Skygods: The Fall of Pan Am

by Gandt, Robert

  Halaby trudged back to the boardroom. He acknowledged their decision. The next order of business was to elect Halaby’s replacement.

  Juan Trippe had someone in mind. The old tycoon unclasped his hands and declared in his Eastern, clipped accent, “I nominate William T. Seawell as chairman and chief executive officer of Pan American World Airways.”

  As it had done for forty-five years, the board obeyed the Imperial Skygod. There were no dissenting votes.

  Chapter Sixteen

  A Place Where You Never Have To Grow Up

  “Mama, I’m going to grow up and be an airline pilot.”

  “Make up your mind, son. You know you can’t do both.”

  Jim Wood was cruising at ten thousand feet in the southern Berlin air corridor. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing on the air traffic control frequency. It sounded like a chicken.

  Prrrruck - puck - puck . Prrrrruck - puck - puck- puck.

  Yes, thought Wood, that’s what it was. It was definitely a chicken. Why was a chicken transmitting on the radio?

  Prrrrrrrrruck - puck - puck -puck.

  “Chicken Man, this is Berlin Center,” said the air traffic controller. “Is that you?”

  Prrrrrrruck - puck - puck.

  “Roger, Chicken Man. Nice to hear you back on the air.”

  Chicken’s Man’s identity was supposed to be a secret, but everyone knew that he was really a wacky Berlin-based pilot named Al Bond. Bond’s talisman was a rubber plucked chicken, which he liked to carry in his flight bag with its head dangling out. He would board his airplane this way, carrying the bag with the rubber chicken, and then make a ceremony of hanging the chicken in the doorway of the cockpit. Startled passengers had been known to scream and demand to be let out of Chicken Man’s airplane.

  One day an inbound flight crew radioed the maintenance office: “Have someone meet the airplane. We had a bird strike on the windshield.”

  A collision with a bird was a serious incident. It could cause severe damage to the jetliner and sometimes even injure the crew. Maintenance personnel rushed to meet the airplane. As the 727 taxied toward the ramp, the mechanics could see that there was indeed evidence of a bird strike, and it was a bad one. The carcass was still on the windshield.

  But something wasn’t right. As the airplane rolled nearer they saw the corpse. It looked like. . . could it be. . . yes, that’s what it was. . . a damned chicken hanging from the windshield wiper.

  This happened on Jim Wood’s third day of flying in Berlin. Everyone seemed to think it was good fun, especially Chicken Man.

  As Wood stood on the ramp watching the mechanics remove the rubber bird, he saw another pair of pilots walking toward their airplane. One was wearing a red fez. The other had a cape and a Russian fur hat.

  This was not the way Pan Am pilots were supposed to look. These guys are weird, thought Wood.

  And then Wood suddenly realized a truth. He had found a home.

  Pan Am’s Berlin base, two hundred miles behind the Iron Curtain, was an outpost. Because of its remoteness, a tradition of eccentricity had taken root there, like a strain of mutant oats. Pilots liked to say that if you weren’t weird when you came to Berlin, then you had to pretend to be. The base was considered by the rest of the system to be a loony bin. The crew room in Berlin was called, aptly, the Cuckoo’s Nest.

  Most airline pilots, by inclination and screening, were straight arrows. They tended toward conservatism in politics, dress, social behavior. But as in any assemblage of professionals, a small number of pilots—about 10 percent by most guesses—turned out to be different. A few, in fact, were downright weird. For such airmen employed by Pan American, the base for them was Berlin.

  Berlin was a place where you never had to grow up. It was where the Peter Pans and black sheep and oddballs of the airline found refuge. It was where you transferred if you were hiding from a wife, ex-wife, creditor, or ill-humored husband.

  To the dismay of their supervisors, the Berlin airmen didn’t even look like airline pilots. They disdained traditional uniforms. They affected bizarre trappings that included berets, babushkas, capes, monocles, and, in the case of Chicken Man, a rubber fowl.

  Pilots got away with such things in Berlin for one reason: they flew well. The Berlin operation consistently posted the most enviable flying safety record in the airline. Since its inception during the Berlin blockade of 1948-49, the Berlin-based pilots had flown millions of Germans in the foulest imaginable weather through the air corridors to Berlin—and never injured a passenger. Moreover, the Berlin base always boasted the best on-time schedule performance in the Pan Am system.

  And so years back a tacit decision was made in Pan Am’s headquarters: Okay, let them be a little weird—as long as they fly safely and on time.

  As a result of the four-power pact dividing Berlin among the occupying powers—the United States, Britain, France, the Soviet Union—Pan Am had an exclusive right to serve Berlin as the single designated American carrier. Air France and British European Airways also flew the corridors to West Germany, while the Russian and East German airlines operated from Schoenefeld Airport in the Eastern Zone. Since the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, Berlin had been a divided city, living under the guns of the Red Army.

  For the pilots, Berlin had the camaraderie of a fighter squadron, a men’s social club, a fraternity house. It was an airline within an airline. The pilots flew together and skied together and drank together. They lent each other money and rotated girlfriends.

  Their cohesiveness was due, in part, to the shared uniqueness of their outpost, Berlin. They were settlers in a strange land. And they knew that what they did had a purpose. Every day they saw the reasons for their presence—the Berlin Wall that split the city, MiG fighters skulking in the corridors, Red Army tanks maneuvering in the countryside. It was great fun and deadly serious all at the same time.

  In San Francisco, Rob Martinside received a cablegram:

  WEATHER TERRIBLE. CORRIDOR FLYING DIFFICULT. GERMANS INSUFFERABLE. RUSSIANS HOSTILE. WOMEN AGGRESSIVE. YOU’LL LOVE IT. COME ON OVER.

  WOOD

  There were copilot openings in the Berlin base. Like everything else in the airline profession, new assignments were filled according to seniority. The most senior pilots who bid for the new openings received the assignments. Martinside submitted his bid, and three weeks later he received notification of his transfer as a first officer to the Internal German Service, based in Berlin.

  His contemporaries thought he was crazy.

  Berlin? Berlin was, after all, a self-imposed demotion. A pilot’s pay was based on the size of the airplane he flew. The Boeing 727, the only airliner Pan Am operated in Berlin, was a smaller and, thus, a lesser-paying machine than the intercontinental 707 Martinside had been flying.

  Beyond the issue of money, it still didn’t make sense.

  “You’re living in California. Why would you want to give this up to go to Berlin? The place is surrounded by commies.”

  “Are you crazy, Rob? Over there I hear you can’t get football on TV. You can’t get parts for a Corvette or a Harley-Davidson. You can’t join a country club. You probably can’t get a decent haircut. Hell, I bet they don’t even speak good English.”

  Many of the pilots commuted to Berlin. They maintained traditional homes and families in Minnesota or Pennsylvania or Oklahoma and divided their lives between there and Berlin. Some became aeronautical models of the character in the old movie Captain’s Paradise, in which Alec Guinness played a sea captain who kept wives in separate ports.

  There was, for example, the Deacon. The Deacon was a captain who kept a home and a wife and two daughters in Ponca City, where he really was a deacon in his church, as well as a teetotaler and a member of the school board. In Ponca City the Deacon was a paragon of morality and godliness.

  Then he would go to Berlin.

  As he stepped off the airplane at Tempelhof Flughafen, a metamorphosis took place. The Deacon’s sai
ntly countenance would transform into a debauched grin. Gone were all thoughts of church and family. Foremost in the Deacon’s needs were tall foaming steins of Pilsner Urquel and an ample-breasted barmaid named Helga.

  The Deacon spent most of his idle hours in a bar called the Hundekehle. Because of the money he had invested over the years in the Hundekehle, a bar stool was permanently reserved for him. Perched on his stool, surrounded by like-minded comrades, the Deacon would hold court. He consumed Urquel, smoked evil-smelling Polish cigarettes, and waited for Helga to get off work. Helga had moved in with the Deacon.

  Every morning he reported for duty. A day of flying in Berlin meant three round trips through the corridors to West Germany and back. They were tough days, particularly with bad weather and a hangover—standard conditions for Berlin and the Deacon. By six in the evening, he was back on his bar stool.

  After two weeks of such duty, it was time for the Deacon to resume his alternate life in Ponca City.

  The metamorphosis reversed itself. As he stepped onto the plane, the Deacon’s features began to smooth. His red-ringed eyes would clear. The saintly countenance found its way back onto his jowly face. Gone were his taste for Urquel and his lust for Helga.

  He was never found out, at least in Ponca City. For years the Deacon happily maintained his dual life. Helga was eventually replaced by Renate, who was replaced by Ilse, who gave way to Soni. When the Deacon hit age sixty and retired from his airline career, two separate ceremonies marked the occasion. One was at the Pentecostal Baptist Church in Ponca City, with hymns and homemade ice cream. The other was at the Hundekehle, with Pilsner Urquel.

  From the air the old airport still looked as it had in the days of the Third Reich. The terminal building, constructed in the shape of an eagle, rimmed the north quadrant of the circular airfield. The building’s spread wings enfolded the sprawling ramp where Pan Am’s fleet of 727s was parked in neat rows.

  Back in the thirties Tempelhof had been a circular grass airfield, designed to permit takeoffs and landings in any direction, whichever way the wind blew. Now it had parallel east-west runways, but the longest was only six thousand feet—barely adequate for modern jets. To add even more challenge to the approach, each end of the runway was obstructed with tiers of apartment buildings.

  On the downwind leg for runway 27, you flew over East Berlin. From the traffic pattern you looked down on the Wall, meandering across the city like a fresh scar, dividing east from west. Though more than a quarter century had passed since the end of World War II, bombed-out buildings still jutted like broken teeth from the city landscape. Within the city, incongruously, were great forests, home to foxes and deer and wild pigs. Berlin boasted more trees per capita than any major city in the world.

  During the winter, Berliners endured weeks without a glimpse of pure sunshine. The Pan Am pilots briefly escaped the gloom when they took off in the morning’s gray murk and five minutes later popped through the cloud layer into glorious sunshine. At the end of their flight, they again descended through the thickening clouds to their destination. In a typical day of flying, Pan Am pilots made three round trips from Berlin to airports in West Germany—usually Frankfurt, Hamburg, Munich, or Stuttgart. Each trip ended with an instrument approach to a fogbound or snow-enshrouded runway, often with a ceiling of no more than a hundred feet and visibility less than four hundred yards.

  For most airline pilots, an approach to a fog-blanketed airport, down to a hundred feet above the ground, was not a relaxed, everyday procedure. Seldom was it necessary to fly all the way down to treetop height before seeing the runway. It was a rare enough event that when it happened, adrenaline flowed like floodwater through the cockpit.

  You descended on an electronic glide path, downward through the gray swirl, toward a runway somewhere ahead. You watched the altimeter needle slowly unwind to the minimum altitude—decision height—where you would make the call to land or to go around.

  It was like flying into the pointed end of a cone. Ground and sky came together at an invisible spot where you had two options: land or go around. At decision height—usually a hundred feet above the runway—the captain announced, “I have the runway,” which meant he saw something out there—approach lights or threshold lights or the strip of concrete itself. And he would land.

  Or he saw nothing. If he was cool, his commands flowed in a level, exaggeratedly calm voice, “No contact, go-around thrust.” At the same time he shoved the throttles forward and rotated the nose up fifteen degrees, and he raised the flaps, and, after the airplane was safely climbing, the landing gear. Back into the murk they would soar, engines roaring.

  For the IGS pilots, such activity was routine. It happened every day. They seldom needed to feign coolness, because they were cool.

  “What’s the weather up ahead, captain?”

  “Who cares? We’re going to land anyway.”

  The weirdness of the Berlin pilots took different forms. Some were self-styled bohemians, like Everett Wood. “Woodie” had come to Pan Am via the old American Overseas Airways, which Pan Am bought out after the war. Most of his career had been spent in Berlin.

  Woodie was a scholar whose soul still lived in the romantic past. He knew Wagner and Chopin and Schopenhauer and Dante. He could quote entire pages of Hemingway and Remarque and Goethe. He could distinguish between vintages of grand cru Bordeaux, and he invariably wept at the conclusion of Othello.

  Woodie had been married twice. Each of his brides, while adoring Woodie, had finally grown exasperated with a life of skimpiness. His last wife was a clever ex-stewardess named Barbro. One day she summed it up: “Woodie, we’ve been married for ten years. All we have to show for it is a bed and a refrigerator. And now the damned refrigerator doesn’t work. Why don’t we call it quits?”

  Woodie spoke German and French fluently. He lived the life of an ascetic, owning neither a car nor a television. His inexpensive, meagerly furnished apartment lay under an elevated railway track. Its ancient exposed plumbing traversed the ceiling and ran along the walls. Woodie cared little about money, and his only unfrugal expenditures were on books and wine, both of which he consumed with relish.

  Because he disdained most of the things pilots hold dear—money being foremost—he was regarded with suspicion by the Skygods. Even in Berlin, the Mecca of weirdness, Woodie was considered aberrant. Why did a Pan Am captain have to ride the subway to the airport? It was embarrassing. Who did this guy think he was, for Christ’s sake, giving passenger announcements in German, and sometimes even in French? The guy was clearly some kind of a deviant.

  The truth was, Berlin was a good deal. Whenever the Pan Am pilots’ contract came up for renegotiation, the Berlin base always demanded—and usually received—special perquisites. They insisted on reduced duty time limits—a maximum of six flights a day—because of the stressful and “hazardous” nature of their corridor flying. They expected a pay bonus—called foreign station allowance—for the “hardship” of their overseas assignment. And, of course, they required a special tuition allowance because their children attended private, international schools.

  They were the prima donnas as well as the weirdos of the airline. More so than at any other pilot base, the Berlin pilots were a tightly knit group, capable of shutting down the operation over any infraction of their working conditions—inadequate crew meals, unfavorable currency exchange, a perceived insensitivity by management. Chief pilots in Berlin played a composite role—part manager, part baby-sitter, part grooming supervisor.

  Hair was one of the burning issues of the seventies. The copilots had a lot of it, in the mod style of the times. Sideburns crept well below the earlobes—the official grooming limit. Mustaches flourished like fir forests. Cascades of hair flowed from beneath uniform caps. Even the caps themselves were an issue. The pilots didn’t want to wear them because they didn’t fit, with all that hair squeezed inside.

  But hair was one of the chief pilot’s lesser problems. That was a proble
m to be dealt with on the ground. What concerned him was when they did something unspeakably stupid in the air.

  The woman in the copilot’s seat wasn’t supposed to be there. Her name was Marin. She was a twenty-year-old stewardess, and she was the latest love of Captain Ed Shaffer, a fifty-five-year-old IGS pilot going on, everybody estimated, about sixteen.

  It was illegal as hell, of course, but it was a ferry flight—meaning there were no passengers, just an empty airplane and its crew being moved back to Berlin—and who would know? Darkness had come, and there they were at the Hanover airport. All they had to do was get the empty 727 back to Berlin. Anyway, Marin was a pilot, more or less, having taken some flight instruction in a Cessna. Shaffer persuaded his first officer, a compliant young man named George Van Houten, to vacate his station. Into the copilot seat climbed Marin, smiling and smelling of musky perfume.

  They took off, Marin at the controls. Ed was coaching her and thoroughly enjoying himself. It went fine, the jetliner wobbling only a little, Ed tutoring, Marin gripping the yoke with both hands. They leveled at 9,500 feet and flew through the central air corridor toward Berlin.

  Ed talked her through the approach and landing. The big jet’s wheels bonked onto the concrete no harder than most landings at Tempelhof.

  Everyone was pleased. The stewardess was thrilled. Shaffer’s love life had soared to a new plateau. Best of all, they had gotten away with it.

  Or so they thought.

  As on most ferry flights, the cockpit door had been left open. The other two flight attendants, riding in the cabin, were curious that the first officer was not in his seat for the takeoff or landing. When they peeked into the cockpit they could not help but notice—mein Gott. . . guck mal—their stewardess colleague, Marin.