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Hard Landing

Page 23

by Thomas Petzinger, Jr.


  Notwithstanding the shuttle’s instant success, Rickenbacker in his time was no genius of passenger marketing, as became painfully obvious during the transition to jets. Mistrustful of jets and resentful of their tremendous expense, Rickenbacker was hopelessly late in ordering them. His procrastination enabled the up-and-coming Delta Air Lines, which competed in much of Eastern’s territory around Atlanta, to seize the moment. Delta ordered some of the same jets of which Rickenbacker had declined to take delivery, making inroads that Eastern would never reclaim. Rickenbacker also dismissed Jetways as frills. Worse still, he was notoriously cheap with the spare parts inventory, which meant that Eastern experienced an exceptional number of mechanical delays. Service aboard the East Coast shuttle, never luxurious, became downright obnoxious. A club called W.H.E.A.L. We Hate Eastern Air Lines—began to flourish, a kind of frequent-flier support group that thousands of Eastern customers actually took the trouble to join. Eastern’s motto, “The Great Silver Fleet,” was twisted by many into “The Great Stingy Fleet.”

  The forced retirement of the 73-year-old Rickenbacker from active management in 1963 was no panacea, however. Like the hapless George Spater, who followed C. R. Smith into the chairman’s suite at American, the second generation of management at Eastern fell short, in no small measure because the first generation of management couldn’t resist meddling. Rickenbacker’s immediate successor, a former air force undersecretary named Malcolm MacIntyre, was driven to drowning himself in martinis at lunch by the indomitable Rickenbacker, who remained a company director and who mercilessly second-guessed all of MacIntyre’s moves. MacIntyre finally departed, and Rickenbacker, nipping quite a bit himself in his later years, was at long last pushed out of the boardroom altogether. He died a few years later at age 82.

  In came another new chief executive, Floyd Hall, a man whose look and style embodied the era of the Organization Man. He had been a pilot over at TWA—a captain, ultimately—who had earned an M.B.A. in his free time. An intensely intellectual man with a dashing thin mustache, he arrived at Eastern at the apogee of the postwar obsession with industrialism, committed as no airline chief executive before him to the principles of what was then called “scientific management.”

  Hall crowded Eastern’s offices at Rockefeller Center with a small army of whiz kid executives. Within a few years Eastern’s executive ranks swelled to include 43 officers at the vice presidential level alone. Nervously watching passenger defections to Delta, Hall with abandon ordered the jets that Rickenbacker had eschewed. He devoted himself to repairing Eastern’s soiled image with passengers, ordering Rosenthal china and Reed & Barton silverware to coax business travelers back into first class and paying a big licensing fee to become the official airline of a new family vacation destination, called Walt Disney World, that was under construction in Orlando in the late 1960s.

  Hall’s actions pulled Eastern from the edge, but his management practices began to cause more problems than they solved. Eastern’s legion of vice presidents began fighting among themselves, and its marketing began to assume the pretensions of its management style when, with the race to the moon in full swing, Hall added a stripe to the color scheme of Eastern’s aircraft in a hue he called “ionosphere blue.” Eastern adopted “The Wings of Man” as its new motto. It was only natural that Hall would try to extend the outer space theme by hiring the best-known orbital adventurer of the day.

  Within a few weeks of Eastern’s first flight and within a few months of Lindbergh’s Atlantic crossing, Frank Frederick Borman II was born in Gary, Indiana, on March 14, 1928. Lindbergh’s triumph defined Borman’s childhood. As a five-year-old he traveled with his family to Dayton, the home of the Wright brothers, where he got a ride with a barnstormer, an experience he was thrilled to recall for the rest of his life. He read and reread The Red Eagle, a children’s novel about airplanes. He developed a passion for building model airplanes from balsa, silk span, and dope on a card table unfolded in the living room. The happiest moments of his life, he would recall 50 years later, involved working with his hands—not just building models but hunting in the deserts around Tucson, where his family had moved to help him escape his boyhood allergies. As a youth there Borman financed his ammunition purchases by catching Gila monsters, which he sold for experimental use to the University of Arizona. His mother was once told by a teacher that Frank, a lonely boy, had trouble getting along with classmates because he was so bossy.

  He began flying at age 15, financing his lessons with money he earned by pumping gasoline and sweeping out Steinfeld’s Department Store (“Tucson’s best,” he would proudly note). Flying was everything. An airplane responded so beautifully, so precisely, to one’s hands. One day as a teenager Borman was caught in a violent thunderstorm, the plane knocked in all directions by turbulence. When he finally came in for a landing, a powerful crosswind nearly swept his plane off the runway. It was then that Borman realized that he operated at his best in a crisis.

  Achievement winning—was also vital to Borman. Though small in stature, Borman became the first-string quarterback of his high school football team as an underclassman, leading it to the Arizona state championship in 1945. He had an unusually large head for his size, and his friends called him Squarehead.

  Destined for a career in the military, Borman won an appointment to West Point through the sponsorship of a judge with whose son Borman built model airplanes. As a cadet Borman distinguished himself with his bullheaded pride. When an upperclassman once ground his heel into the toe of Borman’s shoe, West Point hazing tradition demanded that Borman, a lowly plebe, bear the torture silently. Instead he called the upperclassman a son of a bitch and threatened to kill him. Borman graduated in 1950, eighth in a class of 670, marched in Harry Truman’s inaugural parade, and launched into fighter pilot training as a true believer in the unofficial air force motto, “Every man a tiger.” At one point he ruptured an eardrum practicing dive-bombing with a head cold. He was dismayed to receive orders back to West Point as an aeronautical instructor, but made the most of the assignment. Any unlucky cadets who happened to nod off in Professor Borman’s class got erasers thrown at their heads.

  Borman’s combination of fighter pilot flying and scientific training (not to mention his proven ability to withstand physical torment) won him an appointment as an astronaut in the Gemini program. In two weeks aboard Gemini 7 in 1965 Borman established an endurance record for space flight and helped to conduct the first docking in space. Borman would later describe the “magic feeling” he experienced from the responsiveness of the Gemini spacecraft to his controls. It was the same glorious sensation Borman always felt piloting the swept-wing F-86 Sabre, one of the principal weapons in America’s Cold War arsenal—a jet fighter whose builders happened to include an aircraft mechanic in Columbus, Ohio, named Charles E. Bryan.

  Bryan’s father was an alcoholic, a seldom-seen figure as young Charlie was growing up in the coal-mining hollows of West Virginia. From the time of his earliest memory Charlie Bryan had to work. As a first grader he sold newspapers on a street corner in a grimy coal-dust town, shouting “Extra!” on the day Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.

  The postwar years were a time of great northerly migration, not just among blacks but among Appalachian whites. For many the promised land—the first big city to the north—was Columbus, Ohio, a city just beginning a Cold War boom in the aerospace and technology industries. At the same time that Frank Borman was immersed in the duty-honor-country culture of West Point, Charlie Bryan was a tenth grader working at a drive-in theater in the Whitehall section of Columbus, a few miles east of Ohio State University. When his mother moved to a different part of town, Charlie could not bear to leave his job and his paycheck, so, barely old enough to hold a driver’s license, he began living alone in a shack beneath the movie screen, sleeping on an army cot and showering at a nearby trailer park.

  Charlie Bryan had an intense manner and a stubbornness that always seemed to get him what he wanted,
and his classmates recognized it. He was forever being recruited to run for elected positions in his church groups and other organizations, and he never seemed to lose. But despite his rising to a variety of leadership positions, Charlie Bryan was not social. He did not mingle easily. He felt close to groups but distant from individuals. Though later married (and divorced) twice, Bryan would spend much of the rest of his life living alone, which was how he preferred it.

  By the time he was graduated from high school, Bryan realized that he cared deeply about money and in particular the possessions money bought. His years of working as a teenager gave him the savings to buy a Buick Riviera with a blue body and a white hardtop, a car that people couldn’t help noticing in 1952, particularly when the driver was barely shaving. On the same day he wore his cap and gown he began a mechanic’s job at North American Aviation (later part of Rockwell International) and was soon working side jobs as well—night jobs doing freelance aircraft maintenance and working in a grocery store, all to make extra money. Charlie Bryan wanted a house with two bathrooms where everyone else of his economic station had a single bath—and maybe even a little extra to wager in the stock market.

  When a recruiter from Eastern Air Lines turned up in Columbus one winter day in 1956, Bryan eagerly showed up for an interview. As a teenager Bryan had traveled to Florida with his mother and had vowed one day to live there. It was not just the warm weather that he found so attractive. It was also the romance, the beaches, the palms—“like a deserted island,” as he would explain. He took a mechanic’s job at Eastern in an instant.

  Aircraft mechanics is a solitary craft and a profession of precision, two attributes that brought out the best in Charlie Bryan. He rebuilt wings and changed gears on old Lockheed Constellations and ultimately earned a reputation as a top engine-change mechanic, the most demanding job in any maintenance hangar.

  Decades earlier, in a fateful turn of events, the International Association of Machinists had received an engraved invitation to unionize the hangars at Eastern from Eddie Rickenbacker himself. The IAM was an establishment union with rock-solid American values, and Rickenbacker was petrified that some Communist-affiliated union might otherwise organize his mechanics. (In later years, the union headquarters in Washington would come under the leadership of an avowed socialist.) Charlie Bryan, the loner mechanic, began turning out to hear speeches by one of the IAM’s great leaders, a fiery orator named George Brown. Bryan discovered himself to be a hero-worshiper, and Brown’s stirring addresses caused him to throw himself into the affairs of the union. He soon became a shop steward.

  A seminal event in Bryan’s union career occurred in 1961 in the midst of a crisis, after the wings broke off two Lockheed Electras in quick succession. The problem was ultimately attributed to a vibration-inducing design flaw, which could be remedied by removing the engines and remounting them with altered connections. Eastern, with one of the world’s biggest Electra fleets, launched a crash effort to complete the makeover as quickly as possible, including round-the-clock shifts in the maintenance hangar.

  Some of the mechanics, resentful of working a midnight shift, approached Charlie Bryan to complain. Bryan studied the engine overhaul scheme, diagramming the process on a few sheets of graph paper. He analyzed the staffing required to perform the individual tasks involved in each overhaul. He pondered the schedule by which each Electra was intended to enter and leave the hangar. Ultimately he calculated that with a few minor adjustments in the process the midnight shift could be eliminated while actually increasing the speed of the changeover. Eastern’s management, stunned, readily adopted Bryan’s plan. The event suggested to Bryan that a union official—that he, Charlie Bryan—might know as much or more about running an airline as the people paid big salaries to do so.

  As for his own work schedule, however, Bryan preferred the solitude of the midnight shift. He quoted from Eastern mystics. He steeped himself in Kahlil Gibran. He became absorbed in the work of faith healer Edgar Cayce. But as aloof, as downright weird, as Bryan struck some of his fellow mechanics, he continued relating brilliantly to groups. He exuded intelligence. His demagoguery was skillful. He studied, and aspired to, the style of John Kennedy. His telephone number appeared in the Miami phone book under a pseudonym: Charles Leader.

  Once, after hearing the word “extemporaneous” used in conversation, he rushed home to look it up. While paging toward the word in his dictionary, he noticed a conspicuous entry for the Latin expression ex aequo et bono, “according to what is fair and good.” He fell in love with the expression, adopting it as his personal motto and later having it printed on union business cards and stationery.

  As time passed Bryan seemed to know more and more about the operations and management of Eastern Air Lines. Discerning an unfailing trading pattern in the stock price of Eastern shares, he began buying and selling on cue, raking in enough profits to buy a ’65 Austin Healy 3000 convertible. Management did little to disabuse him of his self-importance when the payroll department began using Bryan’s ever-precise overtime records as a check against its own. Later in his career his say-so over corporate affairs—the control he could exercise from his position of union leadership—reminded him of his days running engine tune-ups, a power trip if ever there was one. “It was an awesome experience being right next to that engine, running it at high power settings, sometimes even takeoff power,” he would tell an interviewer years later. “It was like standing right next to a volcano. You could actually feel the bones in your body vibrating from all that power right there in front of you that you were actually adjusting, and had control over.”

  On Christmas Eve in 1968, in mankind’s first voyage around the moon, Frank Borman and his crewmates raised a wave of goose bumps the world over while reading aloud from Genesis. “Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you,” Borman had said, closing a television broadcast observed by I billion people, “all of you on the good earth.” Despite a number of harrowing moments unseen by the civilian world, the Apollo 8 mission, commanded by Borman, had been a triumph, no one’s more than Borman’s. Less than a month later he and his wife were seated conspicuously close to Richard Nixon during his inauguration ceremonies. Borman addressed a joint session of Congress and appeared before the College of Cardinals in Rome, speaking from the identical spot where Galileo in 1616 had been found guilty of heresy.

  Despite his celebrity as a space explorer, Borman by 1969 was ready to abandon NASA. He was spending more than 200 days a year away from home, and his wife, Susan, was feeling all the stress and anxiety that Borman took pride in sloughing. During the Apollo mission, with its untested entry and exit from the gravitational field of another celestial body, Susan Borman displayed a bittersweet image to the nation as she nervously ran her pearls between her lips. No one, including her husband, realized at the time that she was also dousing her fears with alcohol.

  Leaving NASA, Borman was the most sought-after executive material in America. Nixon aide H. R. Haldeman tried to recruit him for a high-level White House appointment. Ross Perot, the wealthy Texas computer magnate and crusader in behalf of Vietnam POWs, nearly landed Borman as the head of a new political organization to conduct “town hall” broadcasts. Many corporations called, but Borman refused to hire on as a trick pony. He wanted a real job, doing real work—a chance to prove himself in the world outside the military and the space program. In this respect none of the other invitations Borman received matched the appeal of the offer from Eastern Air Lines.

  It was a job the title of which bespoke genuine responsibilities: vice president of operations. The position paid only $60,000 a year, a fraction of what a retiring astronaut might pull down elsewhere, but working at Eastern meant working with airplanes, and Borman still loved airplanes as much as ever. Even after a trip to the moon, Frank Borman was still building model airplanes. He began working full-time at Eastern in July 1970. “I figured right then and there, if I didn’t blow it, I’d be president,” he later commented.

/>   But Borman stumbled within weeks of entering Eastern’s nondescript, poured-concrete headquarters on the perimeter of Miami International Airport. The pilots who flew for Eastern were different from the pilots who flew for the U.S. military. Borman discovered that they actually wanted to make money. Before he knew what hit him, the pilots’ union rolled him in a critical series of negotiations, saddling Eastern with one of the most punitive labor contracts in the airline industry. The top management was furious. In his official performance review Frank Borman received a “below average” rating.

  But Borman, soon much wiser, recovered. He worked compulsively, spending day after day on the road despite his intention to remedy the absences of his NASA years. Unwittingly he was worsening his wife’s drinking and emotional problems, which finally resulted in her lengthy convalescence in a treatment center. (Her valiant recovery was poignantly detailed in Borman’s memoirs, published under the title Countdown.)

  There was treachery along Borman’s path to the top, which hard work alone would not overcome. By the time Borman arrived, the power struggle among the many vice presidents in Hall’s organization had split the top leadership of the company into two warring camps. One group, led by Hall himself, consisted of the corporate leadership in New York, the platoon of bright young analysts he had brought aboard. The other faction was based at Eastern’s operating headquarters in Miami, where Sam Higginbottom, Eastern’s president, ran a fiefdom of his own. Though he had seen plenty of internal politics in the military, Borman was shocked at the extent of the divisiveness gripping Eastern: the rival camps not only had their own staffs and headquarters but even separate public relations executives, each of whom leaked negative gossip about the other faction to the press. The finger-pointing worsened as Eastern was inundated with Lockheed L-1011 widebodies that had been ordered in earlier years. The new jets afflicted Eastern with excess capacity. Other airlines had similar problems—too many 747s and DC-10s. The L-1011s, however, were shipped with troublesome engines, worsening Eastern’s image for poor service.

 

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