Empires of the Sky

by Alexander Rose

  At this critical moment, the Armistice cut the legs out from under the industry. Within days, the U.S. government canceled contracts for another 13,000 airplanes and 20,000 engines, bankrupting hundreds of firms and leaving the survivors with crippling financial losses. Within three months, 90 percent of the airplane industry’s 175,000 workers had lost their jobs. In the following year, 1919, just 780 airplanes were manufactured, and by 1922 that figure had fallen to 263.1

  Despite the tremendous activity during the war, at its end no domestic market existed to pick up the slack. Of those 780 aircraft in 1919, for instance, just eight were intended for civilian use.2 Worse still from the long-term perspective, aeronautical research and development was frozen in time, which meant that as the years passed American airplane technology remained stuck somewhere in the 1914–18 era, with its wood-and-fabric, strut-and-wire biplanes held together by glue and screws.

  The only thing America did have, in spades, was war-surplus trainer planes that were sold off for a fraction of their value to former military pilots who emulated the old nineteenth-century balloon aeronauts and set themselves up as traveling barnstormers (a term borrowed from itinerant acting troupes that had played in barns during the westward expansion). After returning home from Europe, these pilots scraped together a few hundred dollars for a Curtiss JN-4 (“Jenny”), a tandem-cockpit biplane with a 90-horsepower engine, and wandered the country giving shows at out-of-the-way towns and county fairs.

  As Professor Steiner had done generations earlier in his balloon, they took thrill seekers up in the air for their first ride (urinating down onto their own town was peculiarly popular) but also served as death-defying jacks-of-all-trades: One of young Charles Lindbergh’s business cards advertised his specialties as “Fair and Carnival Exhibition Work, Offering Plane Exchange in Midair, Wing Walking, Parachute Jumping, Breakaways, Night Fireworks, Smoke Trails, and Deaf Flights,” while others dangled from trapeze bars suspended below the aircraft, fought aerial duels, and performed loop-the-loops.3

  Lindbergh’s fellow barnstormers were, as one Slats Rodgers recalled, “a sort of mixture of the cowhand of the Old West, the hot-rod driver of today, and the real gypsy.”4 When the weather was good, the living was easy: Pilots ate steak for breakfast, stayed at the finest hotel in town, and tried to lure impressionable young ladies into their clutches. (Lindbergh remembered one flier whose only, and only occasionally successful, chat-up line ran, “Do you or don’t you? That’s all I want to know.”) But in winter or in foul conditions, they often slept under a wing with nothing but peanuts for dinner.5 The vast majority were old war veterans, but there was a surprising number of women and minorities admitted to the cadre. Bessie Coleman, for instance, grew up poor in Texas but earned a flying license in France in 1921 and toured extensively until she was killed in a crash four years later. In the black press, she was eulogized as “Miss Bessie Coleman—The Race’s First Aviatrix.”6

  The barnstorming era was, for many Americans, their introduction to aviation. Up to a million people may have taken a five-minute flight, including Paul Tibbetts, who would go on to pilot the Enola Gay over Hiroshima, and Howard Hughes, who first flew with his father on a five-dollar plane ride. One famous barnstormer, Ivan Gates, estimated that he had put on 1,836 exhibitions in 1,042 towns across forty-one states by 1926.7

  Less admirable was the barnstormers’ safety record. This was a time when there was neither aviation law nor any governmental oversight whatsoever of civilian plane inspection, pilot training and licensing, traffic control, or the use of aircraft. Quite literally, anybody could fly any plane he or she wanted, and fly anywhere he or she wanted, joyfully careless about the condition of the aircraft. One youngster named Jack Chapman, for instance, became a pilot at the age of eleven and liked to fly solo.

  Barnstormers exploited the lack of regulation by ascending in biplanes with but a quarter gallon of gas in the tank, wings of rotting fabric holding on for dear life, and control sticks jerry-rigged from a convenient piece of wood. The useful life of a military Jenny, which had come with a complement of army mechanics and a hangar, had been estimated as six months at most, but barnstormers patched and wired and glued theirs for years after they should have been scrapped. The rate of mechanical and structural failure alone was astounding, and that without even factoring in the risk of running into power lines, loop-the-looping straight into the ground, or plowing into the crowds watching directly below.

  Fatalities were, unsurprisingly, common. Between 1921 and 1923, 196 people were killed and 351 more injured in barnstorming accidents; in the latter year alone, what one observer decried as “winged imbeciles” caused 179 crashes, or about one every two days. For some spectators, it was all part of the entertainment to see if the barnstormer would come to grief. Roger Q. Williams, who advertised himself as the “King of All Dare Devils” who “Flirt[s] with Death in Mid-Air,” later said he felt as if paying customers were disappointed when he didn’t kill himself.8

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  JUST AS CLACKETY and as dangerous, but ultimately of greater value, was the establishment of the Air Mail by the Post Office. In the fall of 1919, seeking to speed up delivery, the Post Office acquired over one hundred surplus De Havilland DH-4 biplanes and succeeded in delivering mail from New York via Cleveland to Chicago. A San Francisco–Sacramento leg opened, followed by a Chicago-Omaha one by May 1920. The hardest route to traverse was across the Rocky Mountains, but by September Post Office airplanes were picking their way through, with numerous stops and plane changes.

  Soon after, on the first westbound trip from New York to San Francisco—the first transcontinental airmail run in history—the Post Office pilots averaged 80 mph, carried sixteen thousand letters, and shaved nearly a day off the fastest express trains, which took about a hundred hours, or more than four days, coast to coast. Once the Post Office began flying at day and night the following year, delivery time was slashed to around thirty-three hours.9

  The savings added up quickly. A long-distance phone call cost $4.65 for three minutes, but a letter could be airmailed for 10 cents. Banks discovered that for every $10,000 check they sent from San Francisco for deposit in New York they avoided having to pay two days’ interest; by such means, one bank saved $33,000 annually, and on a larger scale, the Federal Reserve in New York was immensely pleased to discover that in 1924 it had reduced interest charges by $809,589 thanks to the Post Office.10

  Yet, like the barnstormers, the Air Mail lived on a wing and a prayer. As the De Havillands had a maximum range of just 250 miles but carried minimal fuel, pilots could not make transcontinental runs by themselves but instead shuttled between local “airports”—really, a short grassy strip and a hut—picking up and dropping off the mailbags as and when needed. The lack of infrastructure and organization, combined with delays when bad weather hit, meant that costs climbed precipitously: Despite increasing revenue, the Post Office lost $12 million between 1918 and 1927.11

  The toll in human life rose as well. Being an Air Mail pilot was the most dangerous job on earth. Not for nothing was it known as the “Suicide Club,” whose members were all young men with an insatiable appetite for risk.12 Looking, said one observer, like “Eskimos in their ungainly flying-suits, with helmets and goggles on their heads and great fur-lined moccasins over their shoes,” they carried sidearms “strapped to their thighs in approved ‘bad man’ fashion” to ward off not only mail thieves but bears in the event they had to crash-land.13

  Crashing was a virtual certainty: Everyone expected at least a few accidents (one pilot, Wesley Smith, pranged no fewer than fifteen airplanes), and if they were lucky they would happen in a nice, flat area; trying to land in mountainous or forested terrain was usually a death sentence, perhaps at the paws of said bears. Dean Smith, however, survived a particularly tricky situation: As he telegrammed his boss to explain, “Dead stick—flying low—only place av
ailable, on cow. Killed cow—wrecked plane—scared me.”14

  The pilots led short but eventful lives. One in six died in 1920 alone, and within eight years all but nine of the original contingent of forty pilots were dead.15 That figure doesn’t include the forty-nine other people killed and seriously injured in accidents, in which more than two hundred Air Mail planes were lost.16

  The Air Mail nevertheless endowed flying with utility as much as the barnstormers associated it with entertainment. What neither was able to do—unsurprisingly, given their dire safety records—was persuade Americans that taking a plane to where they wanted to go could be as natural as catching the train, steaming aboard a ship, or driving a car.

  It wasn’t for want of trying. As early as 1913, various entrepreneurs had tried to set up passenger airlines, with occasional, if brief, success. In Florida, in December of that year, the Saint Petersburg–Tampa Airboat Line began to provide service—it was the world’s first non-airship line—as an alternative to the two-hour ferry, the twelve-hour railroad, or the drive along unpaved roads that took up most of a day. The flights took about twenty minutes and cost five dollars each way. But when the tourist low season came the following April, the passengers vanished, and so did the airline.

  After the war, some returning pilots set up airlines, but few ever managed to either get off the ground (literally) or to keep flying long. Their routes were invariably short (Aero Ltd., for instance, ran a New York–Atlantic City service taking less than half an hour—about as long as Aero Ltd. lasted), running the planes on any significant scale was prohibitively expensive, and passengers were hard to attract owing to, first, the wide availability of comfortable, cheap trains; and second, their understandable fear of crashing en route.17

  Most of these airlines were seat-of-the-pants, fly-by-night outfits run on luck, booze, and debt that didn’t stand a chance of overcoming the challenges of operating a successful business. And it is here that the man who would eventually rise to become the Eckener of the Airplane steps into the picture.

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  JUAN TERRY TRIPPE was an effortlessly superior, enviably wealthy, upper-class Anglo-Saxon Protestant of ancient pedigree—or at least that was what he wanted people to think.

  In truth, in 1899 he had been born to the plush if not the purple, and his family background was more colorful than he ever admitted, beginning with his exotic name—Juan—which he loathed.

  It certainly didn’t come from his father’s side, where a Henry Trippe had grown tobacco in Maryland in the late seventeenth century and John Trippe (Juan’s great-great-grandfather) had distinguished himself fighting the Barbary pirates in 1805 with the U.S. Navy. Afterward, the family maintained a state of modest gentility by working as stockbrokers, engineers, and pharmaceutical wholesalers.

  “Juan,” in fact, came from his mother’s side. Trippe’s grandmother, Kitty Flynn, was born poor in Ireland and emigrated to Liverpool in 1860, where she worked as a barmaid and married an American bank robber on the lam named Charles Bullard (in polite society, he called himself Charles H. Wells, “man of independent fortune,” but his underworld sobriquet was Piano Charley). Kitty herself was no mean con woman and was described by William Pinkerton, the detective later dispatched to find the rogue pair, as “a beautiful woman and a brilliant conversationalist who dressed in the height of fashion.”

  The couple had a daughter named Lucy and moved to Paris (England was becoming too hot, Pinkerton-wise) to open a bar, where they specialized in fleecing patrons at faro. The French police closed the establishment after Bullard returned to his old habits and robbed a diamond merchant. Kitty and Piano Charley fled to London and had another daughter, Katherine, in 1877, Bullard vanishing soon after.

  He would eventually turn up in Boston, where he was sentenced to twenty years in prison, but escaped to Canada and thence to Belgium, where the authorities finally caught up with him. During the trial, it emerged that Bullard had bigamously married Kitty, thereby making their daughters illegitimate.

  Kitty, now calling herself Kate, had by then moved to Brooklyn, New York, where she worked various minor stock-market frauds, ran a gambling den, and owned a hot-sheet hotel masquerading as a boardinghouse. Then one day in walked blue-eyed, dark-haired Juan Pedro Terry, aged thirty. He was the son of Tomaso Terry, a Venezuelan of Irish ancestry who owned the biggest sugar plantation in Cuba. In 1881 Kate, inexplicably attracted to the multimillionaire, made sure to marry him, her checkered history conveniently vanishing into the mists of dim memory.

  The kindly Juan Terry gave her daughters fine educations with sojourns in Europe. In 1886, Tomaso died, leaving behind a gargantuan fortune of $50 million, of which Juan inherited $6 million, but he mysteriously died a few months after his father, bequeathing a fifth of his existing estate to Kate. By the time she died of Bright’s disease in 1894, she had spent her Terry money and left just $5,000 to Lucy and Katherine.

  Eighteen months after Kate’s death, on November 24, 1895, Lucy married Charles White Trippe, a civil engineer, in the Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest. The bride gave her father’s name as “Charles Wells”—the only time she ever acknowledged his existence, even if she did employ his upscale alias. Lucy was as adept at socially camouflaging herself as her son would be: Through her mother, she was not only a Catholic, but worse, the lowest of the low: an Irish Catholic at a time when the recent arrivals from that green and moist isle were regarded as slum dwellers fit for nothing more than mindless fighting and menial labor. If it meant entrée into New York’s elite society, it was worth an Episcopalian ceremony.

  Lucy did keep a connection to her Terry relatives by insisting that her second son be named after her stepfather, Juan. It was a name, as mentioned earlier, that the boy grew to hate. It made him stick out as much as his darker, olive-skinned looks did, and it was a constant, niggling reminder of his embarrassing and never-to-be-spoken-of Hispanic-Irish ancestry. He called himself John instead, an appropriately anodyne name for an outsider trying to blend in.

  No matter how hard Trippe tried to cover up his background, there were whispers. When he went to Yale, his classbook vaguely stated that his mother had lived in London and New York before marrying, thus allowing Trippe to let others assume she had led some kind of Henry James/Edith Wharton–like existence, but behind his back his friends gossiped. As one recalled, “He was supposed to have Cuban connections, but we never tracked them down.”18

  Trippe made sure nobody could ever “track down” his background. At Yale, he acquired an unwanted nickname, “Mummy”—as in “to keep mum,” or silent—when asked to give a speech to introduce himself during his initiation into an undergraduate dining club. Mute terror had gripped him. He revealed nothing, for fear of ridicule if the truth came out.19

  After college, still presenting himself as a banal cipher, he went to work on Wall Street, if that is the right word for selling bonds to friends in the morning before heading to his club in the afternoon. He paid his golf club dues, smoked stolid cigars rather than devil-may-care cigarettes, wore stiff old-man suits, and associated with Social Register types far wealthier than himself so that they, naturally, assumed he was One of Us.

  But of course he wasn’t, not really. In these years, Trippe may not have been poor, at least as conventionally defined, but the plutocratic cigars cost fifteen cents for two, his budget Lower East Side tailor hadn’t learned to cut cloth on Savile Row, he lived in a modest apartment on the distant outskirts of a fashionable neighborhood, his universal tip was a lowly dime, and he drove an ancient, used Pierce-Arrow car.20

  To wend his way in the world, Trippe adopted a silky sneakiness that would become legendary among those who later had to deal with him. Trippe was so habitually devious that “if the front door was open, he would go in by the side window”—and that odd plaudit came from one of his very few trusted friends. Later, Franklin Delano Roosevel
t, no stranger to silky sneakiness, half-admiringly called him “the most fascinating Yale gangster I ever met” and “a man of all-yielding suavity who can be depended on to pursue his own ruthless way.”21

  “All-yielding suavity” was a perfect description. Blessed as he was with a seductive politeness, a quiet voice, a modest air, a cherubic smile, and an exaggerated obsequiousness toward his elders and betters, the quiet, pudgy Trippe was often assumed to be weak or soft, yet, inexplicably, he would emerge from tough negotiations as the winner.

  What nearly everyone missed was that Trippe had been obsessed by airplanes ever since his father had taken him to see Wilbur Wright circle the Statue of Liberty in 1909. During the war, he had volunteered and trained as a bomber pilot (but saw no combat), and at Yale, he joined a flying club and raced against other Ivy League schools until, citing its dangers, the university banned the practice.

  In 1923, he quit his tedious Wall Street job and set up Long Island Airways (LIA).22 LIA comprised nine old navy biplanes and six pilots and operated from a makeshift hangar on Coney Island. That summer, he started offering tourists rides up and down the beach but couldn’t make a profit, partly because his pilots “were show-offs who [got] drunk and [took] the next day off” but also because his biplanes were two-seaters that could accommodate only one passenger.23 The revenue accruing from that passenger was not enough to cover expenses—a common problem for early airlines.

  Hoping to discover a solution, Trippe spent his off-hours at the New York Public Library studying the history of other modes of transport, especially trains and ships.24 As one who’d worked so hard to ape the manners of the elite, Trippe was a meticulous planner who prided himself on being better prepared than anyone else.