Skygods: The Fall of Pan Am

by Gandt, Robert

  Single-engine pilots like Rob Martinside and Mike Denham had never confronted the immense yaw problem when a four-engine jet—with two engines on each wing—lost the thrust of one engine. The airplane lurched sideward, slewed by the two engines on one wing versus the single good engine on the other. The pilot had to shove his foot hard on the rudder pedal to counter the yaw and keep the jet tracking straight ahead.

  Forster loved to pull back the throttle of an outboard engine—simulating an engine failure-during takeoff. “Keep it on the center line,” he ordered his students. “I don’t wanna see this thing move one inch off the center of the runway.”

  With practice, they learned. Martinside learned to anticipate the 707’s instant desire to head for the sagebrush just before liftoff when Forster cut an engine. He learned to feed in rudder, just enough, to keep the jet going straight down the runway. He learned to ease smoothly back on the yoke, lift the nose off the concrete, and fly away with three engines.

  Forster kept cutting engines and they kept shoving rudder pedals. They went around the traffic pattern at Stockton, screeching down again and again on the eight thousand feet of cement, and taking off again. Afterward they drank beer with Forster at the English Pub in Burlingame, and he told them war stories about flying C-135s and what it was like to haul Lyndon Johnson around.

  A few minutes before eight in the morning, Rob Martinside climbed out of his beat-up old Jaguar and gazed across the parking lot in the direction of the Pan Am hangar. He could see parked on the ramp what he had seen every Monday morning since he began training. The tall tail of yet another Boeing 707 towered over the vehicles and equipment. A new 707 was showing up in the same place every weekend, freshly delivered from the factory in Seattle.

  Pan Am’s fleet of jets was growing faster than the airline could train airmen to fly them. The company was hiring pilots at the rate of two new classes a month, about twenty-five pilots per class. Martinside’s seniority number, drawn by lottery among his twenty classmates, was 2323. That had made him eighth from the bottom on the entire Pan Am roster. Now, six weeks later, there were sixty-two pilots beneath him on the list. The list, it was said, would stretch to over 3500 within a year.

  The training department had become a factory, pumping out a steady stream of newly qualified navigators, engineers, first officers, and captains. So urgent was Pan Am’s need for bodies that some lucky new-hire classes were moving directly from their initial training into the first officer’s seat without serving, as Martinside and his classmates had done, an apprenticeship as flight engineer or navigator,

  Across the street a new building was under construction. It would be devoted exclusively to training. The three-story cube housed tiers of briefing rooms and cockpit mock-ups and contained several sixty foot bays for the new 707 simulators. These were hydraulic-powered, three-axis replicated cockpits that provided the sound and sight and feel of actual flight. In the simulators students could be drilled on standard operating procedures, and they could practice the engine-out work that Dave Forster had been conducting every night over the blackened hills at Stockton.

  At the other Pan Am bases in New York, Miami, and Berlin, the same thing was happening. “Old hires” of ten and twenty years seniority who had thought they would be career copilots were being propelled through captain training and taking command of brand-new 707s.

  Toting his canvas carry-on bag filled with blue-bound Pan Am manuals, Martinside walked across the parking lot to the main hangar. His eyes stayed fixed on the new 707, and he felt a private jubilation. Maybe he was still a lowly new hire. But just look at those new airplanes, the new building, all those new pilots.

  There was no doubt about it—this airline, Pan American World Airways, by God, it was taking off! Why, in no time they would stop calling him a new hire . . . he’d be halfway up the list. . . a first officer, sure, maybe even. . . why not?. . . maybe even a captain.

  Chapter Eight

  The Everyman Airplane

  Puget Sound, August 1965

  To Bill Allen, it was déjà vu. Here he was being needled again by Juan Trippe. It was just like a decade ago when Trippe was after him to build the 707. Not Boeing’s 707. Trippe’s 707.

  So he had built it—Trippe’s way. And as Trippe never tired of reminding him, Boeing and Pan Am—and eventually the entire industry—had reaped enormous profit. The 707 was the most successful jet in the world.

  Now Trippe wanted to do it again.

  It was a fine summer day. Puget Sound lay as placid as a mill pond, and in the backdrop swelled the magnificent Olympic Range. Their boat was named Wild Goose, and it belonged to actor John Wayne. They talked about salmon and the startlingly beautiful weather of the sound, and about golf, which they frequently played together. Eventually Trippe and Allen had gotten around to talking airplanes, which, after all, was the real purpose of the outing.

  That was how the two old titans of aviation made deals. Trippe would tease and prod and try to read Allen. Allen played the same game, fencing with Trippe, trying to read the Great Dissembler’s true intentions. It was how they had come to terms on the 707. Now they were doing it again.

  Would you build it if I bought it?

  Would you buy it if I built it?

  Although both Trippe and Allen were still ardent believers in the SST, both realized that the supersonic transport was way behind schedule. Given the political storm swelling around it, the futuristic jet might never fly, at least during the few years Allen and Trippe had remaining at their desks.

  They had to build something else.

  What Trippe had in mind was a stopgap airplane—something to fill the void between the first generation of jets, the 707 and DC-8, and the yet-to-be-built SST. They needed an airplane to satisfy the growing demand for passenger seats that he and Allen themselves had created with the Boeing 707. The first jets had made world travel available to Everyman, not just the rich and elite. Now they had to build a bigger airplane to satisfy the burgeoning new demand for travel—an Everyman airplane.

  William M. Allen had just turned sixty-six; he was less than a year older than Trippe. He was a large, robust man with Western tastes and attitudes. Over the years his face had thinned and his hair had whitened, but he had lost none of his Montana lawyer’s commonsense approach to business. The way he ran Boeing mirrored his own unpretentious lifestyle. He maintained his offices not at the company’s main facilities at Boeing Field, just south of Seattle, but downtown, on the third floor of an aging office complex with a railroad track running down one side. Boeing provided its officers neither limousines nor executive jets. Allen believed that people who built airliners ought to ride in them.

  The truth was, Bill Allen wanted the new airplane as much as Trippe. It would be the perfect swan song if he could step down knowing that he had launched the world’s mightiest ship of the sky. It would secure Boeing’s future well into the next century.

  Or it could ruin Boeing.

  Bill Allen’s willingness to take monumental risks with his company did not, in his reckoning, equate with recklessness. Nor did he think that Trippe could be accused of rolling the dice with his airline. It was something more calculated than that. Like most of the pioneers of aviation, he and Trippe had gotten ahead by a peculiar amalgam of financial savvy, vision, and guts.

  By the time the fishing trip was over, Allen and Trippe had moved from “If you build it, I’ll buy it” to a verbal commitment for a preliminary design.

  It wasn’t quite a deal. Not yet. But that evening when they stepped onto the dock from the Wild Goose, both men could feel the familiar old juices flowing.

  One more time.

  Just how big the new airliner—it was now called the 747—could be depended on the size of its engines. And therein lay the classic problem: there were no engines.

  Trippe wanted to use the GE engine that was being developed for the Air Force’s mammoth new Lockheed C-5A. But that was a military power plant, designed specifica
lly for a slower-cruising airplane and without particular regard for the niceties of smokeless exhaust and noise abatement. Yes, said Gerard Neumann of GE, eventually GE’s engine could be tweaked to provide the numbers Trippe and Allen wanted. But not now. The C-5A contract had absolute priority. No commercial engines until the military commitment had been satisfied.

  Meanwhile, Rolls-Royce of Britain, which had the most experience thus far in jet propulsion, let it be known that it was willing and eager to produce power plants for the new jet. Pan Am’s engineer, John Borger, was impressed with the proposals from Rolls, but he had nagging doubts about the hard-pressed company’s ability to deliver.

  More déjà vu. It was coming down all over again to the American engine maker Pratt & Whitney, the historical third member of the Boeing-Pan Am-P&W triumvirate—the same players from the 707 saga of a decade before. Trippe and Allen were still in the game, but Fred Rentschler, guiding spirit of Pratt & Whitney, had died almost at the same time his controversial J-75 engines began propelling Pan Am 707s in the early sixties. A man named Jack Horner now headed United Aircraft, Pratt & Whitney’s parent conglomerate. Horner was proposing that the new airliner be powered by a still-unbuilt 41,000-pound-thrust engine Pratt & Whitney had originally designed for the C-5A competition.

  Pan Am’s engineers, led by Borger, met throughout 1965 with Boeing’s team. They swapped specifications, submitted drawings, looked at mock-ups. The project remained a closely held secret, which Trippe shared with only a handful of his top associates.

  In Trippe’s original vision, the 747 was to be a double-decker. That had been the configuration of Pan Am’s popular old Boeing Stratocruiser, the transport version of the B-29 bomber, and it epitomized Trippe’s concept of an Everyman airplane: an airborne ocean liner. But gradually, through the nudging of Borger and Boeing’s payload engineer, Milt Heinemann, he came around to the idea of a wide-bodied fuselage, nearly round, with a two-aisled, nine-abreast seating configuration. With this configuration they could cram more passengers into the same cabin area with the same degree of comfort. In addition, there was a greater capacity in the belly for cargo—a factor as critical as the passenger load. It was becoming clear to Trippe that in the future, air cargo would be nearly as profitable as the carriage of passengers, and a more consistent source of revenue.

  How much would it cost? No one really knew. The latest version of the 707, called the B-Advanced model, of which Pan Am would soon own sixty, cost about $7 million per copy. By rough guess, at two and half times the 707’s size, the 747 should go for $17 to $20 million. Trippe was promising Allen that Pan Am would take twenty-five, plus spare parts, which amounted to an outlay of over half a billion dollars.

  Half a billion? It was a staggering sum in 1965. It amounted to the biggest commercial purchase in history. And it would be for a newly developed, untested airplane—one for which they didn’t even have engines.

  Financially, Boeing would be in as much peril as Pan Am. For a project the size of the 747, Boeing would have to build a whole new plant somewhere beyond its present facility. A production line of unprecedented dimensions and logistical complexity would have to be established. Just to recover the preproduction costs, Boeing would have to sell at least fifty airplanes. Pan American was the launch customer. If the Pan Am deal did not generate at least as many orders from other customers, Boeing was doomed. And Bill Allen knew it would be his fault.

  Allen demanded from Trippe a rigid payment schedule: a 2.5 percent deposit upon signing the contract, then half the entire amount paid in quarterly installments, due six months before delivery of the first 747. That meant Trippe would be anteing up a quarter billion dollars before he had even flown his first 747.

  Trippe’s own experience told him that new airplanes never lived up to their initial specifications. There were always glitches. Back in 1935 the China Clipper’s original payload and range were insufficient until her engines had been upgraded to more powerful versions. The first B-314 flying boats proved to be dangerously unstable on the water until Boeing provided a hull modification and added two more vertical fins to the tail. Even the successful 707 fell short of Trippe’s expectations until Pratt & Whitney provided the JT-3D fan-jet engine that made the airplane a true intercontinental airliner.

  Nor did new airplanes ever cost what they were supposed to. There were always modifications that someone had to pay for. Trippe knew that airframe manufacturers liked to blame a new airplane’s shortcomings on the engines. So as part of his arrangement with Allen, Trippe insisted that Boeing take full responsibility for the performance of the 747. Whether the engine lived up to its expectations or not would be Boeing’s problem.

  By late 1965, the initial specifications were in ink. The 747 would have a gross weight of 550,000 pounds. A passenger capacity of 350 to 400. Range of 5,100 miles. Initial cruise altitude of 35,000 feet. A maximum speed of 0.9 Mach, or 90 percent of the speed of sound.

  Trippe and Allen signed a letter of intent in December, three days before Christmas. To inside observers, the most striking aspect of the deal was the players themselves. Neither Trippe nor Allen seemed daunted by the immensity of the undertaking. They had become true believers. Each was behaving like an old partygoer, intoxicated by the glitz and sheen of one last great gala.

  A few brave souls had the temerity to question the deal. What if the 747 turned out to be a half-billion-dollar white elephant? Trippe scoffed at the notion. Look at the facts, he told the questioners. Pan Am was the strongest airline in the world. Its operating revenues now approached a billion dollars per annum. And just look at the rate of traffic growth within the industry. Fifteen percent a year since the jets came on line. Twenty-five percent internationally. Wasn’t there already a shortage of available seats across the Atlantic? The enormous revenue generated by a fleet of 747s, crammed with passengers, would repay the half-billion-dollar debt and thrust Pan Am into an era of unimagined prosperity. Pan Am would be ready for the stars.

  Trippe, the airline tycoon who had just spent $500 million on new airplanes, was not one to lose his head over small amounts. One morning a couple of weeks later, he was having breakfast in a hotel coffee shop with Sam Pryor, a Pan Am vice president. The bill came to $4.20.

  As usual, Trippe studied the itemized bill carefully. Then he divided it in half. He let Pryor take care of the tip.

  You could hear the groans reverberating from the engineering offices at Boeing. Angry aero-engineers were crumpling up drawings and hurling them into trash baskets. Why the hell doesn’t Pan Am make up its mind?

  The biggest problem they had in designing the world’s biggest airliner was turning out not to be technical. It was human, and its name was Juan Trippe. Almost daily the chairman of Pan Am came up with changes. Now he wanted more seats. He wanted the thing to carry as many as 490 economy-class passengers, or 375 mixed economy and first-class passengers. That meant lengthening the fuselage, widening it, moving the cockpit to the upper deck. Which, of course, meant more weight. Now Trippe was talking about a 710,000-pound airliner— an increase of 160,000 pounds.

  Nothing in aeronautical science came without a price. An increase in an airplane’s weight meant a corresponding decrease in its performance. Like an overstuffed bird, the 747 would suffer reduced operating range and maximum altitude because of its greater weight.

  Juan Trippe had a traditional fix for the weight-versus-performance problem. It was the same fix he had used in 1923 when he doubled the passenger capacity of his Aeromarine biplanes, and had applied to every Pan Am airliner since: you squeeze more power from the engines.

  The JT-9D fan-jet developed for the 747 by Pratt & Whitney produced 41,000 pounds of thrust, which translated to about 87,000 horsepower. It had more power than any airplane engine ever built. A single JT-9D produced more thrust than all four engines of the first Boeing 707s.

  Trippe wanted more. Instead of 41,000 pounds of thrust, why not boost it to 50,000? That would compensate for the added weight
of the airplane.

  Bill Gwinn, who now headed Pratt & Whitney, reacted as if he were being strangled. Hell, we don’t even know if we can get 41,000 pounds. Gwinn knew that you had to boost the maximum thrust of a new engine in small increments—after it had been tested many thousands of hours. This one had no history. Who knew what it would be capable of?

  Trippe had heard all this before, of course, and he didn’t care. He had learned that the first models of new airliners tended to be obsolete as soon as they entered service. After the original versions flew, there was an inevitable stretching and enhancing and boosting to make the airplane perform the way it was supposed to. Trippe had no intention of spending all this money on what would be a prototype for the real 747s—delivered to future customers.

  When he viewed a plywood mock-up of the 747 in March 1966, Trippe gazed for a long time at the spacious compartment on the second deck, behind the cockpit. He remembered the opulent accommodations of the double-decker B-314 flying boats and the stately Boeing Stratocruisers. They had sleeping berths and lounging cabins and dining rooms. Stewards in starched uniforms served dinner with real china and silver service. They were ocean liners of the skies.

  Trippe had an idea. “Why can’t we have a cocktail lounge up there?”

  The Boeing people exchanged pained looks.

  “And a spiral staircase,” Trippe added.

  More pained looks. Some were on the face of Pan Am engineer John Borger. Trippe’s ideas meant more weight, and even greater cost per airplane.

  Trippe wasn’t finished. “Maybe we ought to have staterooms on the second deck.”

  By the spring of 1966 the final contract was being drafted by the lawyers of Boeing and Pan Am. And then disaster struck.