In the thirties, following the kidnapping of his son and the subsequent lengthy trial, Lindbergh became a recluse. He moved his family to Europe and immersed himself in scientific studies. As the world veered toward war, Lindbergh became an outspoken critic of American intervention. He made an enemy of FDR, so much so that when the United States finally entered the war, Lindbergh was barred from returning to active duty.
As a civilian “consultant” for the United Aircraft Corporation, citizen Lindbergh went to the South Pacific. He flew fifty combat missions, quite illegally, in P-38s and F4U Corsairs. He shot down one Japanese Zero and came close to being shot down himself.
In typical Trippe fashion, the Supreme Skygod kept his distance during Lindbergh’s feud with Roosevelt. When the war was over and the dust had settled, Trippe welcomed his old friend back to Pan Am. They never discussed Lindbergh’s politics or his trouble with FDR, and Lindbergh quietly resumed his duties as Pan Am’s technical consultant.
When the world’s first jetliner, the British-built Comet, was about to fly, Trippe again sent Lindbergh. Lindbergh reported that the Comet was a highly advanced airplane, but it would not have the range to make it nonstop across the Atlantic. But even with one or two refueling stops, the sleek jet would beat Pan American’s plodding Stratocruisers—four-engine transports derived from the wartime Boeing B-29 bomber—across the ocean by several hours.
It was all Trippe needed to hear. He ordered three Comets. They were Pan Am’s first order for foreign-built airplanes since 1927 when Juan Trippe bought mail planes from Anthony Fokker.
And he went shopping for an American jet.
There were, as usual, three possibilities: Boeing, Douglas, and Lockheed. Lockheed was already committed to the production of its highly touted Electra propjet. The Electra was intended to replace the conventionally powered domestic airliners of the fifties, like the DC-6 and the Constellation. The Electra would not be a transocean vehicle. Smith of American and Rickenbacker of Eastern were scrapping over who would get the propjet first. Lockheed had a hot item in the Electra and made it well known that it was not interested in building a long range commercial jet.
Boeing was already at work on a prototype four-engine jet it was calling the Dash Eighty. If successful, it would become an Air Force tanker. Powered by the new J-57 engines, the Dash Eighty could cruise in the upper thirty thousands at over 500 miles per hour. It seemed possible that an enhanced derivative of the Dash Eighty might even become a true intercontinental airliner. If so, passengers would be flying from America to Europe in less time than they now spent traveling from Chicago to Los Angeles.
Trippe dispatched Lindbergh to the Boeing plant in Seattle. There the Lone Eagle flew with legendary test pilot Tex Johnston, asked several pointed questions, then reported back to Trippe.
The Boeing jet was the future, Lindbergh believed. It had some daunting problems, the most serious being that it did not possess the range to fly the Atlantic—Pan Am’s ocean. But that would be overcome. Pan Am shouldn’t waste time with interim airplanes like Lockheed’s Electra propjet .
In Santa Monica, Douglas’s assembly line was already at near maximum capacity filling orders for the venerable DC-6 and DC-7. But Donald Douglas was also sniffing the kerosene in the air. Belatedly he had jumped into the competition for an Air Force all-jet tanker aircraft when it dawned on him that the winner of the competition for a military jet transport would have an automatic, government-funded edge in the development of a commercial jetliner. The incredible expenses of design, testing, and tooling would already be born by the nation’s taxpayers. So now Douglas was in the game with his own prototype jetliner, which would be called the DC-8.
It was a situation made to order for a manipulator like Juan Trippe. He had not one but two builders rushing to construct the airplane he wanted. He could play one against the other. But Trippe’s problem would be to get them to build his airplane. He needed a jet that could fly the Atlantic.
The Boeing and the Douglas aircraft had virtually the same specifications. Boeing’s 707 prototype measured a mere 132 inches in width, which permitted only five-abreast seating, the same as the Stratocruiser. It would accommodate no more than a hundred passengers. The Douglas version had virtually the same capacity. Neither airplane had transoceanic range.
The trouble was the engines. The state-of-the-art power plant—and the only engine available—was the Pratt & Whitney J-57, which powered the B-52 bomber. At about 10,000 pounds of thrust, the J-57 was a third more powerful than any other engine in the world—but still too puny to power a transoceanic jetliner.
And then news of a secret project was leaked: An advanced version of the J-57, designated the J-75, was being developed for a new generation of supersonic fighters. The J-75 was said to be half again as powerful as the J-57. Only about two hundred people outside Pratt & Whitney and the military knew about the J-75. One of them was the Supreme Skygod.
At age sixty-seven, Fred Rentschler was damned tired of picking up the phone and finding the same person on the line.
“Mr. Trippe calling,” he would hear. It went on like that every day. And it was always the same subject: the goddamn J-75.
Rentschler headed Pratt & Whitney, a subsidiary of the conglomerate United Aircraft, of which Rentschler was also the CEO. Like Donald Douglas and Juan Trippe, Fred Rentschler had begun his career in the infancy of aviation. Pratt & Whitney was his personal fiefdom, and in more than thirty years there he had built the world’s most successful aircraft engines.
Back in 1929, Rentschler had taken a long shot and bought fifty thousand shares of stock in an airline called Pan American. It was the first new capital Juan Trippe had been able to raise for his airline. For years after, Rentschler sat on Pan Am’s board of directors. He had seen Juan Trippe in action.
Trippe was asking the impossible. First, he wanted the J-75 released from the secret list, which Rentschler knew was probably feasible, if not popular. Then Trippe wanted to buy a batch of the engines—never mind that they hadn’t even been built or tested yet—to install in jetliners that also weren’t built. What’s more, Rentschler knew for a fact that neither Boeing nor Douglas was willing to redesign its proposed jetliner around an experimental engine.
All this Rentschler told Trippe. Again.
One of Juan Trippe’s most exasperating qualities was that he never seemed to hear what he didn’t want to hear. So he never had to take no for an answer.
“We have to have an airplane that will do the Atlantic nonstop,” Trippe repeated, as if he hadn’t heard.
Rentschler told him again: full-scale production of the J-75 was out of the question. There was still too much to be learned about the high-temperature metals that went into the new engine.
“But look at what a wonderful job the J-57s are doing for the Air Force.”
“This is a bigger animal,” said Rentschler. “We haven’t flown it yet.”
Trippe signed off sweetly, showing no sign of accepting Rentschler’s refusal.
The next day when Trippe called, Rentschler agreed to a “final” meeting in the Cloud Club atop the Chrysler Building. At the meeting Rentschler went through the whole litany once again. The Boeing and Douglas designs were etched in concrete. They were to be built around the J-57, which he was in the business of selling. If Trippe wanted jetliners in the next decade, he would have to buy them the way they were designed. Forget the J-75. That was years away, and would have no effect on the design of the first jets.
Rentschler folded his arms and leaned back in his chair. His decision, he said, was final.
Trippe was smiling his angelic smile. Had he heard? No one could tell.
“Why don’t we take a two-week break,” Trippe said, “and think the whole matter through?”
Rentschler and his associates looked at each other. Think what through? What the hell? Wasn’t it clear that the decision was final?
Not to Trippe. He rose from his chair and shook everyone’s ha
nd. Nothing was ever final to Juan Trippe until he wanted it to be.
While Rentschler’s team drove back to East Hartford, Trippe was on the phone to England. Rolls-Royce had an engine under development that supposedly would have transatlantic capability. Trippe let it be known that he was determined to have a jetliner with powerful enough engines to fly the Atlantic. Even if he had to buy them in England.
The word leaked back to Pratt & Whitney, just as Trippe knew it would. And panic ensued, just as he intended. It was unthinkable that the first American jet across the Atlantic would fly with British engines.
Rentschler and his people went into an emergency reevaluation of the J-75 program. It was, the engineers pointed out, really only an expanded model of the J-57. The temperature limits could be kept the same. It was probably not as experimental and untested as most new engines.
Trippe was relentless. At yet another meeting, he put it on the line. If Pratt & Whitney could deliver those engines, Pan Am would buy 120 of them—with or without an airplane to hang them on—for $250,000 apiece. It was a $40 million order, counting spare parts.
Rentschler was in a corner. If Pan Am turned to Rolls-Royce, Pratt & Whitney—and America’s reputation in the aircraft powerplant business—would go straight down the toilet. On the other hand, if Pratt & Whitney delivered the J-75 and then the engine experienced catastrophic failures, the company would go down anyway.
Rentschler made the decision himself. Trippe could have his engines. They would be delivered by the summer of 1959.
In Seattle, it was Bill Allen’s turn. Allen was the head of the Boeing Airplane Company. Allen gazed across his desk at Juan Trippe’s smiling face. He’s bluffing, thought Allen.
Trippe had just told him that Pan Am now owned $40 million worth of experimental engines. Without airplanes. Just the damn engines, which had never even been tested, let alone installed and flown on a real airplane.
Now all Trippe wanted him to do was redesign the entire Boeing 707. That’s all. Never mind that the prototype was already built. Make it longer and wider. Redesign the wings and reconfigure it for a third again as much power. Give it half again as much range. That was all he wanted.
This was not the first time Juan Trippe and Bill Allen had sat down like this. The two corporate chieftains had done this many times over the years, bluffing, trying to read each other’s hand. Sometimes Trippe and Allen bantered on the golf course in Greenwich, with no notes ever taken by a stenographer. They took fishing trips together in the Northwest, and again no record of their conversations ever reached paper. Trippe, the Great Dissembler, would tease Allen, the Montana lawyer, with his vague proposals.
“Would you build it if I bought it?” Trippe would ask.
“Would you buy it if I built it?” Allen would counter.
Eventually Allen tired of such recordless discussions. He made it a practice to call Trippe back when he reached his office and go through their previous agenda—recording it all on tape.
Pan Am was Boeing’s prime commercial customer. Back in 1939 the majestic B-314 flying boat had been developed at Pan Am’s behest. Only fourteen were built, and Boeing lost money on the project. Pan Am and TWA had been the only customers for the prewar B-307 Stratoliner, and again Boeing lost money. And Pan Am had been the main customer for the postwar B-377 Stratocruiser, a derivative of the B-29 bomber. Boeing’s losses on that airplane were offset by Air Force orders for a tanker derivative.
Boeing had lost money on almost all of its deals with Pan Am. But by giving Pan Am the lead in new airline technology, Boeing had been able to drag the rest of the industry along. New orders flowed from other airline customers who were compelled to follow Pan Am’s lead, and Boeing ultimately rose from its well of red ink.
All this was in Bill Allen’s mind now as he watched Trippe across his desk in Seattle. Allen was a conservative lawyer-businessman, responsible to his directors and shareholders. He was nearly the same age as Trippe. In appearance and demeanor, Bill Allen was a model of the 1950s—Eisenhower-era probity, three-piece suits, receding hairline, an unshakable faith in American capitalism. It was said that Bill Allen placed his trust in only two professions: lawyers and engineers. He had little use for bankers.
Allen’s forebears were Irish and Scottish. Throughout his life, his two halves always seemed to be in conflict, the Irish side willing to take risks, the Scottish half balking at the outflow of corporate money.
Now his two sides were wrestling again. Allen knew in his gut that it would be an unconscionable expense—and risk—to scrap the 707 prototype and redesign the jet on Trippe’s terms. On the other hand, Boeing couldn’t afford to lose Pan Am’s business.
Is he bluffing? Allen tried to read Juan Trippe’s sweetly smiling face. Yes, he decided. “We’re sorry, Pan Am can have the 707 just the way it is. You’ll have to take it or leave it.”
Trippe left it. His next stop was Santa Monica, where he put the same pressure on Donald Douglas. If Douglas didn’t build the airplane Trippe wanted, someone else would. “Even if I have to go abroad,” Trippe warned.
Donald Douglas was a pragmatic, Brooklyn-born Scot. He wanted to know the cost of everything. It was said that he kept an adding machine on his nightstand. He liked a sure thing, and his lineage of propeller-driven airliners—the DC-3 through the DC-7—had been very sure things. Douglas had sold more airliners than any other manufacturer in the world, and Pan American was one of his prime customers.
Douglas had resisted making the huge investment in a prototype jet as Boeing had done. He had less to lose in a redesign of his own jet, the DC-8, which so far existed only on paper. In theory, it was possible to build a redesigned DC-8 around Trippe’s J-75 engines.
And if he wanted Pan American’s business, that’s what he would have to do. He and Trippe shook hands. A big DC-8 would be built around Trippe’s engines. Pan Am would buy twenty-four Douglas jets.
On his way out, Trippe had one more request: “Let’s hold up the announcement for a while.” Trippe wanted the deal kept secret because he wasn’t through finagling.
He went back to Seattle. He sat down again across Bill Allen’s desk, and this time he seemed to have given up on his unreasonable demand that Boeing redesign the prototype 707. Trippe told Allen that Pan American would order twenty-one of the small 707’s, built around the undersized J-57 engines. The lawyers could go ahead and draw up the contract. Trippe and Allen shook hands on the deal. The first 707’s would be delivered in the autumn of 1958.
When Trippe departed Seattle that day, Bill Allen was smiling. So were his vice presidents. So were his engineers. They were convinced that they had just captured the first customer for an American-built jet airliner. Best of all, they had outmaneuvered Juan Trippe.
Trippe had told them nothing about his deal with Donald Douglas.
Back in New York, Trippe quietly signed both contracts—Boeing and Douglas—on the same day. Neither manufacturer knew about the other’s order from Pan Am.
A few days later, at the meeting of the International Air Transport Association on October 13, 1955, Trippe gave an introductory speech. He talked vaguely about how mass travel by air would “prove to be more significant to world destiny than the atom bomb.” That night he threw a party for the IATA executive committee at his Gracie Square apartment in Manhattan. Casually, moving through the crowd, all aviation industry chieftains, Trippe chatted with his guests. Oh, by the way, had they heard? Pan American had just bought. . . ummm, how many?. . . some forty-five jet airliners. Twenty-four of them were. . . oh, yes, transoceanic models. . . built by Douglas, of course. . . with that new Pratt & Whitney engine. Wasn’t that interesting?
The party was over.
Trippe’s guests looked as if they had been gut-shot. They hit the sidewalk realizing that they had just been propelled—without being consulted—into the jet age.
It was painfully clear to them that every airline in America—except Pan Am—had invested heavily in the late
st propeller-driven airliners. Pan Am had gone directly to jets. Their brand-new propeller machines had just become dinosaurs.
At Boeing the news flowed through the halls like a river of doom. Gone were the smiles. From out of nowhere their archrival Douglas had grabbed the larger of the two orders—twenty-four versus Boeing’s twenty-one. It no longer mattered that the Boeing product was sixteen months ahead of Douglas. The stupefying, nearly incomprehensible fact was that Douglas was selling long-range jets to Pan Am. No other airline in the world would want the puny Boeing 707 when it could have the more powerful Douglas airplane. The DC-8, even before it was built, was putting the 707 out of business.
To Allen, it was an especially bitter pill. Boeing had always lost out to Douglas in the commercial airliner market. Since the thirties, when the DC-3 eclipsed the Boeing product, the B-247, Douglas had managed to outsell Boeing. Now it was happening again.
Bill Allen hated what he was about to do. He picked up the phone and called Juan Trippe. Yes, Trippe could have his bigger airplanes. Boeing would redesign the 707. Allen would be on the next airplane to New York to renegotiate the contract. Yes, they would be super-707s, using the J-75 engine. They would be ten feet longer, would carry twenty-four more passengers, and, yes, they would cross the North Atlantic nonstop.
Trippe could afford to be magnanimous. Pan Am would still take six of the smaller 707s—these were already in the works—and then seventeen of the big airplanes. The six smaller airplanes would be used to begin Pan Am’s jet service, then be relegated to the Latin American operation. He offered Allen a bonus of a quarter million dollars for each airplane that was delivered three months in advance of the contract date.
Skygods: The Fall of Pan Am Page 4