Empires of the Sky

by Alexander Rose

  Less discussed amid the excitement—the Japanese newspapers had printed more column inches about the visit than any other event in history—was that Eckener’s stay coincided with the U.S. Navy’s campaign to build up its own airship fleet; in Washington there was alarm at the enthusiasm shown in Japan for the Graf Zeppelin.

  To glean some insight into Japanese designs, the State Department instructed its attachés in Tokyo to compile detailed summaries of the national press coverage of the visit and its possible implications. Much had been made of “German scientific progress,” “German culture and civilization,” and “German genius and technical skill,” they reported back, adding that within Imperial Navy circles there was talk of buying several Zeppelins for oceanic scouting.13

  The U.S. Navy’s recent contracting for the Akron and the Macon airships had been predicated on the idea that they would spot the Japanese battle fleet, but if the Japanese also had Zeppelins, the U.S. Navy would be equally at risk of being spotted.

  With this revelation, if Eckener had entertained any hopes of selling airships to Japan he would have to forget about them, at least if he wanted to avoid difficult questions in Washington about “trading with the enemy.” In the event, the decision was made for him by the Japanese, who ultimately lost interest in airships and plumped for aircraft carriers instead.

  Though the Round-the-World voyage was producing a huge amount of favorable publicity, it was also demonstrating, by dint of the loss of Moscow and Tokyo as potential customers, that the Zeppelin business would have to be confined to Germany and America.

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  ECKENER MADE HIS triumphant return to the United States at 6:06 P.M. on August 25. With his eye for a good publicity shot, he precisely timed his arrival and angle of approach over the Golden Gate of San Francisco Bay as the sun gloriously set behind him. “The oncoming monster of silver sheen,” one newspaper reported, was “burnished at times to russet by the rays of the declining sun” as it entered the bay at an altitude of about 1,000 feet.14

  Despite the tooting of thousands of car horns and the cheers of the multitudes below, Eckener tarried only an hour over the city, the Graf Zeppelin dipping and curtseying to the awe and delight of San Franciscans.

  His ultimate destination was Los Angeles, but first he had to pay fealty to his benefactor. The Graf Zeppelin flew south along the coast and at about 11 P.M. passed over Hearst’s famously gargantuan castle (fifty-six bedrooms) at San Simeon, the one later mocked for its vulgar megalomania in Citizen Kane. To Eckener’s surprise, “everything was enveloped in deep darkness. Nobody seemed to be awake. But suddenly hundreds of lights went on, flooding with brilliant light the large mansion.” Eckener telegraphed his thanks to the great man.15

  They landed in Los Angeles several hours later for refueling and replenishing the hydrogen. With the fate of the Shenandoah in mind, Eckener was morbidly aware of the unpredictable weather lying ahead, but his flight across the United States was not half as bad as he thought it might be.

  The desert of Arizona and New Mexico surprisingly proved to be the most difficult. As the crew of the L-59 had discovered in 1917 during their China Show cruise across Africa, the sun’s heating of the air during the day caused the ship to lift 600 to 1,000 feet at a time and downdrafts pulled it earthward by the same amount. Quite a few of the passengers became seasick, and Eckener, himself a little green round the gills, resolved to never again cross a desert if he could help it.

  His mood was not brightened by some aggrieved homesteader taking a potshot at the Graf Zeppelin with a rifle when they flew over Texas, but aside from that unwelcoming don’t-tread-on-me gesture, the flight rapidly improved from there on out as the Graf Zeppelin soared diagonally from Oklahoma to Kansas to Chicago, and from there to Detroit and Cleveland and Akron (they waved hello to Paul Litchfield of Goodyear) and finally to Lakehurst.16

  Thanks to his timing, Eckener avoided the midwestern storms in the fall, but between those and the southwestern desert in the summer, he was realizing that much of the continental United States was close to being a no-go area for Zeppelins. For the moment, that was a problem obscured by the tumultuous applause, the bedlam of whistles, and the cacophony of countless car horns he received everywhere he overflew. New York in 1929, for instance, surpassed even New York in 1928 when it came to the celebrations. The ticker-tape parade, Eckener noted, was satisfyingly bigger than previous ones and more telephone books, said the papers, had been ripped apart to make confetti than ever before recorded—more even than for Lindbergh.17

  Eckener was invited to the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C., to be awarded its Special Gold Medal, only the eleventh so given. Before an audience of six thousand, including cabinet secretaries, congressmen, diplomats from thirty-five nations, and gold-bedecked ranks of generals and admirals, Eckener was inducted into the pantheon of great explorers. According to Gilbert Grosvenor, the society’s president, Eckener’s voyage made him a fit companion to such immortals as previous medal winners Lindbergh, Peary, Amundsen, Shackleton, and Byrd.18

  But these accolades were baubles compared to his greatest feat. In going around the world, one magazine said, Eckener had single-handedly revived the “airplane-dirigible controversy” and the Zeppelin had retaken the lead in the long-distance stakes. It was now up to the airplane “to prove its possibilities,” not the other way around.19

  38. The Monster

  ECKENER HAD DEPARTED Friedrichshafen with a reputation as a flying Columbus, an adventurer who had crossed an ocean to the New World. He returned to New York hailed as an aerial Magellan, an explorer who had circumnavigated the orb of the world.

  He had broken record after record—6,900 miles nonstop from Germany to Japan in 102 hours; the first Pacific crossing of 5,500 miles nonstop in 79 hours; the first American transcontinental nonstop voyage of 3,500 miles in 52 hours—with barely a mishap or more than a few days’ delay.1

  So swift had been his progress that passengers experienced a new and unexpected phenomenon: a discomfiting form of time dilation that had obliged them to repeatedly put their watches ahead an hour to keep up with the International Date Line. Some of them worried that they had mysteriously lost hours and days of their lives.

  More immediately, however, the Graf Zeppelin’s success proved exactly what Eckener had set out to prove: Airships were a practicable proposition. To that end, he dispatched Lehmann home in the Graf Zeppelin—all the better to sideline him—while he toured New York, Washington, and Akron meeting officials and fielding calls from financiers eager to invest in Zeppelins now that Eckener had come through on what he had promised a year earlier.2

  Now it was less “wait and see” than “hurry up and go.” On October 22, 1929, the Pacific Zeppelin Transport Company (PZT) was formed to develop a line between Los Angeles or San Diego and Honolulu. Currently served by steamships that took up to five days, the route was ripe for exploitation. Some twenty-four thousand tourists had sailed from California in 1929, along with six thousand pounds of first-class mail each week. A Zeppelin could cut two to four days off going by sea, making the U.S.-held territory of Hawaii an enviable destination for affluent vacationers.

  Jerome Hunsaker, a vice president of Goodyear-Zeppelin and a longtime airship advocate (he’d met Eckener before the war), became PZT’s chief executive while Paul Litchfield of Goodyear served as chairman. Their business plan was a little vague, but the gist was that once Goodyear-Zeppelin had built the Akron and Macon it would begin work—scheduled for completion in 1932—on two or three giant airships for weekly runs to Honolulu.

  Litchfield boasted that PZT’s “Transpacific Zeppelins will have sleeping, dining, lounging, promenading, and other accommodations for eighty passengers” plus space for twenty thousand pounds of mail and packages. Fitting all of this would be a cinch with two decks: a lower, with a glass-enclosed promenade surrounding a large cl
ub room and the dining room; and an upper, an open-air promenade where travelers lolling in deck chairs could sip martinis—Litchfield suggestively hinted that “all the flying won’t be done over Prohibition country”—in the balmy Pacific breezes or hang over the railings watching the waves pass by at 100 mph.3

  Complementing the PZT was the International Zeppelin Transport Company (IZT), based in New York and ably managed by Willy von Meister, twenty-six years old, six and a half feet tall, and fluent in German and English. The son of a wealthy American woman and a German noble (the kaiser and the crown prince had stood as his godfathers), Meister had graduated from Darmstadt Technical University with a degree in mechanical engineering in 1924. A couple of years later, he’d sailed to America to set up a Maybach car dealership and later acquired a contract to service the Los Angeles’s engines. Meister had gone to Lakehurst on the day of the Graf Zeppelin’s arrival in 1928 to greet Eckener, only to find himself pressed into service as a translator during the fracas in the Customs Office. Eckener had been so thankful he invited the young man to accompany him on his business tour and to work for Zeppelin.4

  Whereas PZT, essentially a Goodyear-run airship line, advertised itself as an “all-American company” and was associated with Zeppelin in Germany only by dint of its universally recognizable name—Eckener, for instance, was not on the board—IZT had, as its moniker indicated, more of an international flavor.

  IZT announced that by 1934 it would assemble a four-airship line, each of 5.2 million cubic feet, with at least two built in Friedrichshafen. These “Graf-beaters” would have crews of 46 and accommodate 120 passengers in “luxurious staterooms…equipped with tubs and showers.” Eckener had taken to heart criticisms about restricted room to move and boredom setting in, so when they weren’t exploring the observation decks and promenades, passengers would enjoy a swing orchestra, a music room with a piano, a quiet writing room, a bar, and a solarium, which would serve as “a café-dansant by day, and night-club after dark.” There would even be a radio room to listen to the wireless and, mirabile dictu, a room with television, then in an experimental stage.

  Eckener had assembled an impressive roster of investors, first and foremost being Frederick Rentschler’s United Aircraft and Transport Corporation, a sixteen-company conglomerate far larger than any other air operator, including Pan American.

  When Trippe read the news, he couldn’t understand why Rentschler, an airplane man through and through, was suddenly sinking millions into airships. What was his game?

  Originally from Ohio, Rentschler was born poor but grew up rich as his father, an immigrant German ironworker, worked hard and became a major industrialist. While Frederick and Trippe were of course acquainted—the aviation world was a small one—and didn’t actively dislike each other, they didn’t exactly like each other, either. Rentschler, who had the hard-edged look about him of a hungry shark, contrasted markedly with Trippe’s dolphinlike softness, but personal issues were in any case irrelevant, for their relationship was run on strictly business lines admixed with realpolitik.

  A little later, Trippe himself explained how he regarded these sorts of things when he told a former partner he had just betrayed (and nearly bankrupted): “We’re businessmen. We can’t have friends. We can’t be in the position of according favors. We have to look at each deal on a cold-blooded business basis. We’ve made some enemies.”

  Trippe assumed, as his own words indicated (“We’ve made some enemies”—maybe he had), that everyone else believed the same, and his career was and would be littered with examples of forming partnerships with enemies, making enemies of partners, and reversing himself when circumstances changed. Nothing, to men like Trippe and Rentschler, was permanent; everything was in flux. To Trippe, the mere fact that Rentschler was in bed with Eckener meant that Pan American was in their sights. That was just good business, after all.

  Trippe quickly put two and two together. At that moment, United was poised to buy National Air Transport (NAT), which operated the New York–Chicago route. Since United already owned San Francisco–Chicago it didn’t take a genius to work out that taking over NAT would create a single California–New York passage.

  Still, United would remain only a domestic airline and no threat to Pan American, unless…Rentschler joined Zeppelin to go international. And not just across the Atlantic, where United planes would pick up and drop off Zeppelin passengers at Eckener’s U.S. terminus, but potentially down in South America, too, where Trippe’s exclusive landing-rights system would break down as governments realized they could play the rivals off against each other or insist on nonexclusive agreements.

  Eckener had more friends in South America than Trippe had ever suspected. After the war, fleeing from economic and social strife, more than 130,000 Germans had emigrated there, and these Auslandsdeutsche formed a potent and talented population of industrialists, businessmen, and technicians who maintained bonds with the fatherland—not least of which was an attachment to the Zeppelin.

  To maintain at least a semblance of the fiction that there was competition, Trippe had “allowed” a few tiny competitors to exist alongside his South American empire. First among these was SCADTA, the German-run (and now covertly Trippe-owned) Colombian airline, but there was also the Syndicato Condor, an operation based in Brazil that was quietly subsidized by Berlin through Deutsche Luft Hansa, the new German national airline. At the moment, Condor was nothing but a speck compared to Pan American, but it was gearing up to expand little by little.

  The airline already had short hops from Rio de Janeiro to various Brazilian cities, as well as to Montevideo in Uruguay, and it was planning to open a line from Rio to Buenos Aires, then west to Santiago and on to Bolivia. There it would connect to Lloyd Aéreo Boliviano (another local German-run airline), which already flew to Chile.

  Neither of these two tiny airlines would have mattered very much had it not been for the unseen hand, sinister designs, and ulterior motives of Rentschler—as Trippe conceived them. He could see the terrible fate that awaited him if United invested in or bought Condor and Lloyd. After expanding United’s presence in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, Rentschler would inevitably push north into Trippe’s fiefdoms in Central America and the Caribbean, then connect to his vast American network. That was bad, but it would get worse if Eckener decided to open a Zeppelin route from Europe to South America to link with United/Lloyd/Condor.

  The hard truth was that Trippe’s position in South America was rather more precarious than it looked on paper, especially once the stock market crash of October 1929 hit two months after Eckener’s Round-the-World flight.

  Pan American’s revenue mostly came from business travelers paying top dollar for rapid access to South America’s riches, but there were few businesses doing well in the aftermath of the smash. By January 1930, the froth had come off aviation stocks: In October 1929, there had been 278 airplane manufacturers, but three months later, all but a few of the very largest had gone belly-up.

  Airlines exclusively dependent on fares and mail, like Pan American, were particularly vulnerable. Pan American was so big it would probably survive, but the stock price had plummeted 55 percent and there was no bottom yet in sight.

  At the same time, soup-to-nuts conglomerates like United Aircraft and Transport Corporation, which made airplanes (Boeing), propellers (Hamilton), and engines (Pratt & Whitney) as well as ran airports, training schools, and of course its own airline (United), were, if not blossoming, at least in relatively better shape owing to the various subsidiaries balancing one another: United Aircraft was “only” down 35 percent, but Frederick Rentschler could count on a supply of cheap, in-house aircraft to overwhelm Pan American’s weakened defenses.5

  Trippe had arrived in South America like a Cortés, but now he was a Montezuma, trapped and trembling in his palace as the conquistadors battered the doors to steal his gold.

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  JUDGING BY IZT’S rapid progress, Trippe was right to feel he was under assault. When you took a hard look at the state of transatlantic traffic, it was clear that IZT would make a fortune. Plying the Atlantic were currently eleven “monster steamers,” of which five took six days to get across, the rest a full week. In order to justify its fares, which would be double those of a steam liner’s first-class stateroom, IZT’s business plan called for 2.5-day runs each way.

  Operating costs would be heavily subsidized by cutting the number of passengers from the touted 120—a completely unrealistic number in the first place—to between 25 and 50, reserving the rest of the space for high-priced mail. Since the entire U.S.-originating mail (letters and postcards) to Europe amounted to thirty tons per week, if IZT could steal this time-sensitive mail from the steamship lines—which would still carry heavy packages and freight—on twice-weekly flights, a windfall would be theirs.

  IZT had another ace up its sleeve. Senator Charles McNary of Oregon, a New Deal–friendly Republican, introduced the Merchant Airship Bill in April 1930 proposing that cheap federal funds be lent to Goodyear-Zeppelin to defray up to 75 percent of the costs incurred building airships. The loans would relieve Goodyear-Zeppelin from having to raise the colossal capital up front to finance its airships—a major boost as the Depression hit.

  More excitingly for most people, IZT proposed to erect a mooring mast atop the Empire State Building, construction of which was due to be completed in 1931. Like so many other New York real estate moguls, Al Smith, the building’s developer, had a penchant for exaggeration, in this case boasting, “[It’s] on the level, all right. No kidding. We’re working on the thing now.”

  Despite much heated speculation, there was never any intention of the Empire State Building serving as a Zeppelin main terminal. Owing to the need for wind protection, repairs, and refueling, the mooring mast would serve only to drop off passengers before the airship headed to a proper hangar, but still, what a thrill it would be to hitch to the tallest building in the world, cross a gangplank, and take an elevator down to the heart of Midtown, where cabs would whisk you to your hotel.