Empires of the Sky

by Alexander Rose

  Eckener himself, however, regarded using a skyscraper mast as any kind of terminal as an inherently ridiculous idea. How would his airships get close enough to dock without endangering themselves or hitting other buildings? How were passengers supposed to disembark, more than one hundred floors up, amid howling winds? What would happen if they got vertigo looking down from their narrow walkway? Which fools would volunteer for the job of securing the airship as it swung round and round?

  When quizzed as to his thoughts on the matter, Eckener confined himself to grunting that the subject needed further study, which meant “No”—but it was good publicity nonetheless. He preferred to focus on finding the optimal location for what would be the company’s main hangars and mail facility. For the time being, Lakehurst would serve, but it was a military air base and once the navy got the Akron and Macon, there would hardly be room for Zeppelin’s airships. His preference was Baltimore, nicely situated near United’s airports in Washington, Philadelphia, and New York, and a major railroad nexus offering easy access to the West and the South.

  Given all these factors, it is easy to understand why to Trippe, analyzing the problem from his office, the Rentschler-backed IZT looked frighteningly like a monster that would not only kill his ambition to start a transatlantic route but burn down his whole house.

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  ECKENER’S PUBLIC STATEMENTS did nothing to allay Trippe’s fears that IZT was coming for him. The alliance between United and Zeppelin, said The New York Times, was proof that Rentschler “believes transoceanic traffic must be surrendered to the lighter-than-air branch of aeronautics,” with Eckener himself adding, “This is of particular importance because it means that airplane and airship, long regarded as competitors, through two of their greatest companies are joining in a cooperative enterprise.”6

  Eckener also revealed his intentions, confirming Trippe’s predictions that he would encroach on his South American empire: “We [Zeppelin] intend to undertake flights to Brazil by way of Spain,” after which IZT would establish “a huge traffic triangle whose sides will comprise the United States and Germany, Germany and Brazil, and Brazil and the United States.”7

  “Triangle” was the key word. IZT could not be satisfied with flying back and forth along a single route. It needed an international network to funnel passengers and mail through hubs, which would connect with United, Luft Hansa, and Syndicato Condor for domestic destinations.

  The American hub, Eckener had already said, would be Baltimore. More surprising were Eckener’s choices for the European and South American ones. For the former, he had already decided that Friedrichshafen was too remote. Instead, it would remain Zeppelin’s manufacturing center but the main terminal would be moved to Seville in Spain. Blessed with perfect weather and a colorful history, Seville was easy to get to from Berlin, Paris, London, and Rome, and still better, took a day off the travel time to South America.8

  The South American terminal was, as Eckener indicated, to be in Brazil. He’d accepted an invitation to come to Rio de Janeiro from the Brazilian minister of commerce, Victor Kondor, who, being of German ancestry, was excited about Zeppelins. Kondor, unfortunately, had blanched at the cost when Eckener informed him that the government would need to build him a hangar. They compromised on nearby Recife, whose placid weather meant a cheap mooring mast would do. From Recife—already a Syndicato Condor connection—passengers could choose from a brief air, train, or boat trip to Rio.9

  With Brazil confirmed, Eckener was ready for a demonstration flight to prove that the Triangle scheme was viable. With the wind at his back and the newspapers avidly following his every move, Eckener embarked on the Europe–South America leg from Friedrichshafen on May 18, 1930. After refueling at Seville, the Graf Zeppelin headed out to the Atlantic, the ship flying on “as softly and quietly as she always did over water.” He set a course for Tenerife to await, as he said, “the big sensation, the north-east trade wind, which, like a helpful spirit of the elements, was to take us in his arms and bear us at great speed to the south across 20 degrees of latitude—a good 1,600 miles—in constantly fair weather.”

  Early the next morning, they approached the critical point where the cool trade wind mixed with the warm, moist air of the “calm zone,” producing thunderstorms and rain squalls. The airship plunged into a giant cloud and water began driving through the chinks and crevices until it was inches deep on the control-cabin floor. The ship became noticeably heavier as water weighed it down, but Eckener shrugged off the danger. A few minutes later they were out of the squall and the eight tons of water that had seeped in began flushing out. There was nothing, Eckener realized, to be afraid of in a tropical cloudburst, and he was pleased to find, as he had predicted, that the winds had been relatively moderate and there were none of the hazardous vertical air currents that had doomed the Shenandoah.

  By 8 P.M. Eckener had arrived safely in Recife. The next day, they made a ceremonial visit to Rio—the view of the most beautiful bay in the world was spectacular—and at 11 A.M. on May 28, they set out for Lakehurst, the second side of the Triangle, by way of Barbados and Puerto Rico.

  Despite experiencing a severe squall, the Graf Zeppelin arrived safely in New Jersey. Eckener tarried in New York for two days to meet with the gentlemen of the International Zeppelin Company and was gratified to find that “confidence and interest” in the transatlantic project “had been increased by our flight.”

  The return trip via Seville was a jolly one, with Eckener pleased as punch by his New York reception. Or at least it was until they were in the home stretch just past Lyons in France and Eckener came within a hair’s breadth of destroying the airship and killing everyone on board.

  The trouble started when Eckener saw a thunderstorm forming but, perhaps a little cocky and certainly “foolish” (his word), he decided to enter it at the risk of flying blind. At first, it seemed just another lashing of rain—nothing to worry about—but the rain soon turned into hailstones the size of walnuts. Inside the Graf, the passengers could hear the hail drumming on the outer cover, but Eckener did not grow alarmed until Captain Flemming called out in horror that ice was forming and dragging the ship down. From 1,000 feet, it fell to 650, then 500, and then down to a bare 300 feet. Eckener charged up the engines, crying that at this point it wouldn’t matter whether they smashed into the ground at 50 or 65 mph. But still the airship fell, and they were at a hair-raising 160 feet when the elevator man shouted, “I can hold the ship up!”

  The Graf Zeppelin was finally holding steady thanks to Eckener’s coaxing a few hundred more horsepower out of its trusty Maybachs to drive the airship out of the hailstorm. The terror had lasted all of ten minutes, and Eckener assured the worried journalists (untruthfully) that everything was perfectly fine and under control. All they had experienced was a sudden slanting, followed by the crashing of a few plates, but no pitching or rolling. The only passenger who suspected otherwise was the famous polar explorer Sir Hubert Wilkins, who’d been picked up in New York and had been in numerous life-or-death situations himself. He shot Eckener an “earnestly questioning glance,” at which Eckener “nodded slightly to him, and he understood.” Upon arrival in Friedrichshafen, the airship was carefully examined and more than fifty holes were discovered in the outer skin.

  Only among his closest colleagues did Eckener ever admit the truth of the matter. Of all the dangerous situations he had ever been in, or would be in, “none of them affected my nerves” so greatly as that hailstorm. Had the Graf Zeppelin crashed, at one of the highest peaks of Eckener’s career, the entire “Zeppelin enterprise would have come to an end.” As it was, the close call was expertly covered up so that neither his investors nor the public ever found out about it.

  As far as anyone knew, then, IZT was a go and Trippe a goner.10

  39. Engage the Enemy More Closely

  ECKENER HAD MANAGED to shift conventional opi
nion on airships. His Round-the-World and Triangle flights definitively proved, reported the Department of Commerce’s Aeronautics Branch in a widely published statement, that the airship was superior to the airplane for transoceanic flying. Sweeter words Eckener never heard.1

  Among the airshipmen and their backers, this judgment became an unwavering article of faith, but Trippe suspected they were praying to the wrong god. They saw only the present continuing forever, while he peered into the future. Trippe was not alone in perceiving this flawed assumption. Lindbergh similarly thought that the airship’s superiority over long distances was true only in the “present-day,” cautioning that “larger flying boats are being built” and that the airship had yet “to demonstrate its commercial practicability and economy.”2

  Never one to quit while he was behind, Trippe, intending to combat Eckener head to head by building a large, long-range airplane capable of challenging his commanding lead, called Lindbergh, Priester, and Igor Sikorsky in for meetings. Sikorsky, born in 1889 in Kiev and descended from a line of Russian Orthodox priests—he would remain observant until the end of his long life—had attended the Naval Academy in Saint Petersburg but became fascinated by the new field of aeronautics and resigned in 1906 to study engineering. Ultimately, he was a philosophizing dreamer with a talent for mathematics and a penchant for discussing the fantastical aerial machines of Leonardo da Vinci and Jules Verne as if they had really existed.

  When he was eleven, he said, he once had a dream. He was walking along a long, narrow passageway with walnut doors on either side. As he padded along the carpeted floor, he noticed the corridor was suffused with a calm bluish light and he felt a vibrating in his soles. When he reached the end, he opened a door and entered the comfortable lounge of a “large flying ship of the air.”

  That dream formed the inspiration of his life. In the event, reality intruded. His first effort at building such an airplane in 1910 was successful in that it flew (at an altitude of four feet), but unsuccessful in that it couldn’t turn and crashed soon after. He got better. During the war he constructed bombers for Russia but fled to France during the Bolshevik Revolution after being threatened with execution as an Enemy of the Proletariat. From there he emigrated to America in 1919, a former honorary tsarist army general now living on beans and toast and making 80 cents a day giving lectures to fellow expatriates on aviation and astronomy.

  He set his sights on selling civilian planes and founded the Sikorsky Aero Engineering Corporation after raising a little cash from the likes of the composer Sergei Rachmaninoff and other Russian émigrés. Staffed by Russian mechanics, pilots, and engineers, the company managed to build a passenger plane he called the S-29-A by scavenging discarded hospital beds from junkyards and cannibalizing their iron to form its internal structure. In May 1924, on its maiden flight, it crashed, but after major repairs it went up again in September, only for Sikorsky to discover that he was early to the party and that no one, in those pre–Kelly Act days, was interested in a huge fourteen-person airplane when delivering the mail was all-important.

  The Sikorsky Aero Engineering Corporation was based in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and Sikorsky approached Trippe, then running Colonial from its headquarters nearby, about whether he’d be willing to buy a few planes for his budding airline. Trippe had to turn him down as he’d already contracted for the Fokkers, but was left impressed, if nauseated, when Sikorsky unexpectedly “looped” him—Trippe’s first time upside-down—to demonstrate his airplane’s maneuverability.

  Soon afterward, Trippe was out at Colonial and the nearly bankrupt Aero Engineering was reorganized as the Sikorsky Manufacturing Corporation. Sikorsky’s next few years put him back at square one, with the S-30, the S-31, the S-32, the S-33, the S-34, the S-35, and the S-37 all flopping. Trippe, newly installed at Pan American, saved him from yet another financial drubbing by purchasing an eight-seat S-36 in December 1927 for Caribbean use.3

  Sikorsky’s next model was the S-38, an odd-looking seaplane with a long, protruding duck-bill nose, a boat-shaped wooden hull sheathed in aluminum, a small lower wing from which extended two pontoons, and twin booms or outriggers poking out from the upper main wing suspended above the fuselage, which weirdly lacked a tail. Everything was held together with struts and wires reminiscent of the Wrights’ Flyer—but it worked and, crucially for overwater use, was reliable. Over the next few years, Trippe showed his faith in the design by purchasing no fewer than thirty-eight.4

  The S-38 was exactly what it was: an ungainly 1920s aircraft. But now Trippe wanted one fit for the 1930s. Exactly what form it would take occupied Trippe, Lindbergh, and Sikorsky for much of 1929 as the shadow of the Graf Zeppelin loomed darkly over them.

  Lindbergh was adamant that Pan American’s next mainstay be a landplane. A pilot could fly at night to lighted airports, their smoothed runways guaranteeing safe takeoffs and landings; further, jungles and mountains presented no obstacles, and there was an established chain of radio communication and guidance stations to ensure accurate navigation. Seaplanes, he pointed out, could fly only during the day (to avoid hitting flotsam, jetsam, and other debris), could not be used in icy or rough waters, and were prone to corrosion, leaks, and salt caking the windows. In addition, radio signals at sea were subject to strange atmospheric phenomena.

  Sikorsky, on the other hand, argued in favor of seaplanes. He conceded their liabilities but emphasized that for long-haul flights you needed an aircraft capable of operating far out to sea and free to choose from a myriad of ports, harbors, rivers, and bays as its destination. Landplanes were fine for short and medium distances over known terrain blessed with plenty of airports and frequent flights, but to transport a large number of passengers (many already worried about engines conking out) it was necessary to have a flying boat that could reassure them that in the event of a water landing all would be well. More passengers on board, too, meant a heavier aircraft, and it was better to glide in over soft water than to risk the undercarriage collapsing under the strain of hitting a hard runway.

  That left Trippe in the middle. He could see Sikorsky’s points, but Lindbergh knew his onions. All Trippe was concerned about was getting across an ocean and beating Eckener. He asked Sikorsky to show them blueprints for his proposed seaplane to help him reach a decision.

  What Sikorsky brought in to Trippe’s office did little to change Lindbergh’s mind. The S-40, as Sikorsky had named it, looked like the S-38’s beefier big brother. At first glance, it seemed as if all Sikorsky had done was to more or less double everything: four 575-hp engines instead of two 410-hp ones, for instance, 77 feet long instead of 40, and a cost of $125,000 rather than $50,000.

  The same oddly shaped wings and booms were still there, and a conventional tail had not yet made an appearance. But the S-40’s larger dimensions and greater power had combined to give it geometrically enhanced carrying capacity and performance: thirty-eight rather than eight passengers, and a 50 percent increase in range, to nine hundred miles. If built, the S-40 would easily have been the largest commercial aircraft in the world.

  Trippe was duly impressed, but the S-40 was not quite the futuristic aircraft he’d envisaged, and Lindbergh still held out. The latter’s main concern lay with its “struts, wires, and huge pontoons,” which added significantly to air resistance. “I objected to the awkwardness of design and said bluntly that it would be like flying a forest through the air,” recalled Lindbergh. He was taken aback when Sikorsky, in his “delightful Russian accent,” replied, “I agree with you, Co-ro-nel. The resistance is high. But to remove it is still another step.”

  What Sikorsky was saying was that the S-40 was, technologically speaking, an intermediate plane. He knew it was not perfect, but to attempt to skip a generation at this stage would be exceedingly hazardous. Airplane technology had not yet caught up with Trippe’s (or Lindbergh’s) ambitions, and while it was painful and risky to allow Eckener and the airship
to keep their lead, Sikorsky needed time. With time would come, he promised, the opportunity to develop the aircraft he needed to take on Eckener.

  Lindbergh understood, as did Trippe, that the desired “radical improvements” would have to wait. As Lindbergh recalled, “I was disappointed, but I had to agree [that] we were in desperate need of a better plane for Caribbean routes. The Atlantic could come later.”

  In December 1929, with Eckener and Rentschler gearing up for their assault on Pan American, Trippe made the final decision: Just as Admiral Nelson had famously signaled to the fleet at Trafalgar, Pan American too would Engage the Enemy More Closely. He doubled down and ordered two S-40s with an option on a third.5

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  THE KEY FACTOR that Trippe grasped, as so few others did this early, was that the airplane was on the cusp of a major technical transformation, one that would overturn every precept of the decades-old airplane-versus-airship competition.

  Beginning in 1925, the aviation boom had encouraged tentative steps forward in airplane design, but only by the decade’s close were the pieces starting to come together to create entirely new types of aircraft.

  As Lindbergh’s complaint that the S-40 would be like “flying a forest through the air” implied, of central concern to aerodynamicists in this period was lowering air resistance through better streamlining. With reduced drag, an airplane could travel farther, fly faster, and carry heavier loads. Arnstein and Jaray over at Zeppelin had already concluded the same during the war and had altered airships’ shapes from cigars to teardrops, but there was little more progress to be made in that respect. There was still much to do, however, when it came to airplanes, whose sharp angularities, ornamental touches, and cumbersome protuberances were begging to be smoothed out and cut off.