Skygods: The Fall of Pan Am Read online

  Names had always been a problem for him. Trippe had learned to greet people, even his closest associates, in a halting, hesitant way, expecting them to offer their names. He would smile his angelic smile and his brown eyes would twinkle as though he were enjoying a private joke. But this, too, was thought by some to be a cover-up. They believed Trippe was a self-centered autocrat who simply never bothered to learn anyone’s name.

  The Latin-sounding first name always fooled people. Juan Terry Trippe’s name came from a maternal aunt, Juanita Terry. The Trippe family, in fact, could trace its lineage back to 1633, when an English ancestor landed on the Maryland shore.

  In 1909, just after Trippe’s tenth birthday, his father took him to an air race in New York, around the Statue of Liberty. It was a grudge match between Glenn Curtiss and his archrivals, the Wright brothers.

  The day belonged to Wilbur Wright. He made three successful flights in the gusty air, swooping around the Statue of Liberty in a figure-eight pattern, enthralling thousands of spectators. None was more enthralled than Juan Trippe. Standing there, fixated on the clattering biplanes, the boy knew from that day on what he would do with his life.

  Trippe’s father was a banker. Though not wealthy by the standards of his old-moneyed friends, Juan Trippe grew up among a privileged class. Like the scions of advantaged Eastern families, he was sent to prep school, then off to Yale. Photographs of the period show a serious, athletic-looking young man with aquiline features and clear brown eyes. He was an undistinguished scholar and good football player. Above all else, he learned at Yale the value of having the “right” connections.

  In 1917, during Trippe’s freshman year, the United States entered World War I. With most of the football squad, he quit college and volunteered for military service. Despite his less-than-perfect vision, he finagled his way into Navy flight training by memorizing the eye chart in the preinduction physical.

  He first soloed in a Jenny biplane over Long Island. Perhaps peering into the future, Trippe declined an assignment to tiny, single engined pursuit planes and volunteered instead for flying boats. He never saw action. Before he could embark for Europe, the news came that the Great War was over. Trippe went back to Yale.

  On Trippe’s twenty-first birthday, his father died. At the same time, the Trippe bank failed. So when Trippe graduated, with only a meager inheritance from his father, he took a job that befitted a Yale man and a banker’s son: he went to work as a bond salesman with the Wall Street firm of Lee, Higginson & Co.

  He hated it. After two years Trippe renounced Wall Street. Win or lose, he intended to make his living in the aviation business.

  In 1922 there was scant evidence that such a business existed. Trippe invoked his Yale connections, making the rounds of old classmates, selling them stock in his new airline, which he called Long Island Airways. At an auction he bought seven Navy surplus Aeromarine float planes for $500 each.

  The Aeromarines were single-engine aircraft that normally accommodated a pilot and one passenger. Trippe found that by replacing the Aeromarine’s 90-horsepower engine with a 220-horsepower powerplant, he could modify his float planes to carry two passengers. Thus did Juan Trippe, early in the game, seize on a tactic that he would use for the next half century: increase capacity by whatever means, and you increase revenues.

  That summer he dispatched his ramshackle fleet on round trips to the Long Island summer homes of the rich. He sold flights to Atlantic City. He chartered his float planes for trips south to the Caribbean and north to Canada. He worked as bookkeeper, scheduler, pilot, baggage handler, and janitor.

  By 1924, despite the long hours and hard labor of its founder, Long Island Airways went broke. No matter how much revenue Trippe managed to draw into his little airline, the bills always exceeded the take. He was forced to sell off, piece by piece, most of his assets. But Trippe still had reason to be cheerful. He had managed to pocket a small personal profit. And he had learned much about the complexities of commercial aviation—meeting payrolls, maintaining airplanes, raising capital.

  Trippe was convinced of one thing: the airline business, to have any chance at a profit, would have to be semiregulated, like railroads and shipping lines. An airline had to have routes. And it had to have some sort of privileged status to fly its routes.

  The next year a piece of legislation—the Airmail Act of 1925, called the Kelly Act—provided that privilege. The Kelly Act gave the Post Office authority to negotiate with private companies for the carriage of airmail. That meant subsidy—a dirty word in America’s capitalistic society. America’s fledgling airline industry would be subsidized by postal revenues.

  To Juan Trippe, it meant the rules of the game had just changed: money could be made in the flying business.

  The new airmail routes drew applications from hundreds of speculators and investors. Through a consulting business formed by Juan Trippe, a corporation called Eastern Air Transport was created on paper. Trippe’s corporation merged with another, better-financed company called Colonial Air Transport. On October 7, 1925, the new route—and the airmail contract—was awarded to Colonial Air Transport.

  Trippe was vice president and manager of Colonial. He hired employees, rented facilities, ordered new airplanes. From his list of old school chums he recruited investors and directors. They represented some of America’s greatest fortunes: men like John Hambleton, war hero and son of a wealthy banker; Cornelius “Sonny” Whitney, air enthusiast and playboy heir to a banking fortune; and William A. Rockefeller, who had flown with Trippe in the Yale Aero Club.

  It was inevitable that Juan Trippe’s brash style would rankle the older, conservative directors of the company. Trippe was a young man in a hurry. He wanted Colonial to expand, to move into new market. He saw airmail not as Colonial’s real purpose but only as a means to become a passenger-carrying airline. He committed the company to buying large, trimotor transport airplanes—two from Dutchman Tony Fokker, who had emigrated to America and was building aircraft in New Jersey, and two from Henry Ford, who was building his own all-metal trimotor transport, the famous “tin goose.”

  The showdown between Trippe and the directors arrived when Trippe tried to extend Colonial’s routes into the Chicago-New York market. The nervous board of directors was more interested in getting the airline into the black. Colonial was losing money by the plane load—over $8,000 a month. The airline’s cash had dwindled to less than $100,000. In a stormy shareholders meeting, the majority voted against Trippe.

  Trippe cleaned out his desk. It was the spring of 1927. He was out of a job, again. But he had reason to be optimistic. Things were happening in aviation. Whitney and Hambleton were ready to join him in a new venture called Aviation Corporation of America. They intended to bid on a proposed airmail route between Key West and Havana. Another young man, a lanky airmail pilot named Charles Lindbergh, had just proved the feasibility of transoceanic flight.

  And in Florida a new airline was being formed for the purpose of flying into Latin America. It was called Pan American Airways.

  Pan American was the dream child of Major Henry ”Hap” Arnold of the Army Air Corps. With his colleague Major Carl Spaatz, Arnold had raised an alarm in Washington about a German-operated airline in Central and South America called SCADTA (Sociedad Colombo Alemana de Transportes). SCADTA was extending its routes through Central America, as far as the Panama Canal. The Germans even intended to fly to the United States.

  A German airline operating an air service in the Americas? Only seven years after the Great War? It had to be stopped. Arnold and Spaatz decided they would resign from the Army. With a former naval aviator named John K. Montgomery, they would form their own airline to confront the Germans. Montgomery, who was already a civilian, began recruiting investors. For their first route, they wanted the airmail contract from Key West to Havana.

  But in the autumn of 1925 the Billy Mitchell affair exploded like an aerial bomb in the Army Air Corps. General Billy Mitchell, commande
r of the American expeditionary air force in France, was the outspoken proponent of American air power. Mitchell was also contentious and undiplomatic. In 1921 he proved his point—and enraged the military brass—by sinking a number of captured German warships with his bombers. When he publicly attacked the War and Navy departments, calling their leadership “incompetent, criminally negligent and almost treasonable,” he was court-martialed, found guilty, and suspended for five years from rank, command and pay.

  Hap Arnold and Carl Spaatz were Mitchell’s lieutenants. Both testified in Mitchell’s behalf and assisted with his trial strategy. With Mitchell out of action, the two officers felt honor-bound to remain in the Army and carry on the fight.

  Montgomery took over the airline scheme. In 1927 he incorporated Pan American Airways and filed its application for the Key West-Havana airmail route.

  Meanwhile yet another consortium headed by a financier named Richard F. Hoyt, chairman of Wright Aeronautical Corporation, applied for the Havana route. This group, Atlantic, Gulf and Caribbean Air Lines, was the resurrection of a defunct airline, Florida Airways, founded by war ace Eddie Rickenbacker.

  That made three applicants competing for the Key West-Havana route, including Trippe’s Aviation Corporation of America. At the urging of Assistant Postmaster General W. Irving Glover, the three groups were persuaded to merge. On July 19, 1927, the U.S. Post Office awarded FAM 4, the foreign airmail route from Key West to Havana, to Pan American World Airways. After much backroom finagling and manipulation of stock, Hoyt emerged as chairman of the board. Twenty-eight-year-old Juan Trippe became president and general manager.

  Only one serious obstacle remained: the airmail contract carried with it a deadline for service to commence on October 19, 1927. There was still no runway at Key West that would accommodate the new airline’s trimotor Fokker land planes. There was only an old washed-out military strip. For weeks, construction crews had been grading and filling and laying the new surface. Then the rains came and washed it all away.

  The construction crew laid new gravel. Again the rains came. This went on, night after night. Time was running out. There was still no runway at Key West. Pan American stood to lose not only the contract but the $25,000 bond posted with the application.

  Juan Trippe put on his angelic smile and went to Washington to plead for an extension of the deadline. The postmaster wasn’t moved. He refused to grant any extension. If Pan American could not commence service on the 19th, the contract would be forfeited. The new airline would be out of business before it ever left the ground.

  On October 17, the first of the new Fokker trimotors ordered by Trippe landed in Miami, ready to proceed to Key West and inaugurate the service to Havana. All that was needed was a runway in Key West. Trippe, still in Washington, received the report that the construction crews were working around the clock. Don’t worry, they said. The new runway would be ready.

  That night the rains came. Torrents of Caribbean rainwater carved the new runway into an obstacle course.

  It seemed hopeless. The gloom could be felt all the way from the gullied airfield at Key West to the chilly bureaus of Washington. Pan American Airways seemed to be finished.

  And then appeared an unlikely hero.

  Cy Caldwell looked just like any other member of the 1920s breed of barnstormers, rumrunners, and fly-for-the-hell-of-it adventurers. He wore riding breeches and an oil-stained flying jacket. But on this day, October 18, 1927, Caldwell had in his possession an item of incalculable value: a float plane. It was a Fairchild FC-2 named La Nina, which Caldwell was ferrying to the Dominican Republic by way of Miami. Equipped with its pontoonlike floats, the Fairchild was independent of washed-out quagmires like the runway at Key West.

  To Pan American’s manager in Key West, J.E. Whitbeck, Caldwell looked like an angel dispatched by Jehovah. A Float Plane! Whitbeck pounced on the barnstormer. Would Caldwell consider diverting his airplane to Key West, and then flying Pan American’s first load of contract mail to Havana?

  Standing there in his wrinkled flying togs, the flier looked over the scene. He wasn’t particularly moved by the new airline’s plight. Havana was out of his way. And he was supposed to be in Santo Domingo the next day.

  Never mind all that, said Whitbeck. How Much? How much would Caldwell charge for his services?

  That threw a new light on the matter. Caldwell reconsidered. How about, say, $175?

  A sigh of relief was heard all the way to the District of Columbia.

  The next morning, Whitbeck and his crew loaded seven bags of mail containing thirty thousand letters aboard the Fairchild. Cy Caldwell took off, and sixty-two minutes later he landed La Nina in Havana harbor.

  After that single flight, Caldwell flew off into obscurity, but his name became a part of the Pan Am legend. Cy Caldwell would be remembered as the man who saved Juan Trippe’s airline.

  Chapter Three

  Skygods

  Sky-god ski-god: a being who reigns supreme while aloft in man-made flying contrivance 2: an aeronautical creature endowed with godlike attributes and worthy (in his or its own estimation) of human worship

  Back in the boat days. . .

  The new hires heard a lot of that during their training. Whenever someone talked about an event that happened in the first half of Pan Am’s existence, his voice took a reverential tone: “Things were different in the boat days, you know. Back in the boat days we used to. . . ”

  Everything of consequence happened then. Those were the days when Pan American took to the skies, and oceans, in its great flying boats—lumbering, deep-hulled leviathans that took off and alighted on water. To the old-timers, everything that happened after the boat days was anticlimactic. Then came the coldly efficient, unromantic land planes like the Douglas DC-4 and DC-6 and the Boeing Stratocruiser and then the antiseptic, kerosene-belching jets.

  The flying boat was a hybrid—neither fish nor fowl—born of the notion that because two-thirds of the planet happened to be covered with water, it made sense to use the stuff for taking off and landing airplanes. And for a while that was the only option. Conventional land planes required long runways of thick concrete in order to take off with a heavy load. Until the late thirties, no such hard-surfaced runways existed anywhere in the world. Only the flying boat, using miles of sheltered harbor and lagoon, was able to lift the vast store of fuel required to carry a payload across an ocean.

  There was also a psychological factor. Passengers took comfort in the knowledge that should calamity strike and the flying boat be no longer able to fly, it could become, in fact, a boat.

  Juan Trippe, it was said, had a nautical fetish. On the walls of his home hung paintings of clipper ships, the fast full-rigged merchant vessels of the nineteenth century. It was Trippe’s dream that his airline, Pan American, would become America’s airborne maritime service. Pan Am flying boats would be the clipper ships of the twentieth century.

  So he called his flying boats Clippers. Aircraft speed was measured in knots. The pilots who commanded the clippers were given the rank of captain. Copilots became first officers.

  It wouldn’t do for a Pan American pilot to look like the scruffy, leather-jacketed, silk-scarved airmail haulers of the domestic airlines. Instead, they wore naval-style double-breasted uniforms with officer’s caps. When they boarded their flying boats, they marched up the ramp, two abreast, led, of course, by the captain.

  Trippe understood pilots, having been one himself. He knew they were prima donnas who loved the pomp and perquisites of command. The captains of the great oceangoing, four-motored behemoths like the China Clipper needed a suitable grand title. So he gave them one: Master of Ocean Flying Boats.

  Like commanders of ships at sea, the Masters of Ocean Flying Boats were a law unto themselves. While under way they exercised absolute authority over their aircraft and all its occupants. And with such authority went, inevitably, arrogance. And idiosyncrasy.

  Some were classic martinets. Captain R.O.
D. Sullivan was an early flying boat captain, a bully who managed his crews and his airplanes with the tact of a pile driver. He was also a flamboyant pilot. Sullivan liked to make low, curving approaches in the big Boeing flying boats, flaring, rolling the wings level, and alighting on the water all at the same time. Copilots were reluctant to challenge the bellicose Sullivan.

  No one challenged him one evening coming into Lisbon. There was a light rain and low visibility. Sullivan swooped low over the darkened Tagus River, turning onto his final approach. The Yankee Clipper caught a wingtip, cartwheeled, hit broadside, and broke apart. Within minutes she was at the bottom of the river. Twenty-four of the thirty-nine passengers died, including singing star Tamara Drasin. Another singer, Jane Froman, was paralyzed for life.

  At the inquiry, Captain Sullivan denied that he was to blame for the crash, insisting that the Boeing’s nose had veered downward, out of control, prior to the crash. The accident board disagreed. Sullivan’s career with Pan American was terminated.

  Captain Leo Terletsky was a different sort. Terletsky was a European, a White Russian of considerable charm — on the ground. In the air he was insufferable. Unlike Sullivan, he was scared to death of flying. His anxiety caused him to shout at copilots, issue orders and immediately countermand them. He infected his crews with his own anxiety. A number of copilots refused to fly with him.

  One day in 1938 Terletsky was flying the Martin M-130 Hawaii Clipper from Guam to Manila. Somewhere in mid-Pacific, in an area of towering cumulus buildups and torrential squalls, the flying boat vanished from the sky. No trace was ever found of the Hawaii Clipper.

  The press speculated about Japanese sabotage. The disappearance of Terletsky and the Hawaii Clipper came only a year after Amelia Earhart vanished in the same part of the world. It made for an appealing mystery.

  To the Pan American pilots, though, the real villain wasn’t the Japanese. It was the Pacific and its vast, brooding, hidden storms. They had reported seeing anvil-topped cumulonimbus clouds rising to above sixty thousand feet—higher than anything they had previously thought possible. To blunder into such a storm with a flying boat would be catastrophic. And it would be just like Leo Terletsky to do it.