Empires of the Sky

by Alexander Rose

  Trippe realized early on that Woods Humphery was the key man to talk to about a Pan American–Imperial arrangement. The two got along very well—they commiserated with each other about the outrageous salaries they had to pay pilots—and in May 1930 formed a working partnership.9

  The Sikorsky S-40s Trippe had ordered had not yet arrived, but even when they did Trippe knew they would lack the range to make it across the Atlantic in a single leap. So how would he do it? Trying to head south through the British colony of Bermuda and the Portuguese-held Azores was his first choice, but the distances were too great and the Ditadura Nacional (National Dictatorship) government in Portugal proved unwilling to sell a concession in any case.10

  He needed, then, Imperial’s support to develop a potential “northern” route to Europe—one with pit stops. From New York, Pan American would head north up the coast to Newfoundland, then skirt the Arctic Circle over Greenland, get to Iceland, then make stops in the mountainous Faroe Islands (a Danish-owned archipelago) or the rugged coasts of the Shetland Islands, finally arriving in mainland Britain. From Imperial’s point of view, cooperation with Trippe would speed along the development of what it called its “All-Red Route” to Canada to match those it was extending eastward to India, South Africa, and Australia to fulfill its government mandate.11

  Eckener, though, happened to be thinking the same thing: Go North.

  41. The Great Circle

  ECKENER’S IDEA OF exploring what became known as the “Great Circle” northern route had first been broached in the aftermath of the Graf Zeppelin’s Round-the-World voyage two years earlier, in 1929. Then, a few pedants had pointed out that Eckener had not, in fact, gone “around the world,” which to them properly meant following the 24,901-mile equator; he had “merely” flown a circle around the North Pole.1

  Their salient point was that the shortest route between America and Europe was not directly in a straight line across the Atlantic, as most people, thinking of the traditional Mercator projection drummed into their heads at school, naturally assumed. Traveling globally meant using the earth’s curvature to take advantage of shortcuts. With the advent of oceanic crossings, the possibility of cutting hundreds or thousands of miles off a flight by arcing northward toward the higher latitudes began to matter a great deal.

  In this instance, Newfoundland, Greenland, and Iceland—once regarded as hinterlands—would be of potentially enormous importance. Eckener had already nailed down the best Europe–South America and South America–United States routes for IZT, but the optimal path between Europe and New York remained elusive. Could the Great Circle be it? In the summer of 1931 he embarked on three exploratory flights in the Graf Zeppelin to find out.

  The first was a brief charter flight in the service of, of all things, the Swiss Automobile Club, which left for the Arctic outpost of Spitsbergen (today Svalbard) on July 9. The good bourgeois of the cantons had no inkling that Eckener was using them as guinea pigs to determine whether paying passengers could handle the cold weather. Along the way, he also found that Norway was often covered in cloud in the summer and that Finland experienced frequent heavy rain and storms. Neither was an encouraging indicator for regular service. Off Spitsbergen, for instance, they ran into deep fog banks and had to rise from 900 to 3,200 feet in order to make their way through, another bad sign. Machinist Wilhelm Fischer wrote that “it is not advisable to fly further, especially as this chain of mountains of perpetual ice and snow is supposed to be very high….We would be in danger of colliding with the hidden glacier.”

  Eckener ordered a turnaround. After they turned south and headed for the Scottish coast, more thick fog enveloped them. The Great Circle route was appearing to be more hazardous than anyone had anticipated.

  A week later, on July 16, with Ernst Lehmann now serving as captain, the Graf Zeppelin again set off north. Lehmann made for the Faroe Islands to check conditions. When a rough storm assailed them, Fischer recalled that “the ship was shaken throughout its whole structure, going up and down and rolling very severely.” They continued until they reached the east coast of Iceland, where they finally encountered better weather, but the high, steep mountains were covered in heavy clouds and there were no lighthouses to use as guideposts. “It would have been very difficult to venture into these totally fog-covered mountains at night,” noted Fischer.

  When the Graf Zeppelin reached the southern plains of Iceland, he continued, “the few inhabitants stood around their wooden houses, astonished by this unknown wonder from the skies.” To say that it would be troublesome to make an emergency landing in such a remote area with scores of passengers and crew aboard would be an understatement, and Lehmann was well aware of the dangers of mooring an airship out in the windswept open. As it was, another storm was threatening them from Greenland, and Lehmann decided to cut his losses and fly home.2

  So far, the chances of successfully developing a Great Circle route looked pretty slim, but Eckener wanted to check whether going farther north into the Arctic itself might be easier than expected. An airship was primarily a seagoing vehicle, so if he could avoid Iceland and Greenland and stay mostly over water, perhaps the hard terrain and adverse weather could be overcome.

  On July 24, 1931, the Graf Zeppelin, hastily converted into an Arctic exploration airship, departed for the Soviet Union. Out went the lavish multicourse dinners, and in came rations of pemmican (a beef and fat mixture), pea and potato meal, oatcakes, and chocolate; out went the fine china and the linen napkins, and in came aluminum plates and repurposed toilet paper.3

  Eckener’s first destination was Leningrad, the jumping-off point for the Arctic. In the late morning of July 25 they landed in the city with a crowd of a hundred thousand people cheering their greetings, the brief unpleasantness during the Round-the-World voyage evidently forgiven, if not forgotten, by Stalin. As the Red Army stood guard over the airship, there was a huge illuminated sign saying “Welcome” in German and Russian.

  A decade or so later, Leningrad would not be so gracious to the Germans, but for now there was a gala held aboard the Graf Zeppelin. Local functionaries and regional dignitaries crowded the dining room and cabins, where they were serenaded by the Red Army Chorus and the tables “groan[ed] with caviar, while the clinking of glasses almost drowned out all other noises,” said Fischer the machinist. The guards, he added, were roughly turning away hungry civilians at the door—the dire effects of Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture were beginning to show—while guzzling vodka and food on the sly.

  The next morning, they lifted off with a squadron of airplanes as escort (they were there to prevent any lingering over military installations); after a few hours, the Graf Zeppelin reached Archangel. Work had not yet begun on the dictator’s White Sea Canal, built on the backs of a hundred thousand slave laborers, making for a more scenic journey than would have been the case just a few months later.

  Once past Archangel, a squall arose and mist enveloped them for a time, but they reached the Arctic Circle without much trouble. Fischer wrote that whoever has not seen the frigid archipelago of Franz Josef Land “with its gleaming and transparent glaciers, in the fairy-like delicate tones, and the endless symphony of color of its ice-masses—its colorful beaches and the blue inlets between the fantastically shaped islands and foothills—has not known anything of the most beautiful thing which this earth has to offer to our eyes.”

  Romantic, yes, but Eckener, with his veteran airshipman’s eye, looked down six hundred feet and saw nothing but mountains looming out of the fog—Danger. He noted that these were “critical areas to be carefully avoided” on a regular basis.

  By July 30 they were on their way home, but a deep depression with strong winds and dangerous storms was approaching Leningrad, and Eckener had to cancel a planned landing—which of course was taken as another slight by the Soviets. They finally landed in Berlin at 6:30 that evening.

  Eckener
addressed the crowd that had gathered to welcome them home. He was, as ever, bullish, saying that “flight in the Arctic is as comfortable, beautiful, and the least dangerous that one could experience. It took place under a beautiful blue sky and calculating one’s position was no problem.”4

  But the perpetual distinction between Eckener’s public and private faces was in full effect. A true Arctic Circle flight would always entail dealing with Stalin on his own turf. The headaches, which would invariably include inexplicable changes of mind, outbreaks of paranoia, and minor extortions, were far more trouble than they were worth.

  Then there were the weather problems. A constant menace would have been the formation of ice on the envelope and propellers, dragging the ship down to its doom. Atmospheric interference, too, had caused the Graf Zeppelin to lose radio contact with the outside world for an entire day at the 80th parallel, rendering it invisible to searchers if the ship had gone down.5 Eckener privately conceded that an Arctic route was too unsafe and unpredictable to be viable.6

  Yet the more southerly route via Iceland and Greenland was also out of the question, as he had learned from the two earlier flights. The treacherous winds past Greenland were too difficult for a ship the size of the aging Graf Zeppelin. Until he built bigger airships that could negotiate those winds and handle the longer sea voyage necessitated by avoiding Iceland and Greenland, he would have to restrict himself to South American flights, with a possible—if time-consuming—route north to Florida and along the East Coast to reach New York.7

  That was the bad news. The good news was that August 8, a week after his return to Berlin, was the day the Akron, first of the two navy Zeppelins, was christened by the First Lady, Lou Henry Hoover, in Ohio, which greeted her with a children’s choir, brass bands, and a trained-pigeon demonstration. Famed aviatrix Amelia Earhart attended the celebrations, as did 250,000 people from around the state.8

  Meanwhile, work on the Macon was coming along nicely. Once it was completed, Goodyear-Zeppelin would finally be ready to build the IZT airships.

  Until then, Eckener increased the pressure on Pan American by strengthening his connections with the Condor airline in South America and by keeping the Graf Zeppelin busy on flights to Recife and Rio de Janeiro. Shortly after returning from the Arctic, he embarked on three round-trips to Brazil in September and October, each one serving as a demonstration of the airship’s long-haul viability.

  There weren’t any accidents, but in the depths of the Depression, passenger numbers were not high, and neither were the mail loads. On average, just eleven passengers paid their way along with 363 pounds of letters and postcards, making for half-filled flights, cavernously empty cargo bays, and bottomless losses.9 Eckener sustained the short-term hit because he intended to begin regular, scheduled service to Recife and Rio the coming year, by which time, he hoped, the economy would have improved.

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  BETWEEN 1931 AND 1933, as the long struggle between the airship and the airplane heated up, Trippe’s and Eckener’s moves were closely synchronized: When one advanced, the other countered; when one countered, the other feinted—and both would suffer reverses.

  Just a day after Eckener had departed for the Soviet Union to explore the Great Circle route on July 24, Trippe dispatched a spare Pan American Fokker F-10A to start doing the same from the opposite direction. The Fokker left Boston and headed to Bangor, Maine, on a survey flight, and was followed a few days later by a longer-range Sikorsky continuing the journey to Nova Scotia to open an unglamorous Boston-Halifax mail route.10

  So far, so good, but Trippe’s real objective was Newfoundland, the stepping-stone to Europe. From Newfoundland to Greenland to Iceland to the Faroe Islands to the Shetlands to England: an elegant geographical path with pit stops laid out by the God of Flight himself across the Atlantic.

  Acquiring landing rights in the Faroe Islands, Greenland, and Iceland would be a simple matter, as they were all controlled to varying degrees by Denmark, which was happy to sell them for what amounted to petty cash.11 That left the Shetland Islands, which belonged to Britain. With his Imperial Airways alliance in hand, Trippe would have no trouble getting permission to land there to refuel and refit.

  It was Newfoundland that was unexpectedly causing problems. That island had since 1855 enjoyed self-government as an imperial dominion with the same status as Canada, but it was incompetently and corruptly run, so in Trippe’s eyes it was as vulnerable as any small South American country to blandishments. And so it proved: His request for a fifteen-year concession in partnership with Imperial encountered no opposition in the House of Assembly in St. John’s, the capital. When Trippe talked to Sir Eric Geddes of Imperial, he was told that “the chances are a hundred to one that we’ll get final approval.”

  But the “one” came up. Newfoundland, it turned out, was also just as unstable as any small South American country. The Depression was hitting hard, public debt was spiraling upward, tax evasion was a habit, and fully a quarter of Newfoundlanders were on the dole. At one point, rioters broke into the Colonial Building and made heroic but unsuccessful efforts to beat up the prime minister.

  Canada and Britain were forced to intervene, with a royal commission proposing that Newfoundland revert to the lower status of a Crown Colony and be temporarily governed by a committee of “six wise men” accountable to London to restore order.12 All of which meant that when it came to asking for concessions, Trippe was no longer negotiating with St. John’s but with London and Ottawa—tougher customers. The patriotic Canadians, in particular, started making noises about an Imperial Airways route through Newfoundland to Britain that omitted Pan American completely.

  That rumor prompted a call to Geddes from Trippe, who pointedly asked, “Do we not have an understanding?” If Imperial went along with the Canadian plan, in other words, they would be breaking the gentleman’s code. Woods Humphery agreed with Trippe, and in July 1932 he informed a conference of British and Canadian officials that Imperial must share its rights to the Newfoundland route with Pan American for the next fifteen years. With Trippe reassured that Imperial wouldn’t stab him in the back, that summer he dispatched two expeditions to survey Greenland and Iceland on the ground.13

  An “understanding,” of course, goes both ways, and just as Woods Humphery had supported Trippe, he expected Trippe to support him. Part of the agreement with Imperial had always been that neither airline would begin operations before its partner was ready. And that meant Trippe had to wait for Imperial before opening a route through Newfoundland.

  The problem with Imperial, as Trippe only now discovered, was that the British lagged far behind him. Their only “long-range” aircraft was the Handley Page HP-42, a slow, underpowered biplane introduced in 1931 that was obsolete even before it was delivered. Neither did Imperial operate a single route on which the hops were more than five hundred miles—less than an elderly Ford Trimotor could manage—and every stop between America and Britain was more distant than that.

  Worse, a report from Lindbergh brought discouraging news. At Trippe’s request, the aviator and his wife, Anne, had set off on a trip of several months in a specially adapted Lockheed Sirius seaplane to scout Greenland, Iceland, the Faroes, and the Shetlands. At the time, little was known of the flying conditions in these remote regions. Previous attempts to scout them by airplane had generally ended in disaster for the intrepid few, and the findings of the land-based expeditions Trippe had sent had been inconclusive.

  Originally, Lindbergh had intended to do it alone, but his flight had been delayed by the kidnapping and death, probably murder, of his son, Charles Jr., in March 1932—the “Crime of the Century.” Since then, a second son, Jon, had been born, and Lindbergh sought an escape for Anne from the press attention. She left Jon, nearly a year old, in the care of her mother and traveled with her husband as the radio operator.

  Lindbergh reached vir
tually the same conclusions Eckener had after his Arctic flight in 1931. The route was untenable for flying-boat operations. While Iceland seemed safe, the Faroes and the Shetlands would have to be avoided owing to their eternally terrible weather. It was possible to fly directly between Iceland and mainland Britain, but only by stretching a high-performance aircraft’s capabilities to their maximum; a regular passenger plane could not yet hope to do the same.

  Greenland presented the greatest obstacle: In the winter there would be too much ice for safe landings, its fogs and storms were outright hazardous, winds blew snow as high as a thousand feet up, radio communications could be cut off for more than a week at a time owing to atmospheric interference, and temperatures of minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit would wreak havoc on equipment and crew alike. “When you looked at a globe of the world, the Arctic routes were [so] tantalizing, [so] ideal for air routes,” Lindbergh wrote, that it was “easy to forget [their challenges] in a New York office when you stretched a piece of string across the surface of the globe.”14

  In that New York office, recently moved to the fifty-eighth floor of the Chrysler Building, and fiddling with his reels of red string, Trippe could only gnash his teeth. How on earth was he ever supposed to get across the Atlantic with Greenland, the Faroes, and the Shetlands out of bounds?

  He needed a new plane.

  42. Master of Ocean Aircraft

  O​N OCTOBER 12, 1931—almost two months to the day since she had done the same for the Akron—Mrs. Hoover christened the first of Sikorsky’s long-promised thirty-eight-seater S-40s with a bottle of Caribbean water as the navy and Marine Corps bands struck up rousing tunes. Trippe gave a nationally broadcast speech—advertisement would be a more appropriate word—extolling “America’s Mightiest Airplane.”