Skygods: The Fall of Pan Am

by Gandt, Robert

  “Have you flown it?”

  “Last week,” said Lindbergh. “Out in Seattle. They let me try it out. It’s a marvelous airplane.”

  It was then that the pilots noticed that their visitor had changed. The void was gone. Since he had come to the cockpit, chatting with the crew, Lindbergh the public figure had been replaced by Lindbergh the pilot.

  Martinside could tell by Bob Pfaff’s voice and expression that the captain was living out a fantasy. It was Pfaff’s childhood dream come true. Here was Lindbergh—in his cockpit—calling him captain.

  The cockpit was silent for a minute. Martinside reminded himself that he must ask Lindbergh for his autograph. It would be a keepsake. He wondered why Pfaff didn’t tell the story about when he was seven years old and Lindbergh came to town. Normally you couldn’t shut Bob Pfaff up. He loved to tell stories. And, anyway, Lindbergh might find it funny.

  But Pfaff didn’t tell his story. For once, the captain was keeping his mouth shut.

  After a while, Lindbergh thanked the pilots and shook their hands. He said he had work to do back in the cabin.

  When Lindbergh was gone, Martinside said, “Why didn’t you tell him the story about the soap in your hair?”

  “I don’t know,” said Pfaff. “You saw how comfortable he seemed to be with us. Like he could relax for a minute and just talk airplanes without people worshipping him. I didn’t want to spoil it for him.”

  And then Martinside remembered the autograph. I didn’t get Lindbergh’s autograph. Why not?

  He knew. For the same reason Pfaff hadn’t told the story. They were like the kid in 1927. They had to look good for Lindbergh.

  The arrival of newly hired young pilots on Pan Am property, beginning in 1964, was a cause for celebration by the stewardesses. (Not until the next decade would they be called “flight attendants.”) They had seen no new male crew members since the late fifties.

  Pan Am boasted an international, multilingual cabin service. Stewardesses were recruited for their looks and for their language skills. A significant number came from Europe—Sweden, France, England, Germany—and from Japan. Most were single.

  The stewardesses called the short-haired, fresh-faced new-hire pilots “babygators.” The babygators loved it. These were the 1960s, and between the newly liberated women in the cabin and the crewcut new babygators, airborne romances blossomed like wildflowers.

  Which made it hard on young marriages. Divorce was already an epidemic among veteran Pan Am airmen, as it was at most major airlines. No one could say exactly why—the long trips away from home, the proximity of young, available women, or just some rampant hormone in the pilot chemistry—but airline pilots divorced at about twice the national rate. Now it was cutting a swath through the new hires, obliterating marriages that had survived the hardships of remote military posts, long separations, and war.

  Within the first year there were half a dozen divorces in Martinside’s group. One of them was Martinside’s.

  It happened on a flight to Guam.

  “What’s her name?” asked Martinside.

  “Jill Southhall,” said the engineer. “Don’t even think about it.”

  “Why?”

  “You want your ass fired? She’s married to Frank Southall. He’s a check captain and happens to be the meanest sonofabitch in the Pacific. I know two new hires already who got the boot because of him.”

  “Oh.”

  Check captains were Skygods of the ultimate magnitude. Their job was to police the way pilots were flying Pan Am’s airplanes. They were the on-the-job instructors, enforcers—and terminators. Some of the check pilots were patient teachers and excellent airmen in their own right. Some, like Captain Frank Southall, were just plain mean. All this Martinside already knew.

  But she was lovely. She had red hair and an English accent and a mocking laugh. The signals sent by the flashing green eyes and the touch of her fingers on his sleeve were unmistakable.

  Most of the new-hire pilots, like Martinside, had migrated from college to the military to the airlines. In their brief adulthood they had never been exposed to the plenitude of comely young women they found at Pan Am. For many it was too much to resist. And so it was with Martinside.

  He had already told himself to be sensible. To be prudent and disciplined. It was, after all, his career.

  Then one night in Guam he dismissed prudence and discipline. He picked up the phone in his room. “It’s Rob, Jill. Want to meet for a drink?”

  That was all. One drink. Then the walk on the beach. Then the moonlight swim, even though there was no moon. And then back to his room because they were wet and sandy and, anyway, they needed a drink, even though it turned out there was nothing to drink. But it didn’t matter.

  Jill and Rob became an item.

  In the subsequent weeks of their romance, Jill proved to be masterful at scheduling. As a junior pilot, Martinside had little control over his itinerary. But when he again landed in Guam, there was Jill. When he flew to Tokyo, Jill was one of the stewardesses assigned to the flight. Wherever he flew, it seemed, there was Jill. She arranged it.

  It was wonderful—and dangerous. They could sense disaster trailing them like a shadow, lurking outside the door, peering through curtained windows. It was like making love at the edge of an abyss.

  One day Jill made a mistake. She checked Martinside’s schedule and then, as usual, adjusted her own. But for once she neglected to check whether her husband had changed his schedule.

  He had.

  They were caught. There was an ugly scene in the hallway of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu between the Skygod and the new hire. The result was as predictable as the sun rising over Diamond Head.

  The message was waiting for Martinside when he returned to San Francisco:

  TO: THIRD OFFICER R.D. MARTINSIDE, SAN FRANCISCO BASE

  FROM: CHIEF PILOT, PACIFIC

  YOU ARE SCHEDULED FOR A PROBATIONARY PILOT RETENTION HEARING IN THE OFFICE OF THE CHIEF PILOT AT 1300, 4 MARCH.

  YOU ARE ENTITLED TO REPRESENTATION BY ALPA.

  Retention hearing. Like all probationary pilots, Martinside knew what that meant. It was airline code. It meant fire his ass.

  He wore his blue suit, the same one he’d worn to the initial hiring interview. He had a fresh haircut. In a manila envelope tucked under his arm he carried copies of his initial aircraft training grades, which were excellent, and copies of two letters of commendation from captains he had flown with. It wouldn’t hurt, he figured. Balance the bad with some good.

  Even though probationary pilots had no contractual rights, they could be accompanied by a representative from ALPA, the pilots’ union. Martinside declined. He thought his chances were better going it alone.

  He showed up at five minutes before one o’clock. The outer office was swarming with company officials and uniformed pilots. Harried secretaries were simultaneously answering telephones and talking to the men leaning over their desks.

  He worked his way to the desk of a matronly secretary. “Miss Becklund,” he said, “I’m Robin Martinside—”

  “Who?” Miss Becklund looked exasperated. She had worked around pilots for thirty years.

  “Martinside. I’m here for a—”

  “You picked a bad day for it.”

  “I didn’t really pick it, Miss Becklund. I’m supposed to have a retention—”

  “Look, young man, you’ll have to come back another time. Haven’t you heard? We’ve just lost an airplane.”

  Martinside walked back out of the office. His manila envelope was still tucked under his arm.

  The news filtered down to the crew lounge. Pilots stood in clusters talking about the crash.

  “What was it?”

  “A 707 freighter, on descent into Manila. Disappeared off radar. They think it hit the mountain range east of the airport.”

  “Who was the captain?”

  “Lou Cogliani.”

  Cogliani. No comment, just a silent n
od. It wasn’t the right time to make judgments. But each pilot guessed in his heart what had happened out there in the Pacific. And he worried that it could happen again.

  It Did. There were more accidents. And there was a series of near accidents, most involving veteran captains of boat days vintage. An ominous trend was developing that no one was yet willing to examine. But a suspicion was taking root among the junior pilots that something was inherently flawed with the way Pan Am was flying airplanes. And it began somewhere in the inner soul of the company culture—with the Skygods.

  One embarrassing incident involved Check Captain Frank Southall, who, on a gloriously clear day in Montreal, landed a Pan Am 707 at the wrong airport. Southall was relieved of his check duties and soon slipped off into retirement.

  Not long after, when Rob Martinside went into the office to inquire about his “retention hearing,” he was told to forget it. The matter had been dropped.

  Chapter Ten

  Succession

  The old man rose early that morning. At the street level his driver was waiting in the Chrysler. It was a Tuesday, and traffic was heavy. Looking down Park Avenue, he could see the great canyon blocked by the towering slab with the fifteen-foot-high letters—PAN AM. It was still the world’s largest commercial office building. The old man knew it continued to irritate the Primitives, and that thought gave him pleasure.

  The driver deposited him at the usual place at the curb. His private elevator whisked him to the forty-sixth floor. He shuffled down the hall, smiling cordially to the minions whose names he couldn’t remember.

  It was the day of the annual stockholders’ meeting, Juan Trippe’s fortieth such occasion. The meeting was to be in the Windsor Ballroom of the Commodore Hotel, across the street. Trippe had forgotten when the meeting was supposed to convene. He called his vice president for public relations, Willis Player. “What time is the meeting?”

  “Two-fifteen,” said Player. Trippe acknowledged, and then promptly forgot. He returned to his task, working on the statement he would make to the stockholders.

  At one-thirty, Player came by. It was time to go, he told Trippe. They took the elevator downstairs, descended by escalator into the Grand Central lobby, and went through the underground corridor to the Commodore.

  Eight hundred stockholders were assembled in the ballroom. Uniformed Pan Am stewardesses were serving refreshments and distributing annual reports. Chairman Trippe called the meeting to order. In his high-pitched Eastern Establishment monotone he rambled along, reciting the mountain of statistics about the airline’s economic performance.

  Nineteen sixty-seven had been another spectacular year—when examined by itself. Pan Am had earned $65.7 million on revenues of $950 million. But that represented a 21.5 percent drop from the previous year. And the first quarter of 1968 showed that the slump was continuing—revenues up 15.6 percent against increased operating expenses of 22.6 percent, a loss of 4 cents a share versus last year’s profit of 15 cents.

  The numbers were buried in Trippe’s forty-five-minute-long report. Few of the stockholders paid much attention. Several fell sound asleep.

  The reason for the decline was obvious, but not easily explained. The phenomenal growth of passenger traffic during the first two-thirds of the decade was reversing itself. Pan Am’s fleet of jets was flying around half empty. Worse, American overseas travelers were flying in larger numbers—over half of them—aboard foreign flag carriers.

  Among the bored Pan Am stockholders there were no cries of alarm. No questions were raised. The numbers and their ominous trend caused them no concern. What the hell, Pan Am was still making money, wasn’t it? They had come to vote on the directors, not to be bored with accounting data.

  The chairman droned toward the end of his report. It was midafternoon and the audience was glassy-eyed. Several dozed in their chairs. Trippe told them that after the stockholders’ meeting was adjourned, the new board of directors would meet.

  And then he dropped the bomb.

  “It is my intention to retire,” Trippe said.

  An electric current passed through the audience. What did he say?

  “At the meeting of the board,” Trippe announced, “I plan to nominate President Harold Gray to succeed me as chairman and chief executive officer of our company.”

  Trippe is stepping down? It took a moment to sink in. Then the business reporters scurried for telephones. This was hot stuff. After forty-one years, the last airline tycoon was packing it in.

  Someone began clapping. The rest of the stunned audience, unsure of the correct response, hesitantly joined in. The applause swelled and filled the ballroom.

  Like all publicly held corporations, Pan American was supposed to be answerable to its stockholders and board of directors. And so it was, but Pan Am’s directors also understood that Pan Am was, in effect, Juan Trippe’s airline—his personal fiefdom.

  Since July 1964, when Trippe arranged to have himself promoted to the newly created rank of chairman of the board, his control of Pan American had been total. Now he reigned over the conglomerate—airline, missile range, business jets, hotels, office building—in imperial isolation. Pan Am’s corporate hierarchy was arranged along feudal lines with Trippe, the Supreme Skygod, at the head of the court. Beneath him his senior executives were moved like chess pieces, promoted and demoted at Trippe’s whim, often without warning. Although he left the day-to-day management of the airline to his company officers, it was Trippe alone who steered Pan Am’s course into the future. Trippe himself, often without any other consultation, made sweeping commitments to the boldest of new ventures.

  By long tradition, the directors of Pan American World Airways were men of Trippe’s choosing. They represented a cross section of the American Establishment, chosen less for business acumen than for their public stature. There were no mavericks among them, no dissenters, no shrill voices demanding explanations. They included Arthur Watson of IBM; Cyrus Vance, who would become secretary of State; bankers James Rockefeller and Robert Lehman; Donald David, who had been dean of the Harvard Business School; Norman Chandler, chairman of the Los Angeles Times Mirror Company; Robert B. Anderson, former Secretary of the Treasury; and Charles Lindbergh, who was, perhaps, most unlike the others.

  An hour after the stockholders’ meeting, the board of directors met in the walnut-paneled boardroom on the forty-ninth floor. Like the stockholders, none of the directors expressed concern that the traffic statistics were on a downward slope. No one was alarmed that 707s were flying across the oceans less than half full. On this historic day no one wanted to suggest the awful possibility that Pan Am might be heading into stormy seas. Not one of the eminent persons on the board of directors interrupted the proceedings to clear his throat and pose the awkward question: Excuse me, gentlemen, but if we can’t fill our 707s, how are we going to make money with a fleet of 747s, each of which carries two and a half times as many passengers as the 707?

  The directors were there to do what Pan Am’s boards traditionally did: vote their approval of Juan Trippe’s decisions. On this auspicious day, the business of Trippe’s retirement and the succession overshadowed any discussion about the company’s performance. Trippe was stepping down. The company was doing business as usual. The giant new 747—Trippe’s Everyman airplane—was coming next year. All in all, it was an occasion for smiles.

  It was a ritualistic passing of the torch. Trippe, still the chairman, asked seventy-six-year-old Robert Lehman, investment banker and longtime Establishment figure, to take over as temporary chairman. Trippe then formally nominated Harold Gray and the newcomer, Najeeb Halaby, for the posts of chairman and president.

  Each director cast his vote. It was unanimous, in favor. And then Charles Lindbergh nominated Trippe for the post of chairman emeritus. Again, a unanimous vote.

  None of the directors was surprised by Trippe’s choice of Gray to succeed him because Trippe had called each of them the week before. They were comfortable with Gray, althou
gh no one had ever thought of him as some bright new vision for Pan Am’s future. Gray was a solid manager, an insider who understood Pan Am’s cabalistic company culture.

  When Harold Gray came to Pan American at the age of twenty-three, the tenth pilot in its history to be hired, everyone knew he was different. He was not at all like the seat-of-the-pants, fly-for-the-hell-of-it pilots of his time. Gray was a cerebral aviator, one of the few of his generation with a degree in aeronautical engineering. At Pan American he became known as a flying theoretician, an oddball with a slide rule.

  Gray was just the sort of thinker/pilot/manager Priester had in mind for Pan American. It was Gray who figured out the most economical power settings for the Ford trimotors. Gray put the first instrument flying methods to the test at Pan American, and it was Gray who oversaw the extensive testing and modification of the troubled Boeing B-314 flying boats. When Priester created the exalted rank of Master of Ocean Flying Boats, it was, of course, Harold Gray who was the first to pass all the tests. When the great Ed Musick perished in a ball of flame off Pago Pago, it was Gray who quietly stepped into his place

  In 1937 Gray was assigned to command the S-42B Clipper II, the first Atlantic survey flight to Europe, and he was the captain of the inaugural Atlantic crossing of the Yankee Clipper, the Boeing B-314 flying boat. By the age of thirty-two, he was chief pilot of the Atlantic Division (in those days Pan Am had Atlantic, Pacific-Alaska, and Latin American divisions). Then he became vice president of the Pacific-Alaska Division, where he was the first manager to operate the division without government subsidy and still make money. When he became vice president of the prestigious Atlantic Division, he also made that operation profitable. When the east-west departments were combined into the Overseas Division, it was Gray who took charge.