Empires of the Sky

by Alexander Rose

  Trippe had noticed that all the major existing airlines were fighting for a share of the increasingly crowded U.S. domestic market; ACA’s mission instead would be to conquer the potentially lucrative and virtually empty international routes to the Caribbean and South America.

  It was time to use that letter from General Machado granting him exclusive landing rights in Cuba. In early June 1927, Trippe went to see a former navy pilot named John Montgomery. Back in March, he and a partner named Richard Bevier had founded a tiny airline optimistically called Pan American Airways, intended to fly between Key West and Havana. Like ACA, it had no actual airplanes, but it had something better: a fresh Post Office contract to carry mail internationally to Cuba. What they didn’t have was the right to land there—a salient fact they might have forgotten to mention to the Post Office.

  Having been burned before by overpromising entrepreneurs, the Post Office had stipulated that the first mail flight must take off on October 19 of that year. No exceptions would be granted. If a plane didn’t depart that morning, the contract would be mercilessly canceled the same afternoon. Pan American had about four months, then, to be up and running.

  Not only did he have the landing rights, Trippe told Pan American’s owners, he was about to take delivery of the two long-delayed Fokker F-7s O’Ryan had allowed him to take from Colonial. He also had a team: Andre Priester, Hugo Leuteritz, and the grand panjandrum himself, Charles Lindbergh.

  Priester was, like Eckener’s man Ludwig Dürr, one of early aviation’s more eccentric characters and difficult to deal with, but Trippe had quickly realized his potential importance. Short, bald, fiery, strange, remote, a roiling sun contained within a moon-sized body, Priester was a thirty-six-year-old Dutch immigrant working for his fellow countryman Anthony Fokker when Trippe met him at the latter’s airplane factory. Trippe decided he would make an ideal chief engineer for his new airline.

  Again, like Dürr with Eckener, Priester was willing to report only to the one man he respected. Anyone else was treated with disparagement, glared at “with eyes that never appeared to smile” (as one poor interviewee put it), or treated with icy formality. Only in letters to his wife, with whom he maintained amicable relations, would Priester relax enough to sign off with a “Best Regards.”

  Priester’s major selling point was that he was a fanatic about process, doctrine, and planning. It would be he who ran schedules to the minute, produced a thick manual replete with checklists and stuffed with protocols explaining precisely what to do in any situation, and instructed pilots, a louche lot, that they would be fired if seen drinking or even smoking in uniform. Mechanics were dismissed on the spot if they were photographed wearing dirty overalls or if they failed to polish the brass fittings hidden deep inside engine nacelles—because a clean airplane was a tight airplane.1

  Trippe’s other acquisition was Hugo Leuteritz, a Brooklyn-raised technician who’d parted ways with Radio Corporation of America (RCA) when the company rejected his proposal to develop lightweight transmitters. He was necessary because, as Priester repeated like a mantra, “Der flying uff ninety miles uff vater iss no dchoke und iss not to be treated as such.”2 Ninety miles was the distance between Key West and Havana, a short journey but one fraught with danger.

  On the mainland, pilots usually followed the “iron compass”—train tracks—between cities, and there were always landmarks and beacons to help guide them. But out there in the blue, Trippe understood, there was nothing, and if he ever wanted to expand deeper into the Caribbean, then pilots would have to find their way to isolated airstrips on tiny islands. As it was, even when flying the well-known area off the Florida coast, a pilot could easily drift as much as fifty miles off his planned course. In rain or fog, the odds rose considerably of missing as large a landmass as Florida or Cuba and heading either into the Gulf of Mexico or the south Atlantic, never to be seen again. As one journalist put it, an airplane lost at sea without a radio “had as much chance as a mouse among cats.”3

  Trippe and Priester agreed that any pilots they hired would have to be expert in blind instrument flying, which no other airline was demanding at the time, but it was Leuteritz’s job to provide a fail-safe method of aerial navigation—one based on radio communication between an aircraft and new control towers in the departure and arrival airports. Weather reporting, too, would have to be timely, accurate, and constantly transmitted to pilots. Any man who balked at accepting instructions from ground stations, even if contrary to what his own senses and instincts were telling him, would be dismissed.4

  As for Lindbergh, Trippe considered him one of the few people who grasped the immensity of what he wanted to do. After the aviator had returned from his U.S. tour, he’d agreed to meet Trippe but, being inundated with offers and honors, didn’t know exactly when. The assistant’s call came as Trippe was preparing to pick up Betty for a date.

  Trippe had fifteen minutes with Lindbergh at the Commodore Hotel.

  Now. Don’t be late.

  Trippe stood Betty up, an act that would earn him an angry note from her insisting that “obviously, there are people you care about more than you do me.” To Trippe, it was worth the flowers he’d have to send. At the Commodore, he outlined his dream of creating an airline that would eventually span the globe, starting with Central and South America. Impressed, Lindbergh accepted Trippe’s proposal to serve as technical adviser.5

  It was just this kind of farsighted thinking, expansive ambition, and studied perfectionism that distinguished Trippe from anyone else in the air business, as Bevier and Montgomery at Pan American were discovering. Like it or not, they needed Trippe more than Trippe needed them, and Trippe knew it. If they tried to go ahead without him, there was no way of making the October 19 deadline, Pan American would go bust, and Trippe would scavenge its carcass for the Post Office contract.

  Trippe’s terms were onerous. He wanted full control of Pan American, with Bevier and Montgomery as minor partners. Bevier and Montgomery in turn played their hidden ace: Pan American had another suitor—Atlantic, Gulf, and Caribbean Airways (AGC), yet another airline that didn’t really exist in anything but name. AGC was financed by Richard Hoyt, a very sharp Wall Street investor who was not, to put it mildly, a man to be trifled with.6

  Trippe did an end run around Bevier and Montgomery by having a secret meeting with Hoyt to propose an alliance. AGC and ACA would together take over Pan American and buy out Bevier and Montgomery for the air-mail contract.

  Bevier and Montgomery were doomed. As the clock ticked down to October 19 and Trippe deliberately drew out negotiations to increase the pressure to make a deal, Bevier and Montgomery caved a week before the deadline. They handed over Pan American in exchange for $10,000 in cash and $45,000 worth of stock in Hoyt’s AGC.

  Within hours, as per their secret deal, Hoyt sold 52 percent of AGC to Trippe’s ACA for $199,500—most of the cash Trippe had on hand—in exchange for becoming chairman of AGC and allowing Trippe to take over the Pan American subsidiary as president and general manager. From his chairman’s seat, Hoyt would be able to keep an eye on Trippe, whom he regarded as being a little too clever for his own good, while making him do most of the work.

  On October 13, Trippe summoned the new board of Pan American—packed, of course, with his friends—to outline his vision of its future. Given that he had six days to begin service to Havana and still had no airplanes—the Fokkers were almost ready—it was a remarkably ambitious one.

  Pan American’s headquarters would be in Miami, where he would build a world-class airport to serve as the base for two trunk lines to South America. The western line would extend to the U.S.-owned Panama Canal Zone and from there all the way down along the coast to Chile. The eastern line would run first to Cuba and then through the Caribbean island chain to the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and Trinidad before reaching the mainland and tracing its way to Rio de Janeiro and, ultimately,
Buenos Aires. A new airplane route across the Andes would then connect Buenos Aires to Valparaíso (Chile), completing the circuit.

  * * *

  —

  A MINOR PROBLEM, unfortunately, was that none of these routes existed. When it came to airplanes, South America was terra incognita. To make it all work, Trippe would need to gain concessions and permissions from a dizzying list of countries and territories including Mexico, Colombia, Nicaragua, Uruguay, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and Haiti. He would do it, he confidently promised as the board nodded along, but first, he needed to get to Havana inside of a week.

  Aside from pestering Fokker to finish at least one of his damn planes, Trippe’s priority was to get Key West up and running in time for October 19. Right now, there was no “airport” there, just a rock-strewn field filled with swamp pits. His contractors were urgently filling in the pits with the rubble left over from leveling two short runways, but on October 15, the manager there, a humorless, red-haired fellow named Captain Whitbeck, told him that they were ready.

  And then the rain came. For two days, torrents fell and turned the dirt runways into thick mud. On October 17, Key West was unusable, Whitbeck sorrowfully informed Trippe. The only good news was that a Fokker had arrived in Miami safely late at night on October 18. Only, of course, there was nowhere at Key West to land.

  Trippe pored over the air-mail contract, searching, as Eckener had done in the Treaty of Versailles, for some kind of loophole. Like Eckener, too, he found one. The Post Office had directed that a mail plane had to depart from Key West but had omitted to specify that it had to take off from an airport. The land-based Fokker was out of the question now, but a seaplane wasn’t. The mailbags could be loaded onto one floating just off the coast of Key West to fulfill the terms of the contract.

  All Trippe had to do was find a seaplane by morning. Late at night, he called Jacksonville, Chicago, New York, and Boston to charter one, but none were to be had. Meanwhile, the train from New York carrying the mailbags had already departed and was due to arrive by dawn. Then Captain Whitbeck had an idea: He called a friend in Miami, left off Trippe’s list because no seaplanes were permanently based there. The friend looked out his window and, praise be, a Fairchild FC-2 seaplane had landed just a few minutes before for refueling and maintenance before heading to Haiti.

  Whitbeck told his friend to get the pilot on the phone and found himself talking to one Cy Caldwell a few minutes before he was due to leave. The sum of $250 changed hands and Caldwell arrived in Key West a couple of hours later.

  At 7 A.M. on October 19, he and Whitbeck loaded seven mailbags from the New York train onto the Fairchild, taking off at precisely 8:04 A.M. Sixty-two minutes later, Caldwell landed in the sea off Havana, and the local postmaster rowed out in a small boat to certify the mail’s safe arrival according to the terms of the contract.

  Trippe had pulled off a hell of a trick, with mere hours to spare, and Pan American was in business. A week later, on October 28, 1927, the airstrip having finally dried out, Trippe’s Fokker departed Key West on the airline’s first scheduled flight. Piloted by Eddie Musick, a meticulous aviator soon to become a legend in the air business, the Fokker—obsequiously named the General Machado—carried 772 pounds of mail. A jubilant Trippe cabled Betty: FIRST FLIGHT SUCCESSFUL. She burst into tears.

  But now the real work would begin.7

  34. El Dorado

  PAN AMERICAN PROVED a winner from the very beginning. In November 1927, it carried 19,946 pounds of U.S. mail and 877 pounds of Cuban mail; the following month, the numbers rose to 26,513 and 1,492 pounds, respectively. Thanks to Priester’s beady eye, neither the General Machado nor the second Fokker, General New (after U.S. Postmaster General Harry New—Trippe laid on flattery with a trowel), suffered an engine failure, an equipment malfunction, or a late takeoff.

  On January 16, 1928, Trippe announced the beginning of daily passenger service—a long-desired dream now, finally, fulfilled. Customers would board at Key West at 8 A.M. after the mail was collected, and the return from Havana would depart at 3:45 P.M. The eight-seat Fokkers were outfitted with wicker chairs, though they were rarely filled.1

  The great aviation boom was taking off, but Americans were not yet persuaded that flying over water was truly risk-free. Trippe instructed his agents to rustle up passengers. Salesmen stood outside Pan American’s office in Key West temptingly crying, “Fly to Havana and you can bathe in Bacardi Rum two hours from now.” In Havana, they would roust inebriated tourists in bars and “persuade” them to fly home. Some of these passengers, shocked to find themselves waking up in midair, would panic and struggle so much they had to be physically restrained from opening the door.

  Still, flying had some fans, particularly those who had some discreet business to conduct in Havana. One time, a short, squat fellow accompanied by four flashily dressed young men showed up in Key West. He gave his name as Al Capone, telling the ticket agent, “Better see it’s a safe plane. If anything happens to us, remember, it won’t be so healthy for you fellers.” He paid $1,000 for a private flight to Cuba.2

  With Key West–Havana up and running, Trippe set his sights on his next objective. From March 1928, the Post Office began to offer a series of contracts for the right to carry the mail to every foreign country south of Texas. This was the biggest game of all, and Trippe intended to win every hand.

  Get an exclusive contract, make money on the mail, and open passenger service as an add-on. The plan was simple, if tricky to execute. A key point was that one success would lead to another, owing to a new provision in the Post Office rules that the lowest bidder would not automatically be awarded a contract. (The Colonial trick of underbidding to entice a competitor to buy it out had been played once too often.) Instead, “the lowest responsible bidder that can satisfactorily perform the services required to the best advantage of the government” would be the first choice. By “responsible” the Post Office meant the best-managed, best-financed, best-positioned airline, which generally ruled out a host of tiny, penniless upstarts.

  The victorious bidder would also be expected to serve the U.S. government’s interests in the region, which meant it not only had to be American-owned but also willing to work with the State Department to improve America’s often prickly diplomatic, economic, and military ties with Central and South America.

  Between 1898 and 1927, the New York World pointed out, the United States had intervened militarily there on thirty-one occasions and to a large extent regulated many countries’ affairs through treaties and agreements, not all of them entirely voluntary. Suspicion of American motives was rampant, and any airline, unless it was careful not to be too closely associated with Standard Oil or the hated United Fruit Company, would raise hackles.3

  Trippe was more than happy to make Pan American Washington’s chosen instrument. If he served his master well, the State Department and the Post Office would smooth the path to his next desired destination by allotting him the relevant mail contract. One by one, inevitably and inexorably, the individual pieces would fall into place to form a structure.

  That didn’t mean that Trippe’s local competitors would meekly walk away from the table. They had to be destroyed, undermined, outplayed—all of them. A failure to subjugate one would mean the loss of a territory, and the loss of a territory meant a gap in the structure. Too many gaps and the whole thing would collapse.

  For instance, Foreign Air Mail Route Number 6 (FAM-6), which began in Miami, stopped in Havana, proceeded to Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and ended in Puerto Rico, was a critical one for Trippe to nab. He needed FAM-6 to break out of Cuba and bring his planes closer to the South American mainland, but a tiny airline named West Indian Aerial Express (WIAE) was considered the front-runner.

  Lo and behold, thanks to Trippe’s friends on the Post Office committee, FAM-6 was awarded to Pan
American, the more “responsible” airline of the two. With the loss of the contract, WIAE went bust, but Trippe had gained 1,930 miles’ worth of routes and, more important, his entrée to South America. He acquired another 2,058 miles in Central America when FAM-5 (Cuba–Yucatan Peninsula–Panama) conveniently fell into his lap soon afterward.

  The new routes brought in rivers of cash, courtesy of the Post Office. Whereas the Key West–Havana line earned $160,000 annually, Trippe calculated that FAM-5 and FAM-6 would together net $2.5 million per year. Since each contract ran for ten years, that meant guaranteed income of $25 million on mail alone. If he offered passenger service on top of that, well, the sky was the limit. His rinky-dink little airline had hit the jackpot.

  Wall Street took notice. The stock price of ACA, which had gone public, rocketed from $15 a share to $50 and then to a high of $89; within a few years its cash holdings would rise from a few tens of thousands of dollars to $6 million, making it one of the richest predators in the world. Trippe went on a spending spree, buying up more airplanes than anyone in the business had ever seen and beginning construction on a long-desired airport on 36th Street in Miami.

  Miami was intended to mark Pan American’s arrival to the world. Designed by the famous New York firm of Delano & Aldrich, architects to the wealthy, the classy, and the clubby, 36th Street—or “Pan American International Airport,” as Trippe preferred to call it—was one of the first truly modern air terminals in the United States.

  A grand, light-filled two-story affair with a cantilevered roof, it was graced with a huge panoramic window overlooking the runways. There was a large waiting room with wicker furniture, palm fronds, and a huge wall map of North and South America. Spanish wrought-iron grillwork separated the terminal into “Arrivals” and “Departures,” from which outgoing passengers walked beneath canopied promenades to their airplanes waiting on the tarmac.