needs.

  Sir Eric Geddes, a former railway financier, was installed as part-time chairman, and George Woods Humphery, who’d helped run two of the merged private airlines, became his general manager.7

  Both were highly capable executives, but Geddes suffered from poor health. Most of the heavy lifting, then, was delegated to Woods Humphery, a grammar-school boy from Glasgow who’d worked his way up from engineer’s apprentice to the summit of Imperial. He did not, as the euphemism has it, suffer fools gladly and quickly made enemies of the airline’s employees. Within weeks of being appointed to his position, he’d provoked a pilots’ strike by refusing to call them “captains.” He tolerated no indiscipline or work-shyness among the staff, having once sacked on the spot a man he found loafing about at the airport, only to discover that he was actually a passenger waiting for one of Imperial’s perennially delayed planes.8