Flying the Line

the years—controversial Dave Behncke, erudite Clancy Sayen, stolid Charley Ruby, and the inheritor of both history and headaches, J.J. O’Donnell. viii It’s all in these pages, from the dramatic deposing of Behncke to the de fection of American Airlines pilots, a move that almost wrecked ALPA. As a fellow writer and aviation historian, I salute Professor Hopkins for his in credibly detailed research; there will be some who disagree with his con clusions and interpretations of certain events, but history has always been seen through the eyes of the beholder, and time can distort memory, par ticularly memory of controversy. I began covering civil aviation in 1947 when I was assigned to report on the crash of a Pennsylvania Central Airlines DC4 in the Virginia moun tains. That was when I was first exposed to the sensitivity of airmen toward that damning phrase “pilot error.” That was when I first became associated with airline crews, and I sensed the comradeship and unity of a fraternity with wings. They became my teachers as well as my friends, the innocent instiga tors of my Walter Mitty fantasy. They made a nearsighted, 5foot, 6inch writer feel like part of every cockpit crew who ever flew the line. So I welcome this book as a longdelayed tribute to the union of U.S. air line pilots—each and every one of them sworn to uphold ALPA’s motto: Schedule with Safety. Robert J. Serling Tucson, Ariz. ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS It is always difficult for an author to acknowledge his indebtedness to those who have helped him, largely because limitation of space means he must omit many names. In an oral history such as this, those who submitted to taperecorded interviews can see in the pages of the book the fruit of their patience, but many others who sat for equally lengthy interviews will see no trace of their participation. These omissions do not mean, however, that the many dozens of sources for this book whose specific recollections do not ap pear herein have wasted their time. I have been helped greatly by all of them, and were it not for their kindness, my understanding of the history of ALPA would be poorer, as would the story which follows. That said, I must begin by paying tribute to Colonel Carroll V. Glines (USAF, Ret.), ALPA’s director of communications, who first suggested in 1979 that I might like to undertake a commemorative history to mark the fiftieth anniversary of ALPA’s founding. I was initially skeptical about the project, largely because I didn’t want to jeopardize my scholarly indepen dence by writing a captive history subject to narrow censorship. C. V. Glines put those fears to rest, and I can honestly say that in the three years I worked on Flying the Line not once did an ALPA officer or staff member interfere in any way with my interpretation of ALPA’s history. More fundamental to my skepticism about undertaking a history of ALPA was my doubt about completing the project in a mere three years. My first book on ALPA, The Airline Pilots: A Study in Elite Unionization (Harvard University Press, 1971), took four years to write, and it covered only the for mative years through 1938! How, I wondered, could anyone do justice to the long sweep of years since then and still have a manuscript ready by 1981, the halfcentennial of ALPA’s founding? After much discussion with C. V. Glines and a review of ALPA’s archival material at Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University in Detroit, I agreed to undertake the project. Professor Phil Mason, director of the Ar chives of Labor and Urban Affairs at Wayne State, had the foresight to collect ALPA’s historical material in one place. Warner W. Pflug, assistant director of the archives, also rendered valuable service to me during the early stages of research. The heart and soul of this history, however, lay not in the archives, but in the more than 100 hours of taperecorded oral histories I collected. A special thanks to the ALPA Washington office secretaries who labored many long hours to transcribe the tapes. I must also thank the staff of Air Line Pilot magazine, especially editors Anne Kelleher and Joseph Younger. Flying the Line was originally published as a series in Air Line Pilot. Editing, design, and production of the book were also the work of the magazine staff. Esperison x “Marty” Martinez, ALPA’s manager of public relations, also displayed keen interest in the project. One other ALPA staff member deserves special mention, even though he is also part of the story. Wally Anderson, who retired last year after 40 years at the center of ALPA affairs, provided invaluable assistance in reviewing the manuscript and setting the record of events straight. Closer to home, I must acknowledge the help of my wife, Elaine; the hard work of my daughter Ginger, who toiled at several tasks connected with the book; and my son Paul, who had to postpone many events crucial to a 10 year old so that Daddy could write. Tom and Ginny Helm, faculty colleagues here at Western Illinois University, offered unending support as I worked on the project, and Spencer Brown, my department chairman, goodnaturedly arranged my teaching schedule to further progress on Flying the Line. I must also say something about a few of the many professional airline pilots who helped out. Almost from the moment my first book on ALPA was pub lished, pilots have written to me, each with a story or a point of view, often sug gesting that I carry the history forward from 1938 into the years they personally remembered. Capt. Bill Himmelreich of Republic was only one of many who wrote during the 1970s, offering his files on an area of particular interest to him, the Southern Airways strike of 1960. Jim Damron of United, Dick Russell of Braniff, and Dave Ekleberry of TWA are also among those on the long list of ac tive airline pilots who assisted in this history in one way or another. But finally I must say something about the oldtimers, many long retired who contributed to the footthick stack of letters I collected during the 1970s. Many of these letters are quite moving, often running to several singlespaced typed pages filled with intricate accounts of events long past. There was such a rich and varied history in these stories that I was always mindful of the hu man face behind this story as I wrote it. I cannot possibly acknowledge all the oldtimers who helped me so much, but perhaps one of them will serve as surrogate for all the others. He is former Capt. Joe E. Miller, a man I never met, but who in his mid70s wrote to recount his own experience as a Cen tury Airlines pilot in 1932. “I was a good friend of Behncke’s,” Miller wrote, “and it was fun to read and remember those times. I only wish I could write. I have so much I would like to say, but I have tried and do not seem able to get it down on paper.” So for Joe Miller, who also flew for United when it was still called Boeing Air Transport, and all the others, here are my thanks, and here is your story. George E. Hopkins Western Illinois University Macomb, Ill. Aug. 4, 1982 Flying the Line 1 CHAPTER 1 What’s a Pilot Worth? “S ometimes we have to earn a whole year’s pay on a single flight. That’s why they pay us high salaries.” So says the captain, a sudden celebrity following his miraculous feat of airmanship. Many a pilot, over the last half century, has said something like this, usu ally amid glaring lights, thrusting microphones, and scribbling reporters. In a modern setting, the press conference would follow an utterly routine flight that had abruptly turned sour. There would have been no prior hint of trouble. The cabin attendants would have been serving drinks, the second officer gazing contentedly at his gauges, the first officer monitoring the as signed frequency, and the captain keeping an experienced weathereye on everything else. Not a worry in the world for these skilled people at the peak of their professions. Then, suddenly, the moment of truth. It always comes without warn ing. It could be anything from an engine failure to a systems malfunction. The only common denominator in this little scenario, whether it happened aboard a Ford Tri motor in 1929 or on a wide body jumbo the day before yesterday, is that life and death hang precariously in the balance. Airline pilots have created their own traditions. They see themselves as calm, mature individuals who leave nothing to chance, but who never panic if things go wrong. An important part of this selfimage is, admittedly, an almost arrogant self confidence, a feeling that if push ever comes to shove, “I can handle it!” This cocky selfimage has sometimes led to trouble, but more often it has constituted that hidden reserve that has enabled quite ordinary pilots to accomplish amazing feats in a crisis, avert disaster, and re turn their shaken passengers, somehow, to Mother Earth. This attitude was born in the days of wooden wings and is still bred into airline pilots today. The success of commercial air passenger service has always depended, to an extraordinary degree, on the public’s acceptance of this special mys tique. Even today, a passenger boarding an airliner believes, tucked away in the back of his mind, that his particular pilot on his particular flight will be able to handle the danger he half expects to occur. In short, a passenger bets his life that his pilot is a worthy heir to an ancient tradition of excellence and professionalism. 2 Flying the Line The public also believes that airline pilots earn high salaries because their employers appreciate their ability to overcome an occasional emer gency. Pilots themselves often encourage this notion. It ought to be true. Airline pilots should be well paid solely for the skills they possess and the responsibilities they bear, and in an ideal world they would be. But in the real world people get paid what they are worth only if they have the muscle to command it. Skill, courage, and devotion to duty have less to do with why modern professional airline pilots have the bestsalaried jobs in the world than do history and the Air Line Pilots Association. ALPA is first and foremost a labor union, an AFLCIO affiliate. It is also a unique professional associa tion that has made enormous contributions to the air transportation indus try, particularly in the safety realm, but that is something of a byproduct. ALPA’s primary function has always been to make sure pilots got a decent wage. The corollary to this pursuit has been to see that they lived long enough to spend it. In 1981, ALPA celebrated the 50th anniversary of its birth. The first half century had not been easy. ALPA’s existence had often hung by a slen der thread. It has never lacked enemies, either. Pilots themselves, against all logic, have sometimes been among the potential destroyers. Dave Behncke’s worst nightmare was that a disgruntled pilot group on a major airline would form a company union. Behncke (“BEN key”), ALPA’s founder and first president, knew from bitter experience how easily a clever airline boss could lure pilots away with sweetheart deals and per sonal plums. Behncke feared that if a major pilot group should ever defect from ALPA, others would inevitably follow. Then, when ALPA had ceased to represent the bulk of pilots on all airlines, the operators would crack back, reducing pilots to the kind of peonage they were flirting with when it all began. Behncke fully expected disunity to come someday, and he dreaded it mightily. But he would never have expected it to come from the American Airlines group. In 1963, they bolted, nearly destroying ALPA in the pro cess. Fortunately, Behncke wasn’t alive to see it; he probably wouldn’t have believed it anyway. The American pilots were Behncke’s solid rock from the old days—the tough guys, ALPA’s historic backbone, the first to organize 100 percent, and the first to negotiate a contract. Despite the tragic defection of American’s pilots, ALPA survived and grew. Someone picked up the pieces. For half a century now, someone al ways has. Behncke, who died in 1953, was gone, but Charley Ruby car ried on, doing the best he could, as Clancy Sayen had before him, and J.J. O’Donnell has since. What kind of people created ALPA and nurtured it through half a centu ry? How do we explain the courage it took to hold the center when the flanks 3 What’s a Pilot Worth? were giving way? Whence came the integrity of the Century Airlines pilots, who defied the industrial power of E. L. Cord in 1932? There was a depres sion on, with millions unemployed. Cord knew there were plenty of pilots out of work, so why shouldn’t they be willing to work for a “competitive” wage? Cord figured a fair market wage, given the degree of unemployment, would be about $150 per month. When his ALPA pilots resisted the wage reduction, he replaced them. In the economic climate of 1932, it was no trick at all to get replacement pilots. It never has been. No concerted effort by an employer to replace his pilots has ever failed for want of eager applicants, or on economic grounds alone. But despite this, Cord’s pilots fought him. Other pilots would fight other airlines in the future, on grounds almost as hopeless. What made Howard E. “Sonnyboy” Hall challenge Jack Frye’s company union on Transcontinental & Western Air (TWA) in 1933? Hall had been a loyal employee since the days when TWA was known as Transcontinental Air Transport and stopped flying at dusk to transfer passengers from Ford Trimotors to trains. He had helped organize ALPA on TWA during a frenetic burst of activity in 1932. Then he made the mistake of going on a twoweek vacation. When he came back to work, everyone who declined to join the new “TWA Pilots Association” was in trouble. Some got fired. Others simply ducked, paid their ALPA dues quietly, and gave lip service to the company approved “association.” Hall did none of these things, and because he was so senior and respected by his fellow pilots, Jack Frye dared not fire him openly. There was a simpler solution. TWA transferred Hall to an unfamiliar route half a continent away, flying opencockpit planes (he had been fly ing Fords), over terrain unfamiliar to him, at night! “They hoped I’d either quit, or worse yet, get killed,” Hall remembers. “My wife cried when I was transferred from Kansas City to Newark. She thought she was going to be a widow for sure.” They played hardball in those days, but Hall wouldn’t quit or get killed. He had some help by 1933. ALPA was flexing its muscles and beginning to have some influence in Washington. Hall survived; he retired from TWA, after a full career. While some pilots hung tough, others folded, and it is a mistake to view ALPA’s early history as an uninterrupted success story. There was a lot of hu man wreckage in the beginning. Pilots who were out front serving as ALPA officers were really asking for trouble. Of the first three national officers, Behncke, Homer Cole of Northwest Airlines, and John Huber of Thompson Aeronautical Corporation (later American), not one kept his airline job. And it wasn’t because they were incompetent. Homer Cole was a Canadian who enlisted during the patriotic fervor of 1914 and went off to serve king and country in the trenches of France. Cole quickly discovered the gap between reality and recruiting posters. Mud, mis ery, and boredom were the lot of combat infantrymen. 4 Flying the Line “I got sick and tired of the rats and rotten food,” Cole said in a taped interview in 1967. “For six months I went without taking off my outer coat, let alone my underwear. We were lousy, had crabs, and in the trenches around Vimy Ridge I would look up and see aeroplanes buzzing around. They, on the other hand, never flew unless the sun was shining, and I said, ‘Well, if I have to die it might as well be on a nice clear day.’” After the war he came to the United States and began barnstorm ing in the company of his brother in law, Walter Bullock (another ALPA founder). Cole and Bullock went to work for Northwest Airlines in the late 1920s; both had a hand in organizing ALPA, and both lost their jobs. In Bullock’s case it was temporary. Now retired, he recalls that Cole wasn’t the keenest weather pilot, but they did so little weather flying in those days that it didn’t matter. “They were pretty much out to get him, I think,” said Bullock. “It was a kind of pressure thing.” Cole died in 1978 after a long career with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). John Huber’s case was more direct. In 1929 he was Thompson Aeronau tical’s top pilot, the one other pilots referred to as “the weatherman.” Jerry Wood, who later went to work for Eastern, was a hustling young aviation entrepreneur at the time, and he remembers the nearlegendary status of pilots like Huber, who could always get the mail through. “Johnny was a pilot of exceptional ability,” Wood said. But skill didn’t save Johnny Huber’s job. At first the airmail contractors desperately needed pilots like Huber, but later, when flying became a little more routine, they no longer had the need for such expertise. That’s when the harassment began. After American gobbled up Thompson, Huber was just another pilot—and a union member, at that. American had a straightforward policy of frightening pilots away from ALPA. It never worked very well, serving only to make the American pilots more militant in their support of ALPA. Other airlines at that time were engaging in selective firing of ALPA officers. United’s W. A. “Pat” Patter son had recently been slapped down hard by the National Labor Board (a predecessor of the National Labor Relations Board) for trying to sack Dave Behncke. C. R. Smith, American’s president, was too clever for that. Instead of firing Huber outright, Smith simply saw to it that the pilot’s life was mis erable. The company transferred Huber around on the spur of the moment, once sending him from Chicago to Albany on notice so short he didn’t even have time to go home for a change of clothes. “I had to call my wife to tell her we were moving,” Huber said. “I told her to send some clothes and that I’d see her as soon as she could pack the household goods and get to Albany. She couldn’t believe it.” Of course, American offered Huber an option—he could quit. It was rough, and Huber’s health began to fail. In 1935 he resigned, unable to take it anymore. He went on to a distinguished career in air traffic control with 5 What’s a Pilot Worth? FAA. Now retired and living in Florida, Huber feels that modern airline pilots do not appreciate the price he paid in helping to establish ALPA. What made these people tick? What made a man like Byron S. “Pop” Warner defy the conventional wisdom of the era? In 1929 Warner had what he wanted above all else, a pilot’s job with National Air Transport (NAT, later part of United). He was a university graduate, a trained engineer, and al though he loved flying, the relatively low pay, poor working conditions, and the company’s lack of appreciation for the pilots’ contributions bothered him. When he met Dave Behncke, the hulking sixfooter who was “talking up” a new pilots’ association, Warner knew immediately it had to be a union, not another toothless, semisocial pilots’ club. “I could see that unless we got a pilots’ association with real power,” War ner remembers, “there wouldn’t be enough money in airline flying to make it worth my effort. I would have to go back to slipsticking at a desk, and I didn’t want that—I wanted to keep flying.” So Warner was a rapid convert to Behncke’s cause. He could readily see that all this talk about airline pilots being “highclass professionals who didn’t need a union” was just so much blather. Operating under the code name “Mr. A,” Warner successfully organized the pilots of NAT in 1931. Then he got fired. Management’s spies were good at figuring out the cover names of ALPA’s “Key Men,” as Behncke called them. It was an angry, frustrating time. Warner was among the lucky ones. He got another airline job and went on to fly a full career. Now retired and living in California, he can still remember the devastating effect of being fired with out just cause. “I pretty well kept my head down after that,” Warner admits. Then there are the unlucky ones like George L. Hays. He stood up for ALPA during the Long & Harmon fight in 1934, and, like Warner, he too was fired. By 1934, the New Deal’s labor protective machinery was operating effectively, so Hays appealed his dismissal. In one of its first uses of profes sional staff, ALPA sent a representative down from Chicago to Fort Worth where NLB held hearings on the dismissal of Hays and two other pilots. On paper it was a great success. ALPA won the legal battle when NLB or dered Hays reinstated. Another pilot, Maurice M. Kay, also won reinstatement. (A third, L. S. Turner, a previous winner of the Air Mail Pilot Medal of Honor, declined reinstatement in order to pursue other business opportunities.) But while ALPA was busily contesting the illegal firing of pilots for union activities, Long & Harmon sold out to Braniff. The Braniff brothers took over the Post Office airmail routes, but not the pilots. There was nothing ALPA could do. Kay found another airline job after a long period of unemployment, but George Hays had no luck. ALPA was supporting him with a meager monthly payment raised from members by a special assessment. That was embarrass ing enough, but even worse was the humiliating fact that Hays had to fall back on his parents for support at the age of 28. 6 Flying the Line We must remember that this was happening in the midst of the Great Depression, when the despair of unemployment was epidemic, and that there were other things eating at George Hays. He feared that standing up for his legal rights had caused other airlines to blacklist him and that he would never be able to find another flying job. One day George Hays went out to his car, sat down in the front seat, and shot himself through the head. It was 1936. These hard times required some sassy politicking on Behncke’s part, and it always bothered some pilots, who liked to think of themselves as nonpartisan. Behncke spent much of his life trying to educate pilots. The airline business was highly political, unable to survive in those days without direct govern ment subsidy, and Behncke (who was from Chicago, after all) knew about the role clout played. As Behncke began to take his first, halting steps toward representing pilots in Washington, D.C., he found himself facing people with formidable political connections—hard characters like the legendary Eddie Rickenbacker of Eastern and American’s steely eyed C. R. Smith. Many pilots didn’t like the way Behncke criticized their employers when testifying before congressional committees. Nor did they like the way he glo rified politicians who aided him. Behncke found this kind of political soft headedness contemptible. He openly pursued a shifting series of alliances based on the Machiavellian principle that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend.” His ap proach to politics was always frankly opportunistic. “It doesn’t matter where the coal comes from,” Behncke once said, “as long as it gets on the fire.” Politically, the bane of Behncke’s existence (and of other ALPA leaders to come) was the kind of pilot who could not understand that there was no po litical safe ground and that ALPA must choose on some issues. “Most pilots don’t know any more about politics than they do pink tights,” Behncke once grumbled. The Old Man had a way with words. Behncke was a quick study at the game of politics, learning to play it masterfully over the years. Airline bosses hated him for that, especially Eddie Rickenbacker, who bore an ancient grudge against him and had once tried to punch him out. “They hated each other because they were so much alike,” says Eastern’s Jerry Wood of the perennial feud between Rickenbacker and Behncke. Eventually Behncke and Rickenbacker mellowed, each coming to have a grudging respect for the other’s abilities. But that never happened with National Airlines’ George T. “Ted” Baker. Behncke’s last, and in some ways his toughest, political fight was with Baker. There was no quarter given, and none asked. It began in 1948, when Ted Baker goaded his pilots into a strike. A nasty situation had developed at National in 1945, following the dismissal of a pi lot for questionable reasons. Behncke, who prided himself on working things out, proceeded deliberately, without panic, to settle it through the National 7 What’s a Pilot Worth? Mediation Board. National’s pilots were certainly in no hurry to strike, ow ing to the large surplus of trained military pilots hungering for their jobs. But then the mechanics got into it. Baker had been abusing them for some time, so they went on strike; the National pilots naturally felt sympathy for them. In addition, there was a safety question involved. “Baker had a bunch of typewriter ribbon clerks out there working on the planes,” Charles Ruby recalls. “The real reason for the strike was that our planes were a bunch of accidents just waiting to happen.” When it became apparent to Behncke that Ted Baker was engaging in a calculated effort to break ALPA, there was no alternative to a fight. One thing is clear: ALPA never wanted the National Airlines strike of 1948. Ted Baker provoked it, and there is strong evidence that he had the tacit approval of other airlines. Their theory was that if ALPA could be broken on a major trunk airline (albeit one of the smallest), it could be broken elsewhere. The National Airlines strike lasted nine months. To the pilots it seemed like forever—picketing, towing banners behind an old T6 Texan, writing in smoke across the skies of a dozen cities: “Don’t Fly National.” It was great theater, for a while. Then the public, ever fickle, lost inter est. The spectacle of uniformed airline pilots carrying placards, handing out leaflets, and talking on any local radio show that would have them was un usual, but how could it compete with Milton Berle on the hot new medium of television? The new pilots working for National wore uniforms just like the old pilots, though of a different color. It was all very confusing to the man in the street. In short order, Baker had fleshed out his crews with a full complement of strikebreakers, and it was pretty much business as usual. ALPA was all but beaten, “scabbed out.” Baker had won every aspect of the strike except the purely political one, and that decision awaited only the outcome of the 1948 presidential election between Truman and Dewey. Mr. Gallup had already stopped taking polls by October, calling Dewey’s twotoone lead over Tru man “insurmountable.” Dewey was so certain of victory that he announced his cabinet appointments in advance and allowed bands to play “Hail to the Chief ” wherever he went. Ted Baker and Tom Dewey were great friends. Behncke, already slowing down from the heart condition that would eventually kill him, backed Truman and the Democrats in 1948 against all odds. Many pilots thought he was crazy. When it was over, and Truman had pulled the greatest upset in American political history, Behncke looked wiser than a tree full of owls. He held Truman’s political IOU, and Harry Truman was a man who paid his debts. Now it was shellshocked Ted Baker’s turn to sweat it out. He had to ad mit defeat and settle with ALPA. Truman had left no doubt that if the Na tional strikers didn’t get their jobs back, Ted Baker wouldn’t have an airline. Baker may have been mean and shifty, but nobody ever called him stupid. 8 Flying the Line In 1960, politics was once again the determining factor in the defeat of Southern Airways’ Frank W. Hulse, a spiritual descendant of Ted Baker. Be ginning in the summer of 1960 Southern’s pilots walked the picket lines for more than two years. Like the National pilots in 1948, they were completely “scabbed out.” To be out of work is bad enough, but to see others take your job, fly your trips, and draw your salary is even worse. A complacent FAA bent the rules to help Hulse, actually allowing one strikebreaker who held only a private license with no instrument rating to slip into the cockpit. He flew for several months as a captain! There were plenty of bureaucratic red faces over that one, especially since it was ALPA, not the government, that uncovered this incredible dereliction. The Southern strike of 1960 was no mere local dispute, despite the fact that Southern was a local service carrier. It employed more pilots in 1960 than National had in 1948, and there were other local service carriers that were even bigger. “If Mr. Hulse had won,” says John Boyd (whose fellow Southern pilots dubbed him “Senator” because he spent so much time lobbying in Washing ton), “the regional carriers’ association would have broken ALPA on every feeder line, TransTexas, all of them.” Everything hinged on a presidential election, just as it did in 1948, this time John F. Kennedy’s. The Southern strikers formally endorsed him after Richard Nixon crossed their picket lines. The gamble paid off. After his election, Kennedy paid his debts to orga nized labor, of which ALPA was one cog, by appointing a prolabor Democrat to the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB). One must remember that CAB held the power of life and death over airlines like Southern, owing to the fact that they could not sustain themselves without government subsidy. In 1962, af ter the long, drawnout series of lawyerly confrontations called “due process” had run its course, CAB ruled that Frank Hulse had “bargained unfairly” and must either reinstate his pilots or lose his operating certificate. The crucial vote was along straight party lines, three Democrats to two Republicans. “If Richard Nixon had won the election of 1960,” says Harry F. Susemihl, former Southern master executive council chairman, “neither I nor any other Southern pilot would ever have worked again.” Close calls like that dot ALPA’s history. They were interesting times, but it is well to remember that interesting times are usually gutwrenchingly grim to live through. Every airline pilot working today owes a substantial debt to those who came before, men whose names they do not know, who sweated and fought to make ALPA what it is today, sometimes at great personal cost. A long series of beacons winks out of the past at modern airline pilots. They mark a rough and perilous course. Flying it again would be tough. Modern air line pilots owe it to themselves to know their own history—warts and all. 9 CHAPTER 2 Stepping on Toes T hey were called “troublemakers.” Who did they think they were, but ting in where they had no business, presuming to form an “associa tion”? Airline owners weren’t fooled by the fancy name and the talk about ALPA being “like the American Medical Association.” They knew the shape and smell of a union, and they were having none of it in 1931. “I won’t have any union man working for me,” said W. A. “Pat” Patterson when he first heard of ALPA. “Nobody can belong to a union and fly for United!” It was no idle threat, as the example of Byron S. “Pop” Warner made clear. Warner (“Mr. A”) got the ax for ALPA activities on the National Air Transport (NAT) division of United, just after the convention of “Key Men.” That meeting, held at the Morrison Hotel in Chicago on July 27, 1931, was ALPA’s official moment of birth. Reuben Wagner (“Mr. P”), in charge of orga nizing the Omahabased pilots of Boeing Air Transport, was one of sev eral very nervous young men who had made that meeting possible. Why did they risk their careers by listening to Dave Behncke? “We were just worn out,” Wagner explains of the way airline flying was developing as the depression deepened. “We all wanted to fly, we liked to fly. Everyone in those days was flying because they liked to fly, not for the money. But we thought we weren’t getting what we should.” Of the 24 pilots who acted as Key Men during the birth of ALPA, only 6 remain. They are old men now, mostly in their 80s, and the state of their health varies, as does the clarity of their memories. Johnny Huber is the only one who gave up his airline job prior to reaching mandatory retirement, and he was forced out because of C. R. Smith’s vendetta against ALPA. At 74, Huber is the junior surviving Key Man, a year younger than Byron Warner, who managed to land and keep a flying job with American after he was fired from United. Warner is still alert and articulate, still working regularly as an aeronautical engineer, still passing his Federal Aviation Admin istration (FAA) medicals with ease, and still flying his own lightplane regularly. He is the only one of the six surviving Key Men who does; the others have had enough flying. Nearly all of their 18 deceased colleagues died in crashes. Walter Bullock (“Mr. C”), born in 1899, flew his last DC7 trip for Northwest Airlines in 1961. He collected “pledges,” as the first ALPA recruits 10 Flying the Line were called, on what would ultimately be Northwest’s Council 1. He is, in ef fect, the dean of all master executive council chairmen, although they weren’t called that then. After being forced into retirement by FAA Administrator Quesada’s age60 edict, Bullock remained actively a part of aviation well into his 70s, founding a company in Lakeville, Minn., to build classic aircraft replicas. He also flew exhibitions at county fairs in a 1911 Bleriot Model 11 monoplane, a throwback to his early days as a barnstormer. Bullock learned to fly at the Curtiss School in Virginia in 1916. In 1918 he flew a 1910 Cur tiss Model D pusher from the outfield grass at a Boston Braves Fourth of July doubleheader before thousands of gaping baseball fans. He quit flying about 10 years ago. “It was time to hang ’em up,” he says, rather wistfully. His logbook shows 34,000 hours in 102 different aircraft. Now in his eighty second year, Walt Bullock is thinner than old photos show him. As the shadows lengthen over the patio of his Florida retirement home, he gradu ally forgets about the tape recorder, which inhibited him at first. With the help of his wife Lillian, and a massive collection of wellthumbed photographs to trigger remembrance, the stories tumble out. Reuben Wagner is the picture of radiant health in his eightyfourth year. He was one of the old Post Office Air Mail pilots who formed their own association as far back as 1919 and who later provided a granite base of sup port for Behncke’s idea of unionization. To watch “Rube” Wagner enter the crowded grand ballroom at Reno’s ornate El Dorado Hotel during a Retired United Pilots Association cocktail hour is to understand the term “legend ary.” Mere striplings of 75 approach him as they would royalty, touching his elbow cautiously, eager to share some treasured memory of the days when they served as his copilots on trimotor Boeing 80s. Rube Wagner, of course, was never anybody’s copilot. For Ralph Johnson (“Mr. Q”) the years haven’t been so kind. Called “Lit tle Ralph” to distinguish him from the other Ralph Johnson flying for Unit ed, he lives quietly in California, coping as best he can with the debilitating effects of a stroke as he approaches his eightyfifth year. He remembers little now, which is a pity since no man contributed more to the creation of ALPA. Back in 1930, he advocated linking ALPA to the Railroad Brotherhoods until Dave Behncke won him over to the idea of affiliating with the American Fed eration of Labor. After that, Ralph Johnson became one of Behncke’s rocks, a close friend and confidante. George Douglass (“Mr. V”) is also living in California retirement. He goes back to the days before W. A. Patterson and P. G. Johnson’s developing monolith swallowed up little Varney Air Transport, his airline, and made it part of United. “The wife and I are pretty much on the sick list these days,” Douglass says goodnaturedly. But fortunately, his physical ailments have not affected his memory. George Douglass talks lucidly about men long dead and events long past. The only hindrance to communication is his deafness, 11 Stepping on Toes a problem he shares with other early birds who spent long hours exposed to unmuffled engine blast in open cockpits. Their wives help them answer questions they cannot quite hear through the assortment of hearing aids they carry. Some, like Virginia Huber, remem ber almost as much about the early days of ALPA as do their husbands. Vir ginia was working as a stenographer in 1929 when she married Johnny Huber (then a dashing young airmail pilot) and, like Gladys Behncke, she did a lot of note taking and typing for ALPA—all for free. Just these six were left in 1981 as the fiftieth year approached.* (R. Lee Smith of Northwest Airlines, one of the original movers of ALPA, is still alive, but he did not act as a Key Man.) In the memories of these men the truly important things remain bright. A man’s personality and his values, the shape of his face, the way he talked and thought and acted half a century ago, these things they still remember. Principles last forever, but specific details no longer matter much—who was at a meeting, when it took place. The shape and course of debates, once pas sionately contested, seem with the passage of time unimportant, perhaps even faintly ridiculous. Every man is his own historian, extracting from the past that which he finds useful and worthy of preservation for posterity. What fundamental truths do these survivors still treasure? What aspect of their experience during the creation of ALPA do they deem most worthy of passing along to the cur rent generation of airline pilots? Above all else, ALPA’s founders want modern airline pilots to know the sense of satisfaction they feel for having secured their future with their own hands at a time when nearly everybody, including their fellow pilots, thought it could not be done. A tone of calm satisfaction pervades the stories these old men tell. To overcome great obstacles, to participate in an enduring act of creation, to build something lasting with one’s own sweat, these things are sufficient to maintain the fires of satisfaction during the winter of any man’s life. And if the price is to remember being called a troublemaker by those you outwitted, well, that makes it all the sweeter. The men who helped Dave Behncke create ALPA never thought of them selves as troublemakers. They were, in fact, good “company men,” loyal and conscientious, with more of a stake in the survival of the airlines for which they worked than the owners themselves had. As Rube Wagner put it: “We pilots were the company. Some pilots who didn’t want to join ALPA tried to make believe that if the pilots were for a union, they weren’t for the company. But ALPA pilots were for the company way ahead of the company!” *Originally published as a series in Air Line Pilot magazine beginning in January 1981, Flying the Line is based on interviews with ALPA’s founders and principal figures conducted during 1980. In midsummer 1982, as this version was going to press, we learned that George Douglass had died on June 19 at age 86. 12 Flying the Line The people who owned airlines in those days usually had something else go ing for them. Most of them had already made it big, thanks to previous success, or birth, or both. The same couldn’t be said for the first generation of airline pi lots. Very few early pilots took up regular airline flying because they were bored by hanging around country clubs. Aristocratic celebrity aviators back then, the Howard Hugheses and Harry Richmans, usually flew somewhere once, perhaps even around the world, collected their headlines and tickertape parades down Broadway, and then left the dayin, dayout humdrum battles with fog and thunderstorms to people like Eastern’s Dick Merrill. Showing his good sense, Harry Richman (actually a professional musician) took Merrill with him when he tackled the Atlantic. Guess who did the flying. The first generation of airline pilots, the ones who managed to live through the 1920s against all odds, saw the future only dimly. Indeed, the nature of their work precluded longterm planning. Some of them, however, had the idea that air transportation would one day become something more than a curiosity, perhaps even the dominant mode of passenger travel, and they had an inkling that those who flew the airliners of the future would oc cupy a critical position in the industry. This foresight was remarkable considering management’s arrogance in those days, the cocksure belief of most early airline operators that they were the industry and that pilots were dimeadozen technicians doing a job any- body could do. The airline operators were just a bit premature in this judgment. In a few years, airline flying would become a rather ordinary exercise, still requiring considerable technical skill but sufficiently routine that almost any young pilot coming out of military flight school could, with proper training, un dertake it. The operators failed to recognize that the piloting skills necessary for successful scheduled airline operations in the late 1920s were anything but ordinary. An airline’s success was heavily dependent upon the skill of pilots who knew intimately the contact landmarks of their routes, who knew every fence, every mountain pass, every bend and kink in every river and lake between lighted beacons. They flew contact over these “lighted airways” in weather modern pilots wouldn’t touch, conditions sometimes measured in terms of how many telephone poles were visible from a railroad telegrapher’s office. There are cases on record in which pilots only narrowly averted head on collisions with onrushing locomotives. The first generation of airline pilots had learned these extraordinary con tact flying skills in open cockpit biplanes flown in every conceivable weather condition, often as government airmail pilots. When the first multiengine transports became available, the skills early pilots had honed under circum stances that absolutely precluded carrying passengers were easily translatable into regular passenger operations. The ability of these old barnstormers to get a Fokker or Ford Trimotor through on schedule bred a false confidence 13 Stepping on Toes among their employers—a feeling that there really was nothing much to fly ing an airliner in 1929. The pilots themselves knew better, especially the first generation who had not flown the mail but who were expected to fly singleengine aircraft. Jim Belding, who learned his trade at the Boeing School of Aeronautics in 1929, managed to win a job on Boeing Air Transport against the stiff competition of Army Air Corps flying school graduates. The parting advice Belding’s in structor gave him and Bert Ball prior to their departure for their first regular airline job was, “Boys, don’t try to follow Rube Wagner!” New pilots who tried to match the record of veterans such as Ham Lee and Rube Wagner usually came to grief. The gogetter businessmen who began taking over aviation in the late 1920s were largely ignorant of flying skill. Many of them were opportun ists who had come into the business following Lindbergh’s celebrated flight to Paris in 1927, their primary goal being to harness the torrent of money unleashed by that epochal event. Wall Streeters called it “The Lindbergh Boom.” There was big money available in the freewheeling atmosphere of 1927—a choking glut of it, in fact—for anybody who could put together a stock prospectus with the magic word “aero” somewhere in it. The movers and shakers in this scene were usually young men who hoped to make their mark exploiting the commercial possibilities of aviation as the previous gen eration of entrepreneurs had exploited steamships and rails. They had no real love for aviation otherwise. Harris M. “Pop” Hanshue, the operator of Western Air Express, for ex ample, hated airplanes and never flew, even as a passenger, unless he had no other choice. W. A. “Pat” Patterson of United was a banker who never so much as touched the controls of an airplane. Delta’s C. E. Woolman briefly played around with airplanes as a young man, but he was essentially a pro moter who stumbled into airline operations via his accidental control of a cropdusting outfit. Even some legendary aviation personalities, like Eastern’s Eddie Rickenbacker, had only “public relations” flying experience. Although he carried a great reputation from his combat days in World War I, Ricken backer’s total pilot time did not exceed 200 hours, and he never held a civil license. Juan Trippe of Pan American flew the same way the notorious E. L. Cord of Century Airlines flew—only when the weather was perfect and only with an experienced professional pilot along. Cord had a pivotal role in the pilots’ growing support for ALPA, because nobody better exemplified the contempt for pilots that most operators hardly bothered to conceal. Cord had risen rapidly into the rarefied heights of 1920s style finance capitalism, dealing mostly with automotive stocks. In 1929 he acquired his first aircraft operation, the struggling Stinson Aircraft Corpora tion, and shortly thereafter added Lycoming to his stable. Already equipped with engines and airframes, all Cord needed for an airline was pilots, which 14 Flying the Line he proceeded to hire as the depression deepened at wages of $150 per month. Cord had no trouble staffing Century Airlines at that price. “Any normal person can handle an airplane,” Cord said in 1930. Virtually the only genuine airman among airline executives was Jack Frye of Transcontinental & Western Air (TWA). Capitalizing on this unique fact, TWA used to advertise itself as “The Airline Run by Airmen.” All the other airline owneroperators were pilots in the sense that George T. Baker of Na tional and Paul Braniff were pilots—fairweather amateurs. The hard fact is that by the late 1920s a clear clash of values had set in be tween pilots and management—one that almost amounted to a class conflict. When all the romantic myths are punctured, the typical airline owneroper ator of that era can be seen as possessing some very unlovely characteristics. He was less interested in pioneering than he was in his bank account, less interested in the welfare of his employees than he was in his stockholders’ dividends, and less concerned with the safety of flight than he was with its profitability. To the pioneer airline pilots of the 1920s, men who had flown the airmail for the Post Office, who knew the insandouts of making a buck with an airplane through barnstorming, it was profoundly disillusioning to discover the true nature of their new employers. After the disillusionment wore off, the pilots were just plain mad. It was pilots, real airmen, who had brought aviation into prominence by the late 1920s—not bankers and Wall Street wheelerdealers with their fancy connections and silk suits. To pioneer pilots, flying airplanes was a way of life, something they did because they loved it. To be in an open cockpit, to smell the seductive odor of doped wings and oiled machinery, to cast free from earthly restraint with a watercooled Liberty’s 12 drumming cylinders up front and a challenging DH4 beneath them, that was what aviation was about. It didn’t matter that they could have earned far more money on the ground selling insurance. Airplanes mattered—more than life. Certainly more than mere money. That didn’t mean, though, that early airline pilots were going to work for peanuts. It was obvious that the men who signed their paychecks had plenty of money. Aviation was a gusher that returned unimaginable profits, at least percentagewise, on the amount invested. From the moment the Post Office proved that an airmail service was feasible, certain wellheeled gentlemen were using their influence with pow erful congressmen to have it transferred to private contractors. To get some idea of just how lucrative a government mail contract could be, consider the following example. In 1926, the year Congress authorized private bidding for mail contracts, one Charles Deeds, son of a powerfully connected East Coast financier, invested a mere $253 in the stock of Frederick B. Rentschler’s United Aircraft. The initial stock issue was closely held, available only to insiders with the right connections. Only three years later, through repeated 15 Stepping on Toes splits on the great bull market of the late 1920s, Deeds’s original $253 in vestment was worth nearly $36 million—most of it thanks to government mail payments. The Post Office pilots themselves were aware of the financial possibilities. Acting through their association, they hired former Superintendent of the Air Mail Carl F. Egge to head a pilotowned corporation created for the specific purpose of bidding on a contract. “Well, we really got in high gear on that,” Rube Wagner declares. “We went to bankers, mortgaged our homes. They said, ‘Oh no, that won’t work.’ We couldn’t do a thing about it.” The message was clear—only the big boys need apply for a mail contract. Early airline pilots, aware that they weren’t getting much money for do ing the flying that was earning deskbound manipulators fat profits, were highly irritated. They naturally resented being exploited by people who never flew, who never risked their own necks. And there were shenanigans going on after 1926 that the pilots found very distasteful. “We were carrying little bolts through for several hundred dollars,” Reu ben Wagner recalls. “With a postage tag on it and everything, and it was fraud, yeah, it was.” The operators got paid for more than the price of postage stamps, so they made sure there was plenty of mail. Walt Bullock had made a good living for 11 years as a barnstormer. “Some times we had hungry winters,” Bullock recalls, “but we usually did so good we didn’t need to work but half a year.” But after going to work for Northwest in 1927, Bullock found himself earning much less. In 1928 Bullock was one of several pilots who approached the owner of Northwest, a Minneapolis banker named Lilly, for a raise. Their reception was humiliating. “He said he’d quit, disband the airline, if he had any labor trouble,” Bull ock remembers. Northwest’s pilots got a flat salary of $350 per month for five trips a week between Chicago and the Twin Cities, with neither hourly limitations nor regular vacations. “The speed of the J4 Stinsons we flew was only 83½ miles per hour, so that made for some long days,” says Bullock. Following their first meeting with Lilly, Bullock and the other NWA pilots knew something had to be done: That was the main reason the NWA pilots were interested in forming a union. Lilly would say he was rich, didn’t need the airline, that it was just a plaything to him. This was foolish. Even then it was a pretty big airline as airlines went. And this was our whole future, you know, and it didn’t sit so good to have him sit here and tell us it was just a plaything to him. Were Bullock and his fellow pilots intimidated by Lilly’s threats to dis band the airline and fire them if he had any labor trouble? 16 Flying the Line We knew he wasn’t about to close it up. No, it actually made us more determined, I think, because we weren’t afraid, we really didn’t be lieve that. By that time [1928], it was a pretty big business and it was making 25 percent per year on the original investment, right through when the only revenue was mostly mail. Mail used to pay very well, you know. He saw to it that there was plenty of mail. It wasn’t like a man like Lilly to pass up a profit, believe me. He didn’t get to be presi dent of that bank by passing up profits. Rube Wagner confirms Walt Bullock’s description of airmail prof its. “P. G. Johnson bought the best equipment he could buy,” Wagner says. “He bought the best automobiles and trucks and everything. In six months, the first six months, they paid everything off. They paid for the whole thing, and they still were making money.” Still, only by dint of repeated pressure could the pilot groups get any pay raises. On NWA, following the introduction of Ford Trimotors in 1928, Lilly agreed to a small raise. “We got a whole $25 more a month,” Bullock says. “We all just kept coming in as a group and we’d haggle.” Lilly wasn’t about to give away anything. “When ALPA was fully organized Lilly threatened dire results to anybody who joined. But that never materialized. We got $775 a month for flying Fords.” Leaning back in his chair, Walt Bullock’s eyes twinkle, and there is a trace of wonder in his voice. Behncke, old Dave, he was a great one for that. I can’t say I liked the guy that much, personally. He was a hot air kind of guy, but he had a lot of guts and he knew every politician in the country. Behncke al ways painted a picture of how rough it was in those days, and it was rough. But he exaggerated, for a reason I guess, so people wouldn’t think it was easy to buck bankers like Lilly. Hell, we’d have been dead without Behncke. Rube Wagner agrees about the combination of political and public re lations pressures that Behncke brought to bear. “After the convention of Key Men at the Morrison,” Wagner says, “I figured my job was gone. Then Roosevelt took over and Patterson changed, he was all for the unions, said that if he were a pilot, the first thing he’d do would be join ALPA.” Wagner slaps his knee and laughs. “We got along fine after that.” Earning a decent salary was one thing; living to spend it was another. While the pilots were fighting for ALPA’s right to exist, a new battle loomed. It was about safety, and the pilots had a word for it—they called it “pushing.” 17 CHAPTER 3 Pilot Pushing For the first generation of professional airline pilots, the most persistent problem was not low pay, but safety—and the related question of job security. A pilot who played it too safe, who canceled flights too often because of weather or some other consideration, could get fired. Airline operators had a hardnosed attitude about schedule completion in those days and tended to regard overly conservative pilots as “slackers.” This kind of thinking was an outgrowth of the contemporary notion regarding competition, the belief that people had to be “pushed” to achieve a satisfac tory competitive edge. From the operators’ point of view, the fledgling airline industry had to meet the competition, meaning railroads. Unless airlines, like railroads, ran on schedule, no one would take them seriously. The pilots were skeptical about entering a competition with the railroads for the sensible reason that it could get them killed. Any serious effort to compete with the railroads in the area of schedule reliability, the pilots knew, would fall most heavily upon them and would put pressure on them to take risks. More bluntly, the pilots worried less about being taken seriously by business moguls of the 1920s than about being taken advantage of by them. In truth, there were two sides to this question. Some pilots were overly timid, reluctant to adopt the new instrument flying techniques as they began to appear during the late 1920s and early 1930s. They were slow to abandon the oldfashioned contactflying techniques that had seen them through so many flights before. On the other hand, some operators were too ready to adopt new flying techniques and equipment that later turned out to have seri ous flaws. They may also have been too hasty in their dismissal of the pilots’ weatherrelated complaints. Although conflict between pilots and their superiors over when and how to fly is an old story, going back almost to the beginning of regular airmail flying, the pace of technological change in the late 1920s and early 1930s ag gravated the situation. Pilots and operations managers could not agree on the issue of pilots’ authority to cancel a flight because of unsafe conditions. In a sense, it was a question of image. By the early 1930s, the operators preferred to promote commercial aviation as an industry that had arrived, that was fully developed, mature, and no longer experimental. The pilots knew better and preferred a more conservative image, 18 Flying the Line one that portrayed the industry as it really was, essentially a taxsupported pub lic service. Because it was still heavily dependent upon the government airmail subsidy, the pilots insisted that airline service should be seen as a regulated public utility, with safety dominant over every other consideration. This conflict of assumptions and image set the stage for a battle over safety that continues to this day. Its roots are deep in the history of commer cial aviation, and one of the keys to ALPA’s growth and success lies in the way Dave Behncke utilized the safety issue in the 1930s. In theory, airline owners agreed with their pilots that safety was the para mount goal; in practice, it was a different story. Early airline pilots were made to feel that arriving on time counted for more than arriving safely, but late. Of course everyone wanted both safety and regularity of schedules, but to the pilots it was evident that the two were not always compatible. The opera tors agreed in principle, although in specific cases the reasons given by pilots for canceling flights were not always acceptable to them, particularly if it cost the company money. It all boiled down to the question of “command authority”—who had it and when. The issue of “pilot pushing,” or forcing a pilot to fly against his better judgment, was acute, particularly in the last days of singleengine airmail operations when passengers were still scarce. In the easy money climate of the 1920s, a time of cheap nonunion labor and readily available materials, the operators could well afford an occasional smashed airplane and dead pilot. On the Boeing Air Transport Division of what later became United Airlines, the Cheyenne repair and maintenance base would frequently salvage only the registration number of a crashed aircraft and then proceed to build an entirely new airplane around it. “They could go rebuild a Boeing 40B4 far better, stronger than before,” Rube Wagner says. “I don’t think anybody ever bothered to tell the Bureau of Air Commerce either.” With the arrival of very expensive multiengine equipment, airline own ers became less casual about the loss of aircraft and hence of pilots. But even then, a pilot had no recourse but to fly if a determined operations manager disputed his decision to cancel. “The operators fired at the drop of a hat,” says Pan Am’s Roy Keeler, one of the first group of largely ceremonial vicepresidents elected at ALPA’s 1932 convention. Keeler, who retired in 1960, had gone to work for Pan Am in 1929. “The operators always talked safety. Juan Trippe and Musick, sure they wanted it. But they had short memories, and when things would go along well—no accidents—they’d forget. ‘Just a little line of thunderstorms,’ sure. They’re not flying it. But you’d better go if they said to,” Keeler remembers of the days when ALPA was still too weak to contest every dismissal from an airline. “We were all subject to dismissal for most anything anybody could think of,” says former President Charles Ruby of his experience on National during the 1930s. 19 Pilot Pushing Closely allied to the issue of pilot pushing was the related one of competi tive flying, a managerial technique that took advantage of the natural desire of pilots to compete with each other—to see who could get through fast est or perform under the most trying circumstances, most often. Operations managers, themselves pilots, used this device to urge their pilots into flying contests. Some pilots liked it; most didn’t. Dave Behncke’s earliest known utterances on the subject of pilot union ization stemmed directly from the sour feeling competitive flying instilled in most pilots. In 1928, Behncke was elected “governor” of the Central District of the National Air Pilots Association (NAPA), one of several semisocial pi lots’ organizations that flourished in the 1920s. Some airlines were using cash incentives to encourage pilots to fly in marginal weather, and Behncke was speaking for the sober majority when he urged NAPA to adopt the slogan: “Don’t overfly a brother pilot!” By that, Behncke meant that if one work ing pilot refused to fly the mail, then his brother pilots should support him. Unfortunately, working pilots made up only a tiny percentage of those who claimed membership in NAPA, so Behncke got nowhere with his campaign. In a sense, Behncke’s failure to accomplish anything useful through NAPA, particularly in the area of curbing competitive flying, was one of the reasons he began the agitation that later led to the creation of ALPA. Jim Belding (UAL) remembers Behncke’s denunciation of the evils of competitive flying as one of the main reasons junior pilots were attracted to ALPA in the beginning: Behncke and the senior guys didn’t include really junior pilots in ALPA when they started it up in 1931, because they had no protection to offer us. The company could find copilots off the street if they had to. Then in January 1933, when I got my first command, flying single engine night mail, I was transferred to Omaha. Dave Behncke met me one night when I came in off the line at Chicago and we talked in his car. I hadn’t really been approached before. Behncke said they couldn’t guarantee too much for a newly promoted pilot. But I went ALPA because there was one management pilot who was not instru ment trained, who was notorious for pushing pilots. He was a good example of a weather pusher, pushing pilots to make his record look good. We had a case of competitive flying start up that was the cause of a serious accident. One senior pilot would go out and he would get through because he knew everything, and the next man up, who wasn’t as familiar with the route, was intimidated into taking the mail out, and we picked a bunch of them up off the top of hills. I blame it on the intimidation of [the management pilot], but you had to kill somebody before you really got the problem solved. They finally caught up with [the management pilot] and he got fired. 20 Flying the Line Thus, to get through the 1920s in one piece and stay on the payroll was no mean feat. But the first generation of professional pilots accepted the risks of the flying game the way it was, often flying under circumstances modern pilots would never accept. They flew when some unknown railway telegrapher said he could see five, maybe six telephone poles down the track. How good was his eyesight? And would you have company somewhere along the route? Early pilots learned to fly slightly to the right of the tracks just in case a brother pilot might be fumbling along in the opposite direction. The mortality rates that resulted from this kind of flying were staggering. An airmail pilot working for the Post Office Department in 1918 stood only one chance in four of surviving until 1926, when the private contractors took over. The situation improved only slightly thereafter, and as late as the mid1930s, Behncke was scoring well in debates with the op erators by citing the risk factor. A favorite rhetorical device of his was to intone solemnly, at appropriate intervals, that one airline pilot perished in the line of duty every so many days. One of Behncke’s greatest political achievements was to convince Presi dent Roosevelt that the high level of risk that working pilots encountered on an everyday basis justified their getting federal protection. In 1934, FDR’s can cellation of the airmail contracts opened the door for Behncke. Most pi lots weren’t surprised that FDR took this drastic action. For months, the Sen ate investigation into the awarding of the 1930 airmail contracts had filled headlines with charges of fraud and collusion between postal officials and airline executives. And, as we have seen, most pilots were aware of something peculiar in the way the airmail operation was being run. Perhaps, in a moral sense, a case could be made that the major operators deserved to have their airmail contracts canceled. But most pilots opposed the cancellation because since mail was the airlines’ principal source of income, “justice” meant that they were going to get laid off—as indeed many were. In what can only be called an inspired act of political legerdemain, Behncke turned this dark hour in the history of commercial aviation to ALPA’s advantage. Behncke was the only industry spokesman to support FDR’s decision to cancel the airmail contracts. While Lindbergh, Rickenbacker, and other aviators by the score were howling for FDR’s scalp, Behncke won the President’s gratitude by standing behind him. FDR rewarded Behncke by inserting the following language into the message he sent Congress request ing new airmail legislation to restore the contracts to private bidders: “Public safety calls for pilots of high character and great skill. . . . The occupation is a hazardous one. Therefore the law should provide for a method to fix maximum hours and minimum pay.” Airline executives were appalled when they saw Behncke’s rhetoric enshrined in the President’s special message. A hazardous occupation! To say that pilots deserved special treatment because 21 Pilot Pushing they weren’t going to be around very long was hardly calculated to get people on airliners. In a tactical sense, though, Behncke’s harping on the dangers of flying, on the peril a pilot faced each time he went aloft, was the correct thing for him to do at that time. The airlines’ principal business then was mail, not passengers. Scaring people about flying wasn’t going to materially damage any airline’s business. In the future, however, when passengers would inevitably surpass mail as the airlines’ mainstay, ALPA would be able to damage an air line merely by publicizing the safety angle. In effect, Behncke was saying to the operators: “Look! Either you take us in as a full partner in this business, now, or we’re going to be damned disruptive. This is just a sample.” He made his point. By 1934, Behncke had considerable political support. Most airline executives knew full well that he was becoming the kind of tal ented polemicist it didn’t pay to fool around with. After 1934 the operators started praising their pilots to congressmen of all political stripes, agreeing that they needed federal protection. Since Congress was obviously going to insert protective provisions for pilots into the Air Mail Act of 1934 anyway, it made sense for the operators to be good sports about it. Besides, they hoped to pass along the increase in pilot salaries to the taxpayers. This turned out to be only partly true, as we shall see, and hence a source of much future fric tion. But no one could see this in the spring of 1934, when there was a lot of congressional talk about “socializing” the airmail, recreating the Post Office’s old Air Mail Service. The operators wanted their airmail contracts back on any terms, even if it meant having Behncke and ALPA as de facto partners. What Behncke proved was that he knew how to play hardball with the big boys, and he did it brilliantly. Of course there was grumbling among some ALPA members that Behncke was getting awfully big for his britches, attacking their employers like that in Washington. The airlines were, after all, the pilots’ bread and butter, and many pilots disliked undermining them, even for temporary tactical advantage. But this was a minority point of view, coming mostly from pilots so devoted to their employers, perhaps out of fear, that they could not properly distinguish their own interests. And in any case, Behncke had exceptionally good insight into the mental processes of the typical pilot of that era, knowing that when he stressed the dangers of flying, he was on perfectly safe ground. The truth was that early airline pilots enjoyed wearing the mantle of dan ger. The devilmaycare attitudes usually associated with flying were a part of the mystique of aviation. Of course, by the late 1920s, much of this kind of thinking among pilots was mostly sham; they were already in the process of becoming quite ordinary technocrats—sober family men, regular in their habits. But airline flying was still an exotic occupation. It could hardly have hurt Behncke’s cause to emphasize the “danger theme” because it was a major factor in the public’s fascination with flying, 22 Flying the Line and one that pilots encouraged. In the 1920s, particularly following Lind bergh’s flight, professional airmen were socially “in’’ because the public was absolutely air crazy. Any schoolboy of the time could tell you about the avia tion feats of Acosta, the Hunter brothers, and countless others. Although early pilots faced long odds on living to fill a nursing home bed, there were other, nonmonetary compensations. The way kids looked up to you, the thrill of handling the most advanced airplanes in the world, the knowledge that you had a job most men envied. We must remember that the typical airline pilot of that era was a very young man, far younger than the typical airline pilot of today. For young men, mortality is only an abstraction, and the bottom line isn’t always what’s on a paycheck. The pay wasn’t really that bad either, even during the depression. It was the threat of pay cuts, rather than the fact of them, that worried most pilots. The hours were reasonably short, compared with the usual lot of the working class, from which most pilots came, and working pilots were beginning to move well up into the middle class—a far cry from their gypsy status as barnstormers a few years before. Many a pilot was the first in his family line to have the leisure to take up the previously aristocratic game of golf. Or, if improving a golf swing wasn’t a concern, there was time enough to run a business. Airline flying was, in short, just the same then as it is today, in some re spects. It was a good job a lot of people wanted badly—wanted to get paid for what they’d gladly do for free; wanted the romance of skullhugging cap and goggles; wanted the looks they got from attractive young women. And that brings us to another fringe benefit—it could get a fellow married. On the other hand, flying could get a girl widowed. The issue of pilot pushing came to a head when just such a widow filed a lawsuit, charging that her airline pilot husband had been pushed to his death by an overzealous superior. The pilot’s name was Joe Livermore, the airline was Northwest, and the year was 1936. The roots of the Livermore case go back to 1919, when the pilots of the Post Office’s Air Mail Service went on strike rather than submit to “weather pushing.” The airline pilot of today, who wishes to know his own profession al roots, must return now to 1919—the first full year of peace following World War I. 23 CHAPTER 4 The Airmail Pilots’ Strike of 1919 Leon D. Smith was known as “Bonehead,” but not because he was stupid. He got that nickname after walking into a whirling prop, and living to tell about it—stunned, bloody, and partially scalped. On the morning of July 22, 1919, Leon Smith was about to prove that there was nothing wrong with his mental processes. He reported for work before dawn at the Belmont flying field in suburban New York City, ready to assume his duties as a Post Office Air Mail Service pilot. After loading seven sacks of firstclass mail in the forward locker of his de Havilland DH4, Smith paused, lit a cigarette, and waited. His scheduled takeoff time came and went, and still Smith sat there on the muddy tire of the DH4, pondering. In the previous two weeks, 15 Air Mail Service planes had crashed, killing two pilots and seriously injuring others. In every instance, fog was the culprit, and as Smith sat there a thick, murky blanket of it obscured his vision. Hori zontal visibility was so bad that he could see only about 100 yards—not even to the field boundary. So Smith waited, hoping the fog would lift. Of all the hazards early pilots feared, fog was the worst, even more so than thunderstorms. A man could see a thunderstorm and avoid it in those days by flying underneath right down on the deck. The DH 4 was built like a brick, double strutted, but if the turbulence got too heavy, you could set it down on those big balloon tires almost anywhere. Farmers seldom complained about the few feet of crops the landing gear might flatten. Having one of the celebrated airmail pilots land in your field was an event well worth a few ears of corn. Fog was different. It could sneak up on you almost instantaneously, and then there was big trouble, as you tried to get a few feet lower where you might be able to pick up that familiar windmill that was your next checkpoint. The panic set in when you realized that you ought to be just about to the windmill now, and you still couldn’t see anything except a blur of row crops straight down. That’s when you yanked back the throttle and set her down. But what if the blur below you turned out to be trees instead of a nice flat farmer’s field? Then you would be faced with an Air Mail Service pilot’s worst choice—either a crash landing or a blind climb into the soup, without instruments, relying on the seat of your pants, or the sound of the engine, or a change in the pitch of the wind through the wing guy wires. Anything to tell you that you were still right side up. 24 Flying the Line Air Mail Service pilots were, by their nature, brave men. But bitter expe rience had taught them to avoid fog at any cost. That’s why Leon Smith was still sitting there when his boss, a Post Office supervisor who was not a pilot, shouted at him to get moving. “I’ll be damned if I’ll kill myself for a sack of twobit letters,” Smith said, trying to explain to his nonflying superior that the weather was unflyable. Smith allegedly used “abusive language” in challenging the supervisor to find a pilot, any pilot, who would fly that day. The supervisor fired Smith on the spot, turned to the backup pilot, E. Hamilton “Ham” Lee, and ordered him to take to the air. He, too, refused to fly and was also fired. Actually, the pilots had been unhappy over wages and working condi tions for a long time before the flap at Belmont erupted, but it seemed im possible that they would ever cause any real labor problem for the Post Office, let alone go on strike, because they just didn’t seem to be that type. Certainly there had been no hint of future trouble when the airmail was inaugurated amid gala ceremonies in Washington the year before. On that day, May 15, 1918, President and Mrs. Woodrow Wilson were present, chat ting with Major Reuben Fleet, the commander of Army pilots temporarily detailed to the Post Office, and Lieutenant George Boyle, who was sched uled to fly the first sacks of mail out of Washington to Philadelphia. Politi cal bigwigs milled around the old Polo Grounds, which were being pressed temporarily into service as a flying field, while nervous functionaries self consciously loaded sacks of mail aboard the JN4D2 Jenny and the two pilots posed stiffly in front of the plane for newspaper photographers. Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, a similar scene was in progress, with Lieu tenant James C. Edgerton accepting a lavish bouquet from his kid sister prior to departing for Washington and bearing, among other things, a letter from John S. Wanamaker, the famous department store owner and former post master general, to his successor, Albert Sydney Burleson. In the first years of operation the Air Mail Service proved remarkably efficient as it expanded westward to Chicago via Cleveland. The crucial in gredient in its success was the skill of the pilots who flew the antiquated war surplus Jennys and DH4s. Most of the pilots were exmilitary men who had resigned their commissions to take civil service appointments, and many of them had become pilots prior to World War I. Smith had been the senior instructor in charge of pilot training for the Army during the war and had learned his trade at the Curtiss Flying School in 1913. Lee was a veteran who held the world record for consecutive loops, set on June 18, 1918. He landed his Jenny when it ran out of gas on the 105th loop. Because Americans have always been fascinated by speed and the technology of transportation, Air Mail Service pilots were the objects of genuine adulation. Their exploits were regular fare in newspapers and magazines by the early 1920s. 25 Airmail Strike of 1919 Their superiors in the Post Office Department in Washington also praised the pilots in the early phases of the service, when their skill at “con tour” or “terrain” flying, as it was called then, enabled them to complete over 90 percent of their scheduled flights. But Post Office bureaucrats be came openly critical of the pilots when the service expanded westward across the “hell stretch” of the Alleghenies, and the efficiency norms established on the original Washington–New York corridor proved impossible to maintain. Allweather capability was only a distant dream in 1919, de spite what the bureaucrats thought. In the second year of airmail operations, government officials came to expect and demand a high percentage of completed flights. Most of the pres sure came from two men: Postmaster General Burleson and Otto Praeger, the assistant postmaster general in charge of the airmail. Burleson was a politician from Texas whose loyalty to Woodrow Wilson had won him the Post Office appointment in 1913. Early in Wilson’s first ad ministration, Burleson had been an important man, but as time passed and weightier matters (such as the World War) occupied the President, Burleson found himself increasingly pushed into the background. Burleson was looking for a scheme by which he could regain his lost clout. He decided upon the Air Mail Service. Together Burleson and his crony Prae ger, a paunchy, bespectacled newspaperman from Texas whose only qualifi cation for office was his friendship with Burleson, pushed hard to make the airmail a success. Burleson never tired of bragging that under his administration the Post Office had produced annual surpluses of as high as $20 million, and he claimed he had accomplished this by “eliminating wasteful and extravagant methods of operation and making no expenditure for which adequate service has not been rendered.” In his annual message to Congress in June 1919, Bur leson declared: “The high standard of daily perfect flight is being maintained regardless of weather conditions.” Praeger was a carbon copy of his boss when it came to pinching pennies, and he was equally ignorant of aviation. He once told a convention of aero nautical engineers that “a commercial flying machine should be able to land in a city lot near the heart of town, instead of on a 40acre field out where the commuters live.” This combination of ignorance and tightfistedness set Burleson and Praeger on a collision course with the pilots. In midsummer 1919, the East Coast experienced a period of extremely bad weather, but Post Office supervisors, most of whom were not pilots, insisted that the pilots fly as usual. As a result, there were 15 crashes, two of them fatal, in the two week period just before Smith refused to fly. The deaths forced the pilots of the Eastern Division to hold a series of meetings during which they decided to assert what they regarded as the pilot’s prerogative to determine whether or not the weather was flyable. They had precedent on their side, for 26 Flying the Line even the Army allowed its pilots some discretion in this area. The pilots agreed that if one pilot refused to fly, all of them would refuse to fly. When Leon Smith said “no,” they were as good as their word, and the strike was on. Post Office officials knew there was some discontent among the pilots, chiefly because of problems with the aircraft, but they routinely brushed aside complaints. The pilots wanted to continue using both DH4s and Jennys because the lighter and smaller Jenny was better for lowaltitude flight in bad weather. The Jenny carried the lightweight, dependable Hispano Suiza 150 horsepower engine, and it could fly much more slowly, thereby giving the pilot greater reaction time when hedgehopping under a lowcloud ceiling. The Post Office wanted to phase out the Jenny in order to standardize its operations with the larger and faster DH4, which the government had available in considerable surplus from the war. A further complication arose because the Curtiss Company had modified the DH4 to carry the liquid cooled Liberty engine, which had also been mass produced too late in the war to see service. The trouble was that the Curtiss modification didn’t work very well, and the Libertyequipped DH4s had a nasty habit of overheating, especially at low altitude. Pilots with gallows humor sometimes referred to the DH4s as “flaming coffins.” Eventually, and partly because of the fuss they were making, the pilots got the DH4 modified to suit them, and toward the end of its service ca reer they were very pleased with it. Rube Wagner, who joined the Air Mail Service in 1923, recalls: The DH had big wheels on it, so you could land it anyplace where you’d land a Jenny. But it was heavy, the engine was over 400 pounds sitting big and long out in the nose. Eventually it worked all right, when they got the timing gear fixed. They built a stubtooth gear for it and made that engine all but foolproof. That Liberty 12 engine was running just like a clock toward the end. We hated to give it up. What the pilots really wanted, of course, was a completely new mail plane designed and built specifically for their use. J. L. (Larry) Driggs, president of The American Flying Club, an association of aeronautical engineers, sup ported the pilots’ criticism of the DH4 by declaring: “If the pilots themselves have found the DH4 unfit and unsafe, then their word should be taken in preference to that of the engineers at Curtiss who supervised the alterations.” But Driggs’s sensible advice made no impact on the economyminded Bur leson and Praeger, who were determined to use up the available supply of surplus Libertyequipped DH4s. But if the Post Office wouldn’t buy new aircraft, the pilots at least wanted the DH4s properly equipped with instruments. Here, too, they ran into opposition. Because they were expected to fly in bad weather, the pilots re 27 Airmail Strike of 1919 quested that the Post Office purchase “stabilators,” primitive needleandball type turnandbank indicators for their aircraft. The devices cost only about $75 each, but Praeger turned down the request, advising the pilots: “Steer by compass. Turn indicators are too expensive.” This was almost the last straw. Praeger had heard that the pilots were in a fighting mood, and he was more than ready to tangle with them. When he learned that Smith and Lee had refused to fly, he issued a press release approving their firing, citing postal regulations for letter carriers as justification. Upon receiving a telegram of protest signed only “Air Pilots,” Praeger warned the pilots that by sending an anonymous telegram they were “con spiring against the government.” The pilots replied in an open letter released to the press that it was not conspiracy “to avoid killing oneself for the sake of a twocent stamp,” whereupon Praeger huffily informed the press that the Post Office would be master in its own house. “These pilots came into the service as every other pilot,” he said, “with knowledge that they must comply with orders, and where flying conditions are such that they cannot operate, they have the option to resign. If they refuse, removal must be made!” Sympathizing with the underdog pilots, the reporters asked a series of hostile, probing questions that succeeded in nettling Praeger. Finally, flustered and angered, Praeger admitted that there had been a series of bad crashes in the weeks preceding the strike, but he shrugged it off as “something which happens all the time.” When asked a question about stabilators, Praeger in sisted that they were not commercially available. He added pompously that he would never recognize a pilots’ union, nor would he ever have to, because there were “other pilots aplenty.” All in all, Praeger’s performance was a public relations disaster. Praeger had a long history of hostility to labor organizations, as might be expected of a former editor of the conservative Dallas Morning News. He was apparently resolute in his intention to break the strike by replacing every pilot, if it came to that. Indeed, the Post Office had a backlog of hundreds of applications from pilots who wanted work. Praeger even tried to arouse patriotic resentment against the pilots by saying that criticism of the DH4 constituted a “calumny on our aeroplane industry.” In so doing, he revealed his own ignorance. Most of the pilots had distinguished war records, and the DH4 was not an American plane at all. It was a British design manufactured under license in the United States. The upshot of Praeger’s pomposity and bungling, which the press faithfully reported in headline stories, was that public opinion shifted strongly in fa vor of the pilots. The pilots were popular and glamorous figures. There was strong support for them in Congress and growing criticism of Praeger. Two standing committees in the House announced that they would inves tigate, and Halvor Steenerson, chairman of the powerful Post Office Commit tee, announced that he would personally investigate the firings, which under 28 Flying the Line Civil Service rules required a hearing that Praeger had refused to grant. In gen eral, the pilots struck a sympathetic chord when they issued a public manifesto declaring: “We will insist that the man who risks his own life be the judge—not somebody who stays on the ground and risks other people’s lives.” Burleson and Praeger were considerably taken aback by the adverse reac tion to their hard line against the pilots. Although they had wanted to at tract the President’s attention, this wasn’t exactly what they had in mind. In response to a request from the White House for information, Praeger tried to smooth the whole thing over by saying: “This represents one of those cases where the newspapers misled the public by printing only one side of a case” (a lament that has a curiously modern ring). But he quickly backed down under the mounting pressure and showed signs of adopting a more moderate tone in his dealings with the pilots. Largely because of the efforts of Charles I. Stanton, the superintendent of the airmail (himself a pilot, although not a regular airmail pilot), the pi lots went back to work on July 26, four days after Smith had refused to fly. Working feverishly behind the scenes while Praeger made a fool of himself in public, Stanton had arranged a deal whereby if the pilots went back to work, either Praeger or the postmaster general would meet with a committee of their representatives to discuss grievances. By the time the conference between Praeger and the pilot committee was held in Washington on July 27, the pilots’ position had been greatly strength ened by events reported the previous day in the New York Times. A reporter had investigated Praeger’s earlier assertion that he had not bought stabilators because they were not available and found that, as the pilots insisted all along, they were commercially available. He reported: “Today they [the Post Office] agreed to buy some.” The story made Praeger appear to be either a fool or a liar. Many pilots insisted that he was both. Despite the pilots’ strong position, however, they emerged from the con ference with only half a victory. Praeger had agreed in advance to discuss a pay raise, although pay had not been directly at issue in the dispute, perhaps because he wanted to use the carrotandstick technique on the pilots. The pay raise was to be his carrot. On the crucial question of weather, there was a compromise. Praeger agreed to hire as field managers pilots who would, in case of dispute, go aloft to demonstrate that the weather was flyable. Praeger then agreed to a small pay raise, but there was a quid pro quo: there had to be a sacrificial lamb to satisfy his pride. That lamb was to be Leon Smith, who had earlier described Praeger as a “damned donkey.” Lee was rehired, and the pilot committee wanted to hang tough on Smith, but it finally agreed to make his rehiring the “subject of further discussion.” Pend ing that discussion, Smith took to barnstorming, making news when he took a 106yearold Indian woman for a ride at a county fair in Batavia, N.Y., a few months later. 29 Airmail Strike of 1919 The pilots learned two crucial lessons from the strike: first, they needed some kind of organization, or structure, through which they could commu nicate with each other and protect themselves; second, they needed a leader, someone from among their own number who was willing to step forward and stick his neck out by acting as spokesman. They tried to satisfy the first requirement by forming the Air Mail Pilots of America, but it was a weak, unaffiliated organization that soon folded. They tried to get around the leadership problem by hiring a lawyer, but that proved too expensive. The pilots did little else, and as a result, within a few months they were faced again with the same old problem of officials making decisions that showed no understanding of the risks of flying. In one case, an “efficiency rating system” was instituted based on ground speed, which forced the pilots to compete with each other and obviously encouraged them to take chances. Despite their failure to put together any lasting organization, the pilots knew what needed to be done. Years later, after the Air Mail Service had been phased out and most airmail pilots had gone to work for the new private air lines, most of them strongly supported some kind of pilots’ association. At the time of the strike, Dave Behncke was an unknown pilot trying to make a living selling rides and barnstorming in his surplus Jenny. When he emerged to assume the crucial leadership role in forming the organization that became the Air Line Pilots Association, the old airmail pilots were the rock upon which he built. They remembered the strike of 1919, and Behncke could always depend on them to sell the concept. Stories about “Fat Otto” Praeger usually got the point across to younger pilots that unionization was the key to survival. As for Leon Smith, he was never rehired despite Praeger’s promise that there would be further discussions. Eventually he disappeared into obscuri ty—the first martyr in the struggle of the piloting profession to protect itself. He would not be the last. 30 CHAPTER 5 The Livermore Affair What sent Joe Livermore and his copilot Art Haid into the midst of an 80mileperhour winter gale on the night of Dec. 18, 1936? En route from St. Paul, Minn., to Spokane, Wash., in a Northwest Airlines (NWA) Lockheed 10 and carrying a cargo consisting solely of Christmas mail, they made their last radio contact at 3:00 a.m., reporting over what they thought might be Elk River, Idaho. They were off course, overdue, and nowhere near their destination. From Seattle, the western terminus of NWA’s “northern transcontinen tal” route, Operations Manager A. R. “Bob” Mensing told newsmen the next morning that he felt confident the plane had been forced down northwest of Elk River, and that the pilots had been unable to reach a telephone. Newsmen in Seattle were particularly interested in the overdue NWA plane because it was the second such mysterious airliner disappearance in a week. A Western Air Express (WAE) plane with seven people aboard, four of them passengers, was missing somewhere along the Nevada–Utah border. It was presumed that there were survivors because two radio stations had heard weak distress calls claiming to be from the downed plane. It was frontpage drama—the possibility that somewhere there were injured people desperately trying to summon help. In a race against time, over 8,000 searchers scoured the wild terrain, trying to find the WAE plane before a predicted killer blizzard hit the area. After 24 hours, the faint radio signals, which had stirred hope, were heard no more. Later, WAE officials surmised that the distress messages were probably a hoax—some amateur radio operator’s idea of a joke. The reporters besieging NWA’s Bob Mensing for news of his overdue plane didn’t know that yet. Consequently, they spent the day of December 19 camped outside his Seattle office, hoping to get a story that would scoop the reporters covering the WAE plane search several hundred miles away in Salt Lake City. Then, on the following day something happened on the East Coast that up staged everybody: Henry T. “Dick” Merrill, celebrated transatlantic flier, bon vi vant, and Eastern Air Lines (EAL) pilot, disappeared somewhere in the mountains of southern New York. He was flying a DC3 with a full load of passengers. Of the three airline disappearances in the nation’s news that week, only Merrill’s had a happy ending. Owing to static that rendered his radios