The trouble with the military, in Rob Martinside’s opinion, was that you were supposed to perform duties other than flying. You were a personnel officer, or an ordnance officer, or a maintenance officer. You were supposed to be promoted up the hierarchical pyramid until you commanded something, a squadron or a carrier or an air station.
That was the trouble with the Navy. They were always confusing what was important—strapping into a fighter and scorching a hole straight up into the ozone layer—with trivial jobs like personnel administration and materiel accounting. Why didn’t they just leave fighter pilots alone and let them be fighter pilots?
Another thing troubled Martinside: after they promoted you out of a flying slot, they got rid of you. Martinside knew Navy commanders and captains in their early forties, already judged too old to fly, who were forced to retire. In their new civvies they hit the street, looking uncertain and out of place, searching for something to do with the rest of their lives.
Rob Martinside fell squarely into the Airplane Head category. He grew up in middle America, in a dusty Kansas town called Coffeyville. One afternoon when he was twelve, riding his bicycle to school, Martinside saw a low-flying, straight-winged jet bomber pass over town. A jet! Martinside had never seen such a thing up close.
The jet—the boy knew it was a North American B-45—passed over Coffeyville at about three thousand feet, descending, headed for the old World War II air base five miles outside of town.
To hell with school, the boy decided. He pedaled off in the direction of the airfield. He was the first one there. The jet was parked on the concrete ramp. Two men kneeled under a wing.
“Hey, kid,” said one of the pilots. He wore a khaki flight suit. His hard flying helmet, which looked like a gladiator’s headgear, was positioned on the rail of the cockpit canopy. “What’s this place called?”
“Coffeyville,” said the kid.
“Coffeyville?” said the pilot. He looked at a navigation chart.
“See?” said the other pilot. He pointed to the spot on the chart. “I told you.”
“We lost an engine,” said the first pilot. “Had to come down somewhere.”
The boy didn’t take his eyes off the silver-skinned jet. He walked around the airplane. He touched the aluminum skin, smelled the sensuous burnt-rubber-kerosene-hot-metal smell. He felt the heat waves still shimmering from the engine tailpipe.
And then the pilot uttered the magic words that since the dawn of flight had turned kids into bona fide Airplane Heads: Want to see the cockpit, kid?
Charlie Scroggin was the only one in the class who owed nothing to the Red Menace. He was neither an authentic Airplane Head nor an Accidental. Charlie had come up the hard way, as a civilian-trained pilot who paid to acquire his licenses.
Before he flew airplanes, Charlie had been a farmer. When he married his wife, Sue, her family set them up with a farm, which, in eastern Oregon, mostly meant raising pigs. It rained a lot where Charlie and Sue lived, and after a rain the earth took on a glue-like, oozy consistency that would try to suck the rubber boots off your feet. It was like walking in soft cement.
Charlie was still in his twenties, raising pigs, when he was first tantalized by the notion that there might be something else. Sue’s brother, Rod, was a pilot who flew for United Airlines. Though Charlie knew nothing about airplanes or flying, he noticed that his brother-in-law seemed to have a great deal of time on his hands and lived comfortably. And he had nothing to do with farming.
All this was on Charlie’s mind one day as he stood in a cold Oregon drizzle, his feet mired in the trampled earth of his farm. Around him, his pigs wallowed in the slime. Charlie thought about his brother-in-law. He tried to imagine the clean, warm environment of an airliner cockpit. A thought struck Charlie like a thunderclap: I hate these goddamn pigs!
It was a pivotal moment in his life. Charlie turned his back on the animals and, being careful not to lose a boot in the goo, stalked away from the pigpen. He never looked back. He was able to borrow enough money to enroll in a commercial flying course in Eugene.
As it turned out, he had a natural talent for flying. When Charlie finished flying school and had earned his commercial, instrument, instructor, and multiengine ratings, he stayed on as a flight instructor. At the same time he found employment with a local charter flying company. He accumulated nearly three thousand hours of flying time. And though the odds were against Charlie, history took a turn in his favor. The airlines were hiring.
Charlie applied to several, including Pan Am. At the interview they asked him why he wanted to work for Pan Am. Charlie told them about the farm and his brother-in-law and how much he hated pigs.
The crusty old interviewers, all three of them, stared over their half-frames at the young man. He was the only nonmilitary pilot they had interviewed that day. Then they broke up laughing.
It was the beginning of Charlie Scroggin’s career as an airline pilot.
The entrails of a Boeing 707, in multicolored schematic detail, covered the wall of the classroom.
“. . . three thousand pounds pressure comes out here and fills that accumulator over here, and then this valve lets the fluid. . . ”
Rob Martinside tried to pay attention. It was the sixth day of Boeing 707 systems training. They’d had the electrical system and the fuel system, and now they were hearing the nonstop, eye-glazing saga of the Boeing hydraulic system.
The instructor was a pale, wispy-haired man named Ivan White. He had a voice like a 28-volt motor. White’s monotone never varied by as much as a kilocycle as he droned through the entire journey of the airplane’s hydraulic fluid from its reservoir to the engine and electric-driven pumps, to the accumulators, and onward to the brakes, flaps, landing gear, and control actuators. As he spoke, he traced the route of the hydraulic fluid on the wall chart with his collapsible pointer.
“. . . and when the pressure here gets to 3,300 pounds, this valve thinks it’s time to open up and relieve all that load, so. . . ”
Thinks? They heard a lot of that in systems training—parts of an airplane becoming sensate, valves thinking this and that, switches deciding to open and close, sensors saying, Hey, I’m too hot or cold. Martinside wanted to ask how a valve could think. If a valve really did think, what did it think about?
Ivan White was a nice guy, despite his terminal dullness. He had been teaching airplane systems to Pan Am pilots for over thirty years. White liked to let his class know that he had begun working for Pan American as a mechanic at the old Alameda seaplane base, across San Francisco Bay, back in the China Clipper days. No one doubted him.
Another instructor, Fred Tubbs, was in charge of emergency equipment training. Tubbs had an intimate knowledge of every catastrophe that had ever visited a Pan American airplane. He not only knew the cause of each accident, from flying boat to jets, he could give an account of the extent of the mayhem, complete with vivid photographs of shredded, pulverized, and roasted human flesh. This part he liked to save until after lunch.
Tubbs had a statistician’s feel for the inevitable. “Two of you,” he told the class, “will be involved in the crash of a Pan Am airplane.”
Even those in the back row raised their heads.
“One of you,” said Tubbs, “will not survive. Would you like to know why?”
They wanted very much to know why. Every head now had a forward tilt.
And then Tubbs went into his routine about life vests, fire extinguishers, first-aid kits, smoke goggles, escape slides, oxygen bottles. He had a story to go with each item. It saved lives, he told them. It might save theirs.
For ditching and evacuation training, they went to the mock-up room where actual escape slides and an emergency raft were set up. They practiced sliding down the chutes, They set up the raft and climbed in. It didn’t matter to Tubbs that no commercial jet had ever actually ditched at sea. “It’s going to happen,” he declared with absolute conviction. “It’s just a matter of time. And you may be aboard
.”
This was good stuff, the students thought. Fred Tubbs knew how to make death and mayhem great fun.
New hire.
No one could remember seeing such a creature at Pan Am, at least not since the mid-fifties, which was the last time the company had hired any new pilots. The years 1955 to 1964 had been the doldrums of the airline business, when the industry was agonizing over turboprops versus jets and it still took twelve hours’ flying time to cross the Atlantic.
And then came the jets. Waves of new pilots landed on Pan Am property like boatloads of immigrants. No one quite knew how to regard them.
They soon got used to the treatment. New hires. They were called that by their instructors, by the secretaries, by the food servers in the company cafeteria. The appellation was neither affectionate nor derisive. It was purely a business label, meaning that they resided on the bottom of the seniority list, made less money than the janitors, could be fired for any transgression, and were the lowest form of life in a cockpit.
The lucky ones, like Ron Taft and Connie Smith, had wives who earned a salary. Barbara Taft was a nurse—ex-Air Force, where Ron had met her—and her take-home at the local hospital amounted to over twice what he made at Pan Am. Jean Smith was a librarian. She earned enough to allow the Smiths to live in a real house, unlike most of the apartment-dwelling new hires.
The starting salary was a joke. No one could live in San Francisco on $500 a month, not even in the mid-sixties. Pan Am took the position that if you really wanted to work for the world’s most experienced airline, you first had to demonstrate some humility. You had to wallow in a little squalor before you flew with the Skygods.
It was especially hard on the wives. They yearned for the good times back in the military when they were somebody—when they shopped in the PX and dressed up for officers’ club functions and the sentries saluted their car when they drove onto the base.
Now they were anonymous nobodies. Even other Pan Am people ignored them. A yawning social chasm lay between the wives of the old-time “real” Pan Am pilots and those of the impertinent new hires.
Since they couldn’t afford to go out to lunch or to join clubs, the new-hire wives pooled baby-sitters and brought contributions to parties—half-bottles of wine and spaghetti and potato salad and rice concoctions. On bleak afternoons between paydays they talked about the future—the dreamed-about hopeful someday when they would sip margaritas on sunny verandahs and move into sprawling houses with new furniture and washing machines and big automobiles.
Someday, they assured each other, they would again be somebody. They would be spoiled, bejeweled, fur-clad, imposing wives of real Pan Am pilots.
One way to supplement the anemic Pan Am paycheck was by flying in the military reserves. Chuck Kraft joined an Air Force Reserve C-124 unit at Hamilton Air Force Base north of San Francisco. Jim Wood and Chuck James went to Reno, where the Nevada Air National Guard flew F-101 fighters. Navy and Marine pilots like Rob Martinside and Mike Denham and Cale Boggs signed up for the A-4 unit across the bay at Alameda Naval Air Station.
Besides helping pay the rent, the reserves provided something else. For some of the new airline pilots, withdrawal from the military had not been easy. They still carried with them, like old school sweaters, the peculiar culture distinctions of their service.
Fighter pilots were the worst. Early in their careers they had been imprinted with the notion that they were the elite. Everybody else who flew airplanes did so only to support the fighter jocks.
Over entrances to ready rooms and officers’ messes and latrines around the world was a ubiquitous sign: IF YOU AIN’T A FIGHTER PILOT, YOU AIN’T SHIT.
They believed it. It was a separate culture among airmen. It seeped into their pores when they underwent fighter training—and it never fully left them. The culture affected how they wore their uniforms, how they invoked their jet-jockey lexicon, how they used their hands when they described their own boldness aloft.
It even extended to the world outside. Fighter pilots were supposed to be audacious not only in airplanes but around women, in bars, on the highway. They fancied themselves in control of all forms of locomotion—airplanes, cars, boats, motorcycles, golf carts.
This kind of arrogance hadn’t changed much since World War I, when fighter pilots flew Spads and Fokkers and Nieuports. Now they tore through the air in supersonic machines like the F-100 and the F-104 and the Navy F-8 and F-4. But the idea remained the same: They, the fighter pilots, were the hunters. Everything else, especially lumbering multiengine bombers and tankers and transports, were targets.
When they were full of themselves and feeling mean, fighter pilots liked to deride multiengine pilots. They called them bus drivers. No self-respecting, hard-charging, fast-burning fighter pilot was supposed to allow himself to mutate into a bus driver.
Of course, times had changed. Here they were at Pan American, flying many-motored airplanes. Was that not bus driving? Well, perhaps, but. . .
The military reserves made it possible to assuage their consciences about bus driving—and other things. For some, there was still a whiff of guilt about having left the service. A war was cranking up in Southeast Asia. Their buddies who had stayed in were busy winning air medals. But being in a reserve squadron sent a clear enough signal that you were still ready and willing. If things really got hot over there, all they had to do was call up the reserves, right?
That made it a little easier to be a bus driver.
During the hiring process, each pilot applicant had been asked, “do you want to be a flight engineer or a pilot?”
Flight engineer?
Flight engineers weren’t pilots, at least by job description. They sat behind the pilots, at a separate panel. They were there to manage items like the fuel system and temperature control and monitor the engines.
Rob Martinside thought they were kidding. Who would want to be a flight engineer? In the Navy the only flight engineers he knew were enlisted men. They were mechanics who wore dungarees and tattoos. Martinside was an officer and a pilot.
So Martinside was hired as a pilot. And then he learned that newly hired pilots earned $500 per month, which amounted to $1,000 per month less than the newly hired flight engineers, who were also pilots. This oddity came about because of union contracts. The engineers were represented not by the Air Line Pilots Association but by their own union, the Flight Engineers International Association.
There was more bad news. “Pilot,” in the Pan Am lexicon, meant “copilot,” and in the case of Pan Am new hires, it meant that you could be assigned as a navigator.
Navigator! Being a flight engineer was bad enough. But navigators, in Martinside’s recollection, were failed pilots who had washed out of flight training and been recycled as stargazers.
The very notion astonished him. Why in the age of transoceanic jet transports and soon-to-come SSTs did Pan Am still fly airplanes across the planet with navigators—guys peering through holes in the ship, gazing up at the heavens for guidance? Had the tools of navigation not changed since Columbus and Magellan?
Well, yes, but not a lot. Celestial navigation was still around, and so were navigators.
And what did all this have to do with flying? That was the part that gnawed at those like Martinside. In the Navy he had been the sole occupant of his little delta-winged jet, wholly in command. Now he was not only no longer in command, he wasn’t even second in command. Instead of occupying a front seat, he was relegated to the back of the cockpit with his eyeball planted in the socket of an octant.
Ground school lasted six weeks. After 707 systems came an operations specifications course, and then a class on Pan Am weight and balance procedures and dispatch problems and aircraft performance.
Finally they were ready to fly.
That was supposed to be the easy part. Flying was flying, Martinside had always believed. If you could fly, say, an A-4 off carriers as he had done, you could fly anything. It was just a matter of adjustme
nt.
One star-filled night he found himself wallowing through the sky over Stockton, California, in the right seat of a Boeing 707. Despite his best efforts with the steering-wheel-like control yoke and the rudder pedals, he could not make the damn airplane fly straight. The beast wallowed, yawing in a sickening nose-left, right-wing-down. They called it a “Dutch roll”—an aerodynamic phenomenon peculiar to swept-wing transports like the 707. Forty years earlier the condition had been identified by engineers and named after an oscillating style of ice skating imported from the Netherlands.
“You stop it like this,” said Forster, the instructor. He applied a rightward jab to the yoke, then returned it to neutral. The rolling ceased. “Whenever it starts, just give it one of these,” Forster explained, jabbing the yoke to the left. “It’s easy.”
Martinside tried it. It wasn’t easy. After several tries he learned to anticipate the big jet’s tendency to swing its nose like a pendulum. The trick was to anticipate the yaw, then stop it with little, short jabs, as Forster had just done.
Dave Forster was a jolly man with a huge girth who smoked filter-tip cigarettes and told raunchy jokes while he flew. As a military pilot, he had commanded Air Force Two, Lyndon Johnson’s vice presidential transport. Because of his extensive experience in the military version of the 707, Pan Am had recruited him as an instructor.
Actual aircraft training could be dangerous. Simulators for Pan Am’s jets were still under development. Until they arrived, it was necessary to rehearse aircraft emergencies—engine loss on takeoff, emergency descents from high altitude, two-engine-out approaches—with real airplanes. The airlines had already experienced several spectacular accidents during training flights.
They trained mostly at night, when spare aircraft were available between scheduled trips. In the traffic patterns around outlying California airports like Stockton and Ontario and Mojave, the novice airline pilots wrestled with the big jets, learning the vagaries of Dutch rolls and instrument approaches and engine-out landings.
Skygods: The Fall of Pan Am Page 7