Thanks to Lindbergh, model-airplane building became the nation’s number-one craze almost overnight. Radio stations broadcast hobbyist shows, the biggest of which was the Jimmie Allen Club, whose members, like Mickey Rooney and Shirley Temple, received a monthly newsletter filled with tips to improve the aerodynamics of their little balsa-and-glue planes with rubber-band engines. In Los Angeles, there was a special playground reserved for flying model airplanes, and crowds flocked to the cinemas to see Walt Disney’s new creation, a certain mouse, dolled up as an aspiring Lindbergh in Plane Crazy, as well as a movie about Great War pilots called Wings (released on August 12, three months after the flight) that would go on to win Best Picture at the first Academy Awards.
In junior high schools, courses in aeronautics, the history of aviation, and meteorology were introduced into science curricula; Air Cadet programs taught students to fly, and at college they joined flying clubs and took advanced lessons at reduced rates from one of the 575 Guggenheim-backed aviation schools that had sprung up by 1929. In America’s burgeoning aviation industry, the Department of Commerce advised, there would be good jobs available as mechanics, engineers, airplane designers, airport builders, ground crewmen, radio operators, advertising copywriters, and ticket salesmen.
Flying quickly became a part of everyday culture. In 1925, one newspaper, to give an example, had carried eighty columns and three pages of pictures (mostly crashes) about aviation; by 1928, those numbers had swollen to 450 and 36, respectively. Whereas there had been just one or two special-interest journals covering aviation in the early 1920s, in 1928 there were twenty popular magazines dedicated exclusively to the subject.6
The urge to fly had finally arrived—the demand Trippe had dreamed of—but the wherewithal was lacking, not only because flying remained prohibitively expensive compared to traveling by train or car but also because there were so few seats.7
The airlines were slow to realize that passengers, annoying as they were, might be worth accommodating, and it was not in fact Lindbergh who prompted them to start offering service but a boring-but-important change in air-mail rates in January 1928.
When the Post Office halved the cost of a stamp, it dramatically boosted the number of letters and packages carried, but not by enough to allow airlines to offset the increasing costs of operating the larger airplane fleets, in terms of both size and quantity, that the volume of extra mail necessitated. Unexpectedly, then, they needed to attract paying human customers, otherwise known as “self-loading cargo,” to bring in additional revenue. As a result, a few primitive seats were hastily added to the mail planes flying the busier legs.
The humorist Will Rogers, the country’s most popular columnist and an aviation aficionado, took advantage of the new pro-passenger atmosphere to thrill his forty million daily readers by relating in a series of articles his jerry-rigged trip from Los Angeles to New York. On one of Boeing Air Transport’s (BAT) new two-passenger mail planes (the Boeing 40A) from Salt Lake City to Chicago, he luxuriated in the side-by-side arrangement, which resembled the cheapest coach seats on a local train. After a couple of stops, unfortunately, an executive with the Labor Bank in New York joined him. “Now when I told you this seat was narrow, I didn’t just put that in there to make more words,” wrote Rogers. “It is either terrible narrow or this old Labor boy keeps spreading out. He is a big husky thing.” Rogers believed the seats were designed for “one frail woman accompanied by a male contortionist.”8
Once airlines grasped that there were people willing to spend $200—a quarter of the price of a new car—for a one-way ticket from Chicago to New York, shuttling mail at five cents a letter quickly became of secondary interest. They turned their attention to selling the benefits and glamour of passenger travel.
A concerted campaign was highly successful in persuading Americans that flying was no more dangerous than driving—in fact, a great deal less dangerous—with advertisements emphasizing that the airlines’ only concern was, as one slogan went, “Safety—First, Last, and Always.”9 Now, there was, of course (and here the public-relations people discreetly ahemmed), the occasional accident—actually, they were more than “occasional,” there being 234 airline crashes and 29 deaths between 1927 and 1929—but these paled beside the number of fatalities caused by cars, which slaughtered 80,619 men, women, and children in those same years.10
Even if you did die in a plane crash, an off-message (and anonymous) operations chief of a large midwestern carrier casually remarked, it really wasn’t so bad. Some people, he said, will “tell you how terrible it must be to fall through a mile of air. But I don’t see that it is any more terrible than to fall through a mile of water—that’s what you do when a ship sinks under you. And in the air there aren’t any sharks to nibble at you.” What was really important, the chief went on to say (in yet another unfortunate choice of phrase), was that as air travel grew more popular, “fares will be falling faster than a punctured parachute.”11
So they did. Within the year, a cross-country airplane trip from Los Angeles to New York would cost $400 compared to between $200 and $350 by train, and the price would continue to decline as passenger numbers exploded.12 In 1926, U.S. airlines had carried a mere 5,782 passengers; the following year, 8,679; in 1928, 48,312, which more than tripled in 1929 to 161,933, hitting 384,506 a year later—an increase of 6,650 percent in four years.13
A significant proportion of that growth came from women. Early attempts to drum up customers had focused exclusively on attracting businessmen, but airline executives soon realized that women formed an excited contingent of potential travelers. Ford’s magazine ads depicted them waiting at the terminal and cheering: “Man No Longer Flies Alone!” In 1929, a quarter of passengers were women, rising to a third by the mid-1930s.14
The push was not, maybe, an altogether altruistic one. Airlines had cannily understood that if even a helpless woman was willing to go aloft, then hitherto reluctant males had no excuse not to, unless they were cowards. One company came up with an innovative ploy to lure husbands into taking their first flight by offering a free ticket to their accompanying wives. The scheme came to a sudden but perhaps all too predictable end when it was discovered that a number of the young, attractive “wives” the men were bringing on their business trips were not, in fact, married to the passengers in question.15
In order to keep up with demand, the industry, which had built only 344 airplanes in 1925, doubled and redoubled output, hitting a peak in 1929 of 5,414.16
A large number of these were small private planes employed in a variety of new ways. Politicians chartered them to travel around their states; merchants began offering express delivery; the American Tobacco Company hit upon the idea of skywriting “Lucky Strikes” in smoke; companies purchased them to ferry executives around; they were used as crop dusters and seeders; and the Coast Guard used them to spot schools of fish for the benefit of trawlers.
Airplanes were not only being woven into the warp and woof of everyday life; they were also opening new vistas. All twenty-nine thousand square miles of Alaska was mapped for the first time between 1926 and 1929, while farther south airborne archaeologists discovered pre-Columbian ruins in the Mexican jungle and stumbled upon tribes cut off from civilization for millennia.17
Technologically, the major development lay in the advent of big, three-engine passenger aircraft. While Will Rogers had been wowed by the Boeing 40A, introduced in 1927, having two seats, the Boeing 80A, which appeared a year later, was capable of accommodating eighteen passengers and three crew; the Fokker F-10 (a larger version of the F-7 that had so infuriated Trippe’s Colonial partners), hauling twelve, was introduced to fleets at the same time; and the faithful eleven-seater Ford Trimotor sold in numbers greater than all the others put together.18
Thirst for the new airplanes was hard to quench. In 1928 alone, 23 airlines were launched. By the following year, there were 62 passenger airli
nes, 47 air-mail lines, and 32 air-cargo lines flying in the United States—and all they wanted were airplanes, more airplanes.19
To service them on the ground, a new infrastructure came into being. Airports, for instance, could no longer be the grass-and-dirt runways equipped with a shack that had once been used by the Post Office.20 By January 1928, there were suddenly 503 airports in the United States, and by December 1929, 834, many with paved, lit runways, hotels, sturdy hangars, fueling stations, and terminals with waiting rooms, marbled lavatories, and offices. Washington-Hoover, serving the District of Columbia, even had a swimming pool, and Enterprise, Alabama, living up to its name, built a three-runway airport in the midst of a nine-hole golf course where players had fun hitting long drives over taxiing planes.21
To service customers in the sky, airlines rapidly improved their in-flight service. Will Rogers, again, had counted himself lucky to be gruffly handed a chicken sandwich, a Thermos of coffee, and an apple when he’d flown cross-country, but a year later, purred the travel journalist Arthur Phillips, his luncheon “was no uncouth handing out of tomato sandwiches from a paper sack but a most delicious repast, carefully prepared and daintily served.”
Chicken remained a staple, but now at least it came in a variety of forms (cold roast chicken, chicken salad, creamed chicken, fried chicken). Potato salad, white and rye bread, string beans with onions, baked ham, chocolate cake, strawberry shortcake, fruit cups, and, for the few vegetarians present, egg salad sandwiches were served. For beverages, passengers could choose from coffee, iced tea, orange juice, tomato juice, and lemonade.22
Cutlery was enviably expensive. As the inimitably named columnist Velva Darling noticed as she flew from Los Angeles, the knives, forks, and spoons were gold-plated and heavy enough to stay more or less put in turbulence. Cups were made of metal or enameled; plates, porcelain; napkins, linen. On most airlines, a lap pillow served to balance them, but a few others pioneered the use of detachable, one-legged folding trays fitted into holes in the floor that were secured by two clips to the cabin wall. Arthur Phillips was, again, in heaven when he found his tray covered “with a linen spread of fine quality…of a beautiful lavender shade [that] formed an effective and delightful color combination with the modish dirigold tableware.”23
An early innovation had been the introduction of “stewards,” as on ocean liners, often the sons of major investors in the airline. One smitten passenger described her steward as “a college boy, tall, clean-cut, intelligent…and very eager to make each passenger as comfortable and happy as possible.”24 They adjusted vents, hung coats, distributed cotton earplugs (a Ford Trimotor could generate 115 decibels of noise), handed Vogue and House Beautiful to the ladies (gentlemen read Fortune), and showed new fliers maps of the terrain and landmarks they should look for.25
Training was rudimentary for these fine young men, the natural assumption being that their good breeding ensured decorum and discretion; the most useful advice they received was to gargle with Listerine before serving food and to kneel in the aisle, rather than lean over passengers, when pouring drinks to avoid spillage.26
They were eventually replaced by “stewardesses”—“sky girls,” “hostesses,” “courierettes,” “skipperettes,” and the unfortunate “escorts” were all considered as job titles—who were selected on the basis of their sturdiness, practicality, horse sense, and disinclination “to chase [men] around the block at every opportunity.” (Any “flapper type of girl,” as one recruiter said, was out of the question.)
A prerequisite for the job was having previously worked as a qualified nurse. At Boeing Air Transport, they wore matching hunter-green wool capes and berets, low-heeled black shoes, and knee-length skirts and, as nurses who had seen a lot in their time, were expected to be capable of taking care of both passengers and themselves.27
Behavior on an airplane was strictly regulated to avoid any hint of impropriety. Pilot-stewardess relationships were absolutely forbidden, partly to assuage the fears of pilots’ wives that some saucy minx would steal their husbands on a layover in Kansas City. Stewardesses were also instructed to salute, not greet, pilots when they came aboard and were banned from entering the testosterone-drenched cockpit. (Somehow forgetting about Amelia Earhart and her “Ninety-Nines” club of accomplished aviatrixes, pilots believed female fliers were “impulsive and scatter-brained,” rarely remembered to fill the gas tank, and habitually set off for out-of-range destinations because “that’s where they want to go.”)28
As for the passengers, stewardesses were instructed by the airline to “retain the respectful reserve of the well-trained servant. A ready smile is essential, but never permit yourself the intimate attitude of a traveling companion.” Most important, only touch a male traveler when needing to wake him, in which case “tweak his elbow sharply.”29
In the cabin, stewardesses had the power to remove abusive passengers—not that there were many. The most unruly person Olette Hasle ever had to deal with was a man who kept removing his shoes. There were occasional instances of groping, but stewardesses rarely put up with it. Harriet Fry Iden slapped a professor who lunged at her, as did Mary O’Connor when a passenger “got fresh” with her: Neither was reprimanded, Iden’s supervisor adding that the brute had it coming.30
Smoking on board was encouraged, with United raising the bar by gifting each passenger fifty Chesterfields. Until the later arrival of sealed windows, a recurrent problem was passengers’ habit of opening their windows and tossing the lit stubs out, much to the annoyance of farmers and forest rangers. The installation of ashtrays at every seat helped mitigate the issue.31
Playing board games was also popular.32 More exciting, though, was the advent of the in-flight movie, the first of which—the title is, unfortunately, lost to us—was shown in the drawn-curtained cabin of a Universal Air Line plane flying from Minneapolis to Chicago on February 16, 1929. A projectionist suspended a screen at the front and, held spellbound for ten reels, “the passengers lost all sense of air consciousness,” as The New York Times reported, equally spellbound.33
To erase the impression that passengers shared space with mailbags, airlines commissioned designers to come up with décors reflecting their brand. United Air Lines went with a traditional you-can-trust-us-to-get-you-there look. On their serene and sedate Boeings, one relaxed, as at one’s club, amid leather seats, bronzed metal fixtures, muted lighting, and walnut paneling.34
A trendy upstart, Transcontinental Air Transport (TAT, soon to become TWA) prided itself on being more “progressive” than its competitors and hired an “artist in Greenwich Village” to “create an interior which would be modernistic, individual, and like absolutely nothing but an airplane,” explained Velva Darling, who loved the lavender wall paneling, window shades with fluffy curtains, and cream seat covers.35
What passengers, whatever airline they chose to reward with their loyalty, did not know was that all the fancy seats and furnishings were designed to be easily removable so that cleaners could use a high-pressure hose to flush vomit off the floor. Non-flushing chemical lavatories, dubbed “slop boxes,” were as hideous as their nickname implied, and stewardesses frequently had to sponge them down with a potent disinfectant during the flight.
Nausea was the bane of flying, and no matter how often executives claimed that only one out of a hundred passengers threw up, the true figure was much, much higher. An industry rule of thumb had it that 80 percent of passengers would heave when traveling over the Southwest owing to its unpredictable weather.
When an airplane hit turbulence, its tail would swing back and forth, and hundred-foot plummets were common. At those times, said Marcia Davenport, “your mouth flies open, your eyes goggle, you clutch the arm of your chair [and] your mental attitude is not helped much by the neat little cardboard ice-cream container fastened at each chair with the legend, ‘Use in case of Air Sickness,’ on its cover.”
Mos
t unpleasantly, when nauseated passengers sitting at the front opened the windows to unleash hell into the slipstream, high-velocity vomit would spatter those aft who’d unwisely opened theirs to enjoy the fresh air.36
None of this mattered, though, because during the great boom the aviation business, which in pre-Lindbergh 1927 had ranked 144th among manufacturing industries with gross revenues of $90 million (the corset trade was bigger), grew faster than any other. Until March 1928, only two aviation companies, Curtiss Aeroplane and Wright Aeronautical, had ever issued stock, but between that month and late 1929, twenty-one air companies went public, eventually reaching a paper value of $1 billion. Some speculators saw a 2,000 percent return, but Frederick Rentschler, a founder of Pratt & Whitney and a partner of William Boeing’s, outdid everyone by turning his investment of $253 in the company that would become United into a fortune of $35 million.37
Twiddling his thumbs and cooling his heels after his ouster from Colonial, Trippe was desperate to get back into the game.
33. Terra Incognita
WITHIN WEEKS OF watching Lindbergh take off, Trippe formed a new venture with his wealthy ex-Colonial friends. They invested in him supreme power, giving Trippe carte blanche to make deals, hire staff, and buy whichever airplanes he thought best. Though grandly named the Aviation Corporation of America (ACA), it was, as yet, merely a holding company with nothing but $300,000 in a bank account to its name.
Empires of the Sky Page 33