On March 30, Juan Trippe was sitting in an audience of businessmen—members of the President’s Business Advisory Council—listening to Lyndon Baines Johnson tell them that these were difficult times. They must all, executives of industry and government alike, join together in this mutual sacrifice.
Trippe’s internal alarm began jangling: mutual sacrifice?
These were difficult times, Johnson was saying in his Texas hill country twang. The country must come first. The United States was in real danger of runaway inflation. The immediate—and temporary—cure, Johnson wanted them know, was a “voluntary pullback in your plans to expand industries, construct new plants, broaden your capital outlays.”
Pullback? Trippe caught the glance of Bill Allen, seated across the room. How could they pull back now? The pact between Pan Am and Boeing would be the largest commercial deal in America’s history. Now Johnson wanted to pull the rug out from under both companies.
Trippe knew that Allen had already set in motion Boeing’s plans to construct a mammoth assembly site for the 747 in a forest near the company airfield at Everett, Washington. A thirty-five-mile railroad spur would connect the site to the Boeing field. The new plant alone represented an expenditure of $250 million.
What the President was not saying, of course, was that this was 1966 and his administration was bankrolling a war. Billions of borrowed U.S. dollars were being sown into the mud of Southeast Asia. And to keep America’s economy from self-immolating, LBJ wanted the business community to cool it.
Most of the businessmen stared at the President in stony silence. They were realists. Lyndon Johnson was a notoriously manipulative President who could—and would—cut off the oxygen of any corporation that did not play according to his rules.
Before the audience became too restive, Johnson abruptly adjourned the meeting. Most of the businessmen gathered their briefcases and stalked for the door. Johnson nodded sourly as each took his leave.
Juan Trippe did not leave. He could sense the curtain descending on his last and grandest dream. Trippe hung back, looking for an opportunity to approach the President, whose lanky frame was now surrounded by other agitated businessmen.
Trippe maneuvered himself to the head of the line. For all his famous vagueness and rambling, Juan Trippe, in a crisis, could transform himself into an impassioned salesman. For the next fifteen minutes he delivered the sales pitch of his life.
The 747, he told a skeptical Johnson, would vastly increase the Air Force’s emergency troop-carrying capacity. Its foreign sales would contribute mightily to correcting America’s balance-of-trade problem. Construction of the 747 would keep thousands of workers employed. The jumbo jet’s technological sophistication would place the United States light-years ahead of its envious European competitors. And anyway, by the time the assembly line was in full production the economic cycle would have swung and the expenditure for new fleets of airplanes would be just what the economy needed.
Trippe only hinted at the most pertinent detail: all this would occur in 1968, an election year.
Johnson rubbed his eyes. He had ingested too many facts in too short a time. “Does anyone else know about this?”
“Only Bill Allen at Boeing,” said Trippe, disingenuously, “and now you.”
“Be here tomorrow morning at ten,” the President said. “My car will be waiting.”
The next morning Trippe was taken to a meeting with Robert McNamara, Johnson’s Secretary of Defense, whom Johnson liked to call “the man with the stickum on his hair.” In the post-Kennedy era, McNamara had become, in effect, the assistant President.
McNamara wanted to know why Trippe didn’t use a civilian version of the Lockheed C-5A that was being developed for the Air Force. The C-5A was a mammoth cargo airplane that looked like a horizontal office building with fins. Why couldn’t that be the next-generation airliner?
Trippe told McNamara that Pan Am had already looked at the C-5A. The big jet was just fine for the Air Force. It was built like a locomotive. But as a commercial airliner it would be a disaster. No one could afford to operate such a craft because it was slow, consumed inordinate quantities of fuel, and would never meet the stringent passenger safety standards imposed by the Federal Aviation Agency. Any airline would go broke trying to fly the C-5A.
McNamara was not pleased. “You’re telling me that I’ve just wasted five hundred million dollars of the taxpayers’ money?”
No, Trippe assured him. The Air Force needed an airplane like the C-5A. But the airlines had a different requirement. What they needed was the 747.
McNamara’s analytical brain processed the information. After he’d thought for a minute, he picked up the phone and called the President. Then he dragged Trippe off to the White House.
In front of LBJ, Trippe delivered his pitch again, tailoring it to the President’s concerns, which were more political than technical: How many jobs would the 747 create? In what states? Who were the sub-contractors? Where were they located?
After half an hour, Johnson had heard enough. He told McNamara, “Get somebody down here from Boeing.”
Juan Trippe walked out of the White House with a smile on his face. The Everyman airplane was back on track.
The Imperial Skygod took his customary place at the head of the long table. Assembled in the walnut-paneled boardroom on the forty-sixth floor of the Pan Am Building were his directors. It was the afternoon of April 12, 1966, and they had been summoned to Trippe’s court to vote their approval of his ocean liner of the skies.
There were some heavyweights on the board: General Alfred Gruenther, former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, who had always championed American leadership in the skies and who could be counted on to support Trippe’s new airplane; Dave Ingalls, an old Trippe friend from the Yale days and a Pan Am insider; old Mark McKee, former president of the Wisconsin and Michigan Steamship Company and a Pan Am board member since the thirties. McKee usually dozed off during board meetings and awakened in time to vote with the majority. Charles Lindbergh was a member, and everyone knew he favored the Everyman airplane as a sensible alternative to the planet-polluting SST.
There were the inside directors, all company officers like Harold Gray and Sam Pryor, who already knew about the superjet project and would be expected—required—to vote with their chairman.
Trippe reeled off his numbers. Traffic was projected to increase by at least 15 percent a year into the next decade. Each 747 would replace two and a half 707s and would operate at 30 percent less seat-mile cost. The 747 would slice twenty-five minutes off each Atlantic crossing.
And, oh, yes, Trippe added, the administration of President Johnson had given its blessing to the Boeing-Pan American 747 contract.
That was the clincher. The board of directors asked a few questions, made comments, then did its duty. The members granted their official approval to the project that Trippe had already undertaken. Trippe had authorization to buy twenty-five 747s, as well as an option for ten more. It meant that Pan Am’s indebtedness for the 747s and for the previously ordered 707s now amounted to nearly a billion dollars.
There was no argument. There were no dissenting votes. The Imperial Skygod had decided. So it would be.
Chapter Nine
On The Line
Jim Wood was the first of his class to complete first officer training. For his initial line trip he was scheduled to fly with one of the ancients, a senior captain named Lou Cogliani. The trip was to Honolulu and back.
Wood showed up an hour and a half early. His shoes were spitshined. The three gold stripes on each sleeve glowed like neon. He was prepared to learn about flying from the old master.
“Sir,” he said, extending his hand, “I’m Jim Wood, your first officer.”
Captain Lou Cogliani, Master of Ocean Flying Boats, peered at the young man over the tops of his half-frames. It was the Look. He ignored Wood’s hand. “How long you been flying, kid?”
“Ten years, including the Air Fo
rce and—”
“Never mind that shit. How long you been with Pan Am?”
“I’m new, sir. Just out of training.”
Cogliani leaned over the operations counter. “Goddamnit, Evans,” he barked at the clerk. “What’s going on here? I told ‘em I didn’t want any new hires in my cockpit.”
“I don’t make the schedule, Lou. There’s the phone. Call the chief pilot if you want.”
Cogliani glowered at the phone. Then he shuffled through the paperwork for the flight to Honolulu. He ignored his new copilot.
They took off. Cogliani still had not spoken to Wood, except to order him to read the checklist.
Wood watched how the old master flew the 707. Captain Cogliani, he noticed, flew an airplane the way a bear handled a beach ball. He gripped the yoke with both hands. The veins stood out on his tensed forearms. He yanked, jerked, shoved, manhandled the protesting 707 all the way to 35,000 feet.
Wood glanced back at the flight engineer. The engineer nodded and rolled his eyes.
Wood was confused. Cogliani was a Skygod—a Master of Ocean Flying Boats. He was one of those legends that Wood most of all wanted to be like someday. He was supposed to be a hero. Something was wrong, thought Jim Wood. The Skygod was an asshole.
Approaching Honolulu, Cogliani commenced his descent from altitude too late, ignoring Wood’s reminder about their rapidly diminishing distance from the airport. Too high for the approach, Cogliani had to fly a circle to lose altitude. Then he overshot the localizer, the final approach course. Honolulu Approach Control vectored them back onto an approach course straight into the runway.
At fifteen hundred feet above the field, the captain had still not called for the landing gear down. Wood kept his silence.
A thousand feet. Still no gear. Jim Wood bit his lip and said nothing.
At six hundred feet, Wood could stand no more. “Do you want the landing gear down, captain?”
Cogliani glowered at him. “Landing gear? Goddammit, I’ll tell you when I want the gear down.” Two and one-half seconds later, with a great deal of authority, he told him. “Gear down!”
No one, not even a new hire like Jim Wood, would dare suggest that the captain—a Master of Ocean Flying Boats—might actually have forgotten to lower his landing gear. Instead, Wood did something even more foolish. He laughed.
Three days later, in the chief pilot’s office, Wood received his first lesson in Skygod protocol. The chief—the craggy-faced man who had welcomed Wood’s class to Pan American—regarded the young man over the tops of his own half-frames.
“Do you want to keep your job, son?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then get this. You will sit there and raise and lower the captain’s landing gear—on command—and keep your impertinent, newly hired mouth shut. Clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Get out of here.”
Lou Cogliani wasn’t unique. From around the world, new hires brought back stories about flying with the Skygods.
Martinside flew with a captain named Will Fenton. Fenton was a man of fearsome visage who had a shaved head and wore a goatee. When he smiled, Will Fenton looked like evil incarnate. By company rule, pilots were not supposed to wear beards, but Fenton, a Skygod, had exempted himself from such earthly rules.
They were flight-planned from San Francisco to Honolulu at 35,000 feet. Standing at the operations counter, Fenton scratched out the flight level on the flight plan and wrote in 24,000 feet. He scratched out “.82” in the column for Mach number and wrote in “.86.” Increasing the Mach number—the ratio of the airplane’s speed to the speed of sound—translated to an increased speed over the ocean of twenty knots. Fenton threw the flight plan back over the counter. “Refile us for the lower altitude and higher speed,” he said to the dispatcher.
The dispatcher gazed at Fenton warily through his horn-rimmed glasses. “May I ask why, captain?”
“One simple reason,” said Fenton. He leaned over the counter as if to share a secret. “It’s faster.”
The dispatcher looked disgusted. “But it wastes fuel. Flying at that Mach number at twenty-four thousand will cost”—he ran his finger down a chart—”nearly twelve thousand more pounds of fuel.”
“Good,” said Fenton. “Put on twelve thousand more. I’m in a hurry.”
And so it happened. The Skygod had decreed. The dispatcher called for an additional twelve thousand pounds of fuel to be loaded on the 707. To the delight of its 125 passengers, Pan Am Flight 906, commanded by Captain Fenton, touched down that night in Honolulu twenty-five minutes ahead of its scheduled arrival.
Will Fenton had a date, and he didn’t want to be late.
One of the toughest things about flying with old Bob Farnham was keeping him awake. Another was keeping him reminded of details like where they were going and what day it was.
Farnham was a Skygod, at least by seniority if not by ilk. He had been around since the early boat days. The copilots liked flying with Farnham, because he exhibited none of the Skygodly bellicosity and bluster. He had fluffy red-gray hair and looked like Santa Claus. Unlike some of his boat captain colleagues who had been time-warped into the jet age, Farnham could be a very competent aviator—when he remembered to be.
One evening Captain Farnham arrived at the airport, about to depart on a week-long trip to Europe. He was running late, fifteen minutes past his check-in time. He drove his Cadillac—the Skygods’ chariot of choice—directly to the operations office. He parked in the drop-off space in front of the office and ran inside with his suitcase. He left the motor running on the Cadillac. He intended to check in, say hello to his crew, then go park the car.
He forgot.
Captain Farnham chatted with his first officer. He perused the seven-and-a-half-hour flight plan to Paris. With the first officer and navigator he made his way to the gate where the 707 was receiving its passengers. He took off for Paris.
The motor of the Cadillac continued to run.
For a week, Farnham flew around the globe. He flew to Paris, and later to Tehran, to Beirut, and on to London. For not one instant were his thoughts troubled by the faraway labored chugging of the parked Cadillac.
Meanwhile, some junior pilots removed Farnham’s car to the parking lot. On the day he was scheduled to return, they put the Cadillac back in its space at the operations office. They left the motor running.
Captain Farnham did not notice that there was a bigger-than-usual crowd at the operations office that day. He said goodbye to his crew. Suitcase in hand, he strolled out to the curb where crew members normally boarded the bus to the parking lot.
There was his car. The motor was still running.
For a moment, the captain stared at his automobile. His eyes narrowed as disconnected thoughts sought union in his brain. Didn’t I . . . how could it . . . but there’s my car. . .
The moment passed. He shrugged his shoulders—Oh, well, screw it—got in his car, and drove away.
One night Martinside was in the cockpit of a 707, preparing for departure. The purser came into the cockpit and handed the crew a business card. “Some guy wants to know if he could visit the cockpit.”
The card read:
GENERAL CHARLES A. LINDBERGH
DIRECTOR, PAN AMERICAN WORLD AIRWAYS
“Please ask him to come up,” said the captain, Bob Pfaff.
Pfaff turned to Martinside. “Before he gets here, let me tell you a story.” Pfaff said that when he was a kid, seven years old, Lindbergh came to his hometown. It was after his famous flight in 1927, and Lindbergh was making his triumphal tour of the United States. There was a parade, and everyone turned out. Pfaff was a kid with an unruly mop of hair never touched by a comb. But on this day, before the Lindbergh parade, his parents had found him in the bathroom smearing soap in his hair. He was plastering it down in a gooey, slicked-back mess.
What in the hell was he doing? His father wanted to know.
“I want to look good for
Lindbergh,” said the kid.
That had been important. “Lindbergh was my hero,” recalled Captain Pfaff, in the cockpit of his jetliner. “That’s why I rubbed that damn soap in my hair. I wanted to look good for Lindbergh.”
There was a knock on the cockpit door, and in came Lindbergh. He smiled his kindly smile. The still-youthful face and the ice-blue eyes and the voice were friendly, but he was businesslike and reserved. There was a void there. Lindbergh had spent a lifetime being hounded by fans, reporters, cranks. He was a man who didn’t let people get close.
The pilots introduced themselves. Lindbergh slid his long legs around the jump seat and sat facing the flight engineer. He looked around the cockpit. He gazed at the instrument panel, then back at the engineer’s panel. “Are you fellows still having problems with the CSDs disconnecting?”
The flight engineer looked surprised. “No, sir,” he aid. “They’ve gotten better. We hardly ever have one disconnect anymore.”
“Good,” said Lindbergh. “We researched that problem and decided to try increasing the radius of that shear fitting in the drive unit. That seems to have fixed it.”
The crew members looked at each other. Lindbergh had been a technical consultant to Pan Am for forty years. He was obviously still very much involved in maintenance and engineering matters.
Lindbergh talked about JT-3 engine oil consumption. “Amazing, isn’t it? All four of these jet engines consume less oil than just one of the old recips.” He talked about how to handle the manual mode of the cabin pressurization system. “You’ll probably never have to use it, since we made the system completely automatic.” About the new navigation devices, he told them, “We knew about the Doppler effect back in the twenties, but it took this long to figure out how to use it.”
Lindbergh, it turned out, knew as much about such things as most line pilots. Then he talked about the new 747. His face brightened. “You fellows are going to love that airplane.”
Skygods: The Fall of Pan Am Page 9