China Clipper

by Robert Gandt

  For two years Long Island Airways provided a platform for Trippe’s theories. From the former naval air station at Rockaway Beach in Queens, Trippe sent his Aeromarines on round trips to the Long Island summer places of the rich. He sold excursions to Atlantic City. He chartered his aircraft to destinations as far south as Honduras and northward to Canada. He swept floors and carried bags. He sometimes flew the airplanes. He kept the books, and he learned the vagaries of payrolls, airline schedules, and the management of temperamental pilots.

  When the airline folded in 1924, Trippe seemed hardly dismayed. He had learned what he needed to know and was ready for bigger things.

  Of one future condition, Trippe was certain: The airlines, like the railroads, would sooner or later be regulated. Regulation meant government control. In the case of the airlines, that meant authority to operate over specific routes. The U.S. Post Office, in the form of mail subsidies, would provide both the incentive and the license for airlines to profit and expand.

  The Air Mail Act of 1925, called the Kelly Act, attracted applications from hundreds of speculators and entrepreneurs. Through a consulting business formed by Trippe, a corporation called Eastern Air Transport was created on paper. The corporation was then persuaded to merge with another, better financed company called Colonial Air Transport. On behalf of the new airline Trippe went to Washington to enter a bid for a proposed new airmail route. On 7 October 1925, the contract airmail route from Boston to New York, via Hartford (CAM 1), was awarded to Colonial Air Transport.

  Trippe became a vice president of Colonial with the duty of managing the operation. His salary, when the airline became operational, was $7,500 per year.4 He hired employees, rented facilities, and placed orders for the new trimotored airplanes manufactured by Fokker and Ford. He recruited investors and directors like John Hambleton, war hero and son of a wealthy banker, Cornelius “Sonny” Whitney, aviation enthusiast and heir to a banking fortune, and William A. Rockefeller, who had been a member of the Yale aviation unit.

  During a publicity flight to Cuba with a new Fokker trimotor, Trippe managed to obtain an appointment with the new Cuban president, Gerardo Machado. Trippe was able to persuade Machado to grant him exclusive landing rights at Camp Colombia, the army airport in Havana. When Trippe came home with the Machado letter in his pocket, he had, though he didn’t yet realize it, the key to his future.

  Inevitably, Trippe’s style rankled the conservative directors of the company. To the older men, Trippe’s schemes were brash and ill-conceived. After extensive boardroom lobbying, a majority of the shareholders voted against Trippe’s bid to extend Colonial’s routes into the Chicago–New York market.5

  Trippe cleaned out his desk. It was the spring of 1927. He was jobless, but Trippe had reason for optimism. He still had his connections. He still had the Machado letter granting him landing rights in Havana. And the news was good. The Atlantic Ocean had just been crossed in a single flight by another young man named Charles Lindbergh.

  With his two allies from Colonial, Sonny Whitney and John Hambleton, Trippe formed another airline. Whitney and his wealthy family had access to vast sources of investment capital. Hambleton had the connections—and requisite charm—to recruit powerful support on Wall Street. Trippe, who possessed few personal assets, brought with him his insider’s knowledge of the airline business.

  On 2 June 1927 they incorporated Aviation Corporation of America. Backing them was a powerful group of investors, including William H. Vanderbilt, Sherman Fairchild, Grover Loening, and William Rockefeller. This group contributed the initial capital of $200,000.6 Trippe was in charge of operations. Whitney and Hambleton were directors. The airline’s first goal was the soon-to-be-awarded foreign airmail route from Key West to Havana.

  Two other companies were in competition for the same route. One was the dream child of a group of military pilots that included Army Air Corps Major Henry H. “Hap” Arnold and Major Carl Spaatz. Arnold had raised an alarm in Washington about a German-operated airline in Central and South America called SCADTA (Sociedad Colombo-Alemana de Transportes). The specter of an unfriendly foreign power operating an airline in the Americas, particularly near the Canal Zone, had inspired Arnold and his backers to form their own airline. The new company was called Pan American Airways.

  It was the intention of Arnold and Spaatz to resign from the service. But in 1925 the Billy Mitchell controversy rocked the army. Both Arnold and Spaatz felt obliged to remain in the army and continue Mitchell’s work.* The project was taken up by a former naval aviator, John K. Montgomery, who had been associated with SCADTA and was well connected on Wall Street. In March 1927 he and his group incorporated Pan American Airways, Inc. The new company commenced a vigorous campaign for the Key West–Havana foreign airmail authority.

  Another consortium, headed by thirty-nine-year-old financier Richard F. Hoyt, chairman of Wright Aeronautical Corporation, also applied for the Havana route. This group, Atlantic, Gulf and Caribbean Air Lines, was the resurrection of a defunct airline, Florida Airways, founded by war ace Eddie Rickenbacker.

  At the urging of Second Assistant Postmaster General W. Irving Glover, the three groups were persuaded to merge. On 19 July 1927, the U.S. Post Office awarded FAM 4, the airmail route from Key West to Havana, to Pan American Airways.

  Harmony did not prevail among the merged groups. Montgomery, who represented the original creators of the airline, assumed he would take charge. But Richard Hoyt, craftier in the game of stock manipulation, executed a series of moves intended to narrow the field. He created a holding company, Atlantic, Gulf Caribbean Airways, Inc., with which he bought Pan American Airways. He then sold 52 percent of the holding company’s stock to the Trippe-Hambleton-Whitney group, the Aviation Corporation of America. Montgomery found himself odd man out.

  In the new corporation, Hoyt became chairman of the board. Trippe assumed the duties of president and general manager of the airline subsidiary, Pan American. Hambleton was named a vice president. Both he and Whitney became directors.

  Montgomery and his group packed their briefcases and went off to organize yet another airline.

  Pan American had a route and an airmail contract. They would soon have airplanes, four new trimotored Fokker VIIs, which Trippe had ordered while still at Colonial Air Transport. They had the vital landing rights in Havana, thanks to Trippe’s Machado letter.

  One significant problem remained. The airmail contract contained a deadline, 19 October 1927, for the new service to commence. There was still no runway at Key West that could accommodate the big Fokker land planes.

  For weeks frantic construction had been under way at an unused military airfield in Key West. As the days ticked by, the rains came and washed away each newly laid patch of gravel. If Pan Am did not fly by the nineteenth, they would lose not only the contract but would forfeit the $25,000 bond posted with the application. Pan American would be finished before it left the ground.

  Trippe’s request for an extension was denied. Pan American would fly on the nineteenth or lose the mail contract. With two days remaining, one of the new Fokkers arrived in Miami, poised for the flight to Key West. The runway was nearly ready. Then an overnight tropical deluge converted the field back to a sodden, brackish swamp.

  Just as the matter seemed hopeless, an unlikely hero appeared. His name was Cy Caldwell. He belonged to the generation of itinerant aviators in the twenties—barnstormers, rumrunners, fly-for-hire adventurers. On this occasion, one day before the expiration of Pan American’s contract, Cy Caldwell had in his custody an item of inestimable value—a Fairchild FC-2 floatplane, which he was ferrying to the Dominican Republic by way of Miami.

  Would Caldwell consider diverting his airplane to Key West, and then flying to Havana? After a round of deal-making by telephone, Caldwell agreed to fly Pan American’s mail for a fee of $175. The next morning seven bags of mail containing some 30,000 letters were loaded aboard the Fairchild, which bore the name La Niña.


  Caldwell took off, and one hour and twenty minutes later he landed La Niña in Havana harbor. The date was 19 October 1927.7

  The airline was in business. Pan American’s route system would snake its way southward, through the republics of Latin America. Along the way, it would collide with an equally ambitious airline, guided by a man with the same vision as Juan Trippe.

  *“Hap” Arnold rose to command the American Army Air Forces in World War II. Carl Spaatz ranked directly beneath him.

  6

  NYRBA

  In 1928, an airline that connected the rich South American seaports of Rio, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires to the markets of New York amounted to nothing more than a dream. Such an airline would fly the longest air route in the world—7,800 miles of jungled coastline and open sea, coping with a polyglot of customs and governments. It was a route that could be served only by flying boats.

  The New York, Rio and Buenos Aires Line existed only in the imagination of a pugnacious young man named Ralph O’Neill. O’Neill, in the summer of 1928, occupied a hospital bed in Minas, Uruguay, recovering from his most recent crash. During an attempted record flight from Rio to Buenos Aires, he had smashed his Boeing F2B fighter into the side of a mountain during a night landing.

  The sprawling, tumultuous continent of South America suited the talents of a man like O’Neill. While working there, he had conceived a bold idea: he would found an airline, a north-south route along the fertile east coast, all the way to New York.

  To many people, Ralph O’Neill seemed arrogant, loud of mouth, and quick of temper. He was a good-looking, muscular young man who didn’t mind taking risks. As a pilot in World War I, he had become the fourth American ace in history, winning three distinguished service crosses with a croix de guerre. For five years after the armistice, he had trained the Mexican Air Force before going to South America as the chief salesman for the Boeing Airplane Company.

  All he needed was money. In July 1928, still bandaged from his crash, Ralph O’Neill boarded a steamer for New York.

  O’Neill had done his homework. He arrived on Wall Street with detailed reports on the economic, political, and operational aspects of his proposed airline.

  Sixteen countries, including Chile, would be served. The route was composed of seven dawn-to-dusk segments, each of about a thousand miles, with individual legs averaging no more than 250 miles. A chain of harbors spaced at suitable intervals linked the ports of call. Weather, his greatest adversary, would be avoided by means of weather reporting stations and radio facilities along the entire route. For nervous investors, O’Neill produced statistics predicting that the airline could repay its backers within two years after an initial six-month shake down.

  At first, O’Neill found doors slamming in his face. New York, he discovered, was the headquarters of Pan American. Juan Trippe and his wealthy backers had their own ambitions in South America. O’Neill was the outsider.

  But then he met Jim Rand, the maverick president of Remington Rand, who decided to invest half a million dollars in O’Neill’s airline. Another ally was Admiral William Moffett, chief of the navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics. Moffett was a visionary officer who often bucked the military’s proprietary attitude towards aviation. He believed in the future of air commerce and thought O’Neill’s ideas had merit.

  O’Neill needed airplanes, and Moffett had one in mind. “Reuben Fleet’s Consolidated Aircraft recently won a design competition for a new flying boat,” he told O’Neill. “We’ll be testing it at Anacostia within nine months. It’s a big boat. One-hundred-foot wingspread with bracing to outrigger pontoons and a hull sixty-two feet long. Of course, we haven’t flown it yet, but you ought to keep it in mind.”1

  There was another new airplane that Moffett particularly liked. It was the S-38 amphibian, built by Russian immigrant Igor Sikorsky, for which the navy already held options. Moffett thought that such an airplane, if O’Neill could contrive to acquire it, would function admirably in the rugged environment of South America.2

  Thereafter, things quickly fell in place. Major Reuben Fleet, president of Consolidated Aircraft, came on board, promising to deliver six commercial versions of the Admiral flying boat and thereby becoming a major stockholder in the new airline. Fleet’s flying boat, called the Commodore in its civilian colors, would be the largest and most luxurious commercial aircraft in existence.

  Rand lined up more investors. Stock was sold, and within a few months the airline was capitalized in the amount of some six million dollars. The airline took a name: The New York, Rio & Buenos Aires Line. It was a grand label, intended to connote railroad comfort and reliability. It implied, too, special ties with the three greatest cities on the Atlantic.

  The government of Argentina responded favorably to O’Neill’s application for a mail contract, and it seemed likely that similar contracts could be expected from Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil. But a condition of the crucial Argentine contract was that the new airline, NYRBA, be in regular operation—with fines for each day of delay—within twelve months.

  O’Neill needed flying boats. The Commodore boats were slow in coming, with many development snags to be smoothed out. NYRBA had ordered six Sikorsky S-38s as interim aircraft, but the U.S. Navy was already first on the delivery list with their own order of six aircraft. Pan American was next with an order for two. The small and underfinanced Sikorsky plant could deliver the amphibians at a rate of only one every four weeks.

  O’Neill’s benefactor, Admiral Moffett, again came to his aid. The Bureau of Aeronautics, at Moffett’s direction, would postpone acceptance of their S-38s and exchange delivery slots with NYRBA.

  And what about pilots? O’Neill’s second most pressing need, after he had airplanes, was the men to fly them. Moffett made available to O’Neill a roster of the most experienced navy flying boat pilots. O’Neill was “free to try to wean them from the Navy.” This O’Neill intended to do by offering them a salary double that of their navy pay.3

  NYRBA’s inaugural flight departed Norfolk, Virginia, on 11 June 1929, bound for Rio. Christened the Washington, the new S-38 was loaded with seven passengers including a mechanic and a 600-pound radio bolted to the cabin floor. The pilot-in-command on this special occasion was NYRBA’s president, Ralph O’Neill.

  The trip was a series of near-disasters. Even with normal loads, the S-38 sprayed vast amounts of water back over itself during takeoff. The Washington, burdened with a load it had never been designed to carry, plowed through the water like a trawler. Each takeoff along the route required multiple attempts before the sluggish craft could free itself from the water. Water sloshed over the fuselage, through the cabin, and upward into the engines. The deluge diminished the engines’ power and chewed into the propeller blades.

  As they flew southward over the Caribbean and across South America, it became necessary after each stop to file down the pitted propeller blades. O’Neill was finally forced to reduce the Washington’s weight, offloading the mechanic, removing the overweight and water-soaked radio, and eventually even detaching the Sikorsky’s retractable landing gear. By the time the bedraggled S-38 at last reached Rio, it had been transformed to a pure seaplane.4

  But the trailblazing flight, despite its problems, put NYRBA in the airline business. Six weeks later service commenced between Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Shortly thereafter a twice-weekly service was begun with Ford trimotors, flying the overland segment from Buenos Aires, across the Andes, to Santiago, Chile.

  Ralph O’Neill was building his airline from south to north. For the next year he would devote his energies to South America, eight thousand miles from the airline’s headquarters in New York. It would turn out to be his worst mistake.

  The Commodore outclassed any commercial land or seaplane of 1929. Her enormous wings—a 100-foot span with a chord of 12 feet—were capable of supporting 10 tons in the air. Beneath the wings, mounted between the hull and the outboard pontoons, were the two 550-horsepower Hornet engines.

 
; The Commodore’s cabin set a new standard in airborne comfort. On either side of the center aisle, under a high-domed ceiling, were the four Pullman-like compartments. The richly upholstered seats faced each other and were equipped with padded armrests and reading lights. Large, silk-curtained windows afforded a spectacular view outside. In the after compartment were a spacious lounge and adjoining lavatories. A separate compartment for mail was installed in the forward fuselage.

  The Commodore had begun her life as an experimental navy flying boat. She had taken the name Admiral, in honor of Admiral William Moffett, Chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics, and received the designation XPY-1. Built by the Consolidated Aircraft Company, she was Reuben Fleet’s entry in a navy design competition for a giant flying boat with the range to fly from mainland America to Hawaii.

  The XPY-1 made her maiden flight from the Anacostia River in Washington, D.C., on 22 January 1929. “The big plane,” reported the New York Times, “roared down the river on a ten-mile wind. . .lifted easily after a 650-foot run and climbed quickly. Two Navy Corsairs, one with photographers, swooped after it in formation.”

  Among those on board was Captain Holden Richardson, whose flying boat experience went back to the early days with Glenn Curtiss and the famous NC boats. After the first flight, Richardson bestowed his approval on the new aircraft. It was “very stable,” he said. “It felt good to have something solid under foot.”

  Also on board for the flight was Assistant Secretary for Aeronautics Edward Warner, who spoke of how the navy’s sponsorship of such designs might contribute to the progress of commercial flying boat development.5

  Warner’s words were prophetic. In an ironic twist of free enterprise, the Bureau of Aeronautics decided to open the Admiral flying boat production contract to bids from qualified companies. The contract to produce the Consolidated-designed flying boat then went to the Glenn L. Martin Company. Reuben Fleet was outraged. “We had to bid so as to recoup our investment in development of the first ship. Glenn L. Martin had bid against us and the Navy had to give him the contract because with no engineering cost he was able to bid a half million dollars under Consolidated.”6