Empires of the Sky

by Alexander Rose

  Sikorsky had delivered the first S-42, the long-range successor to the S-40, right on schedule. In early August 1934, Trippe’s chief pilot, Edwin Musick, took it for a faultless four-circuit run totaling some 1,200 miles along the Manhattan riverfront, Long Island Sound, and coastal Connecticut, serving in effect as an eight-hour-long advertisement for Pan American. Immediately afterward, the Brazilian Clipper—as Trippe had dubbed the plane—was assigned to the Miami-Rio route. Travel time between the two cities was cut at a stroke from eight days to five, and the Brazilian Clipper was soon joined by the West Indies Clipper, Jamaica Clipper, and Antilles Clipper.11

  The Sikorsky S-42s scored a huge success for Trippe, who brilliantly exploited a growing interest in Brazil among Americans. One of his board members was the extraordinary adventurer Merian Cooper. In his time he had chased Pancho Villa in Mexico, served as a bomber pilot in France in the Great War, flown for the volunteer Kościuszko’s Squadron in the Polish-Soviet War of 1919–21, been shot down and interned in a Soviet POW camp, escaped from that POW camp, and been pursued by pirates off the Abyssinian coast. In the late 1920s, he had joined Trippe’s merry band at Pan American, but board duties took up little of his time: He otherwise devoted himself to—why not?—the movie business, where he pitched an idea about a giant ape ravaging New York that had come to him in a dream.

  King Kong came out in 1933 to great acclaim, and on the back of its success Cooper became production chief of RKO, where he oversaw the making of an ambitious “aerial musical” called Flying Down to Rio.

  If ever a movie served as outright propaganda for a company, Flying Down to Rio was it. As the film went into production, Cooper—still a Pan American board member, but not a word was heard about the conflict of interest—and other RKO executives became frequent visitors to Trippe’s offices in New York and enjoyed themselves “scouting” locations in scenic Brazil courtesy of the airline.

  Released in January 1934, the film was a major blockbuster, though audiences paid less attention to the romantic triangle among the leads (pulchritudinous Dolores Del Rio, beefcake Gene Raymond, sizzling Raul Roulien) than to the dance numbers performed by a scene-stealing duo named Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, together for the first time.

  The film’s spectacular chorus-girls-dancing-on-a-wing flying sequences and its invention of a “new Brazilian dance craze that is driving the world Melody Mad” called the Carioca drove American tourism to lush Rio in 1934—with Pan American, featured heavily in the movie, reaping the benefits. That year, the airline reported a 44 percent increase in South American passenger miles over 1933, as tourists flocked to experience, as one magazine put it, “palm-fringed beaches fanned by the southern trade-winds, exotic scenery, Latin folk, brilliantly plumed parakeets, and sloe-eyed señoritas.”

  To accommodate them, Trippe built the Dinner Key Terminal in Miami, intended to complement the city’s 36th Street Airport in handling Pan American’s growing fleet. Designed in the cool Streamline Moderne style, Dinner Key was the most modern seaplane terminal in the world and could control up to four aircraft landing or taking off simultaneously.

  The main entrance doors were of bronze, like some Homeric palace, topped by a frieze of winged globes, the symbol of Pan American. Inside, visitors were greeted by the hulking prominence of a three-and-a-quarter-ton rotating globe ten feet in diameter that showed Trippe’s boundless empire.12

  Or so he wanted people to think. In fact, the boundary stopped at the Atlantic—but he didn’t care anymore.

  * * *

  —

  THE ATLANTIC OCEAN was still a mire, thanks to Imperial Airways, Trippe’s ball and chain of a partner. Granted, Glenn Martin was late in delivering his M-130s—he’d asked for an extension until the fall of 1935 to deliver the first one—but Imperial hadn’t even started to build its own transatlantic plane, and, thanks to his “understanding” with Woods Humphery, Trippe couldn’t go anywhere in the meantime.

  Imperial had been bragging to Trippe that its contracted seaplane, the Short Brothers “Empire” S-23 flying boat, would be a world-beating aircraft. But then Oswald Short, co-founder of the firm, and Arthur Gouge, its chief designer, attended a lecture by Sikorsky at the Royal Aeronautical Society on Pan American’s S-42 and were flabbergasted by what they heard.

  Before a stunned audience Sikorsky spoke of such proven numbers as a top speed of 182 mph, a payload of 8,363 pounds, and an astounding wing-loading ratio of 28.58. To give some idea of the scale of Sikorsky’s achievement, consider that the S-40’s respective figures were 137 mph (25 percent less than the S-42), 3,200 pounds (62 percent less), and 19.5 (32 percent less).

  In the question period afterward, a shocked Gouge confessed that the superiority of the S-42 was such that Short Brothers would have to “re-cast their ideas” and redesign the Empire from scratch.13

  The very earliest it could be delivered, Woods Humphery told a horrified Trippe, was the summer of 1936—fully two years away—by which time Sikorsky would no doubt be generations ahead technologically even as Trippe’s expensive M-130s languished in a hangar until Imperial could get its act together.

  * * *

  —

  TRIPPE SOUGHT A way of turning the Imperial liability into a Pan American asset. He had the glimmerings of an idea, but it was a hell of a long shot.

  He stopped by his old haunt, the New York Public Library at 42nd Street. In the mid-1920s, when he’d been running Long Island Airways for Coney Island thrill seekers, Trippe had spent countless hours in the library studying the history of trains and shipping as he tried to understand the arcane science of airline economics. Now he lodged himself in the Maps Room, peppering, or pestering, the librarians with requests to bring old, yellowed maritime charts up from the archives.

  He was looking for one tiny speck in an endless ocean, an island in the Pacific. But none was to be found, no matter how closely he held his magnifying glass to the page. He had another idea: the logs of the clipper and U.S. Navy ships that had once plied the blue. One brittle manuscript after another was brought to his desk and Trippe diligently deciphered the crabbed, handwritten numbers and notes within. And all of a sudden, there it was: a single mention of a place named Wake Island, located roughly halfway between Midway and Guam.14

  Little was known of Wake. First discovered by a Spanish navigator in 1568, who dismissed it as a waterless, barren island inhabited by nothing but seabirds—an accurate appraisal—it was rediscovered by Captain Samuel Wake of the Prince William Henry in the 1790s, but nobody cared. The place was so forgotten and forlorn that it had seldom been added to maps since.

  Trippe investigated further and ordered up the five volumes of Lieutenant Charles Wilkes’s Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition During the Years 1838, 1839, 1840, 1841, 1842. While surveying the Pacific Ocean, Wilkes had made a brief stop there on December 20, 1841, and had written of the place: “Wake’s Island is a low coral one, of triangular form, and eight feet above the surface. It has a large lagoon in the center, which was well filled with fish of a variety of species; among these were some fine mullet. There is no fresh water on the island [and] from appearances, the island must be at times submerged, or the sea makes a complete breach over it….The reef around this island is very small in extent.”15

  That was the sum total of knowledge of Wake Island. Judging by Wilkes’s description, it did not sound very promising, but the lieutenant had spent less than a day there and had only guessed that it was sometimes underwater. Maybe it wasn’t. How large and placid was the lagoon? How small and dangerous the coral reef?

  Trippe needed to find out more because Wake was so perfectly situated. If a flying boat could land in the lagoon and the island was supplied with fuel and water by ship, then Wake was an ideal spot for an island-hopping Pacific route from California to Hawaii to Midway to Wake to Guam to Manila, and from there China or Japan was an easy ri
de.

  In June 1934, Trippe called a trusted manager named C. H. “Dutch” Schildhauer, a former naval aviator, into his office with the rolltop desk and asked him to go to Washington and look into Wake Island. “Do it quietly,” said Trippe as he ushered Schildhauer out. “You don’t need to bring our name into it.”16

  Schildhauer made straight for the Navy Department, which was sure to have more up-to-date information available. It had some, but not much. In 1898, Hawaii had been annexed; soon after came the Spanish cession of Guam and the Philippines to the United States as it expanded across the Pacific.

  At that point, there had been a thought, Schildhauer learned, that Wake Island would make a good coaling station for the fleet. To that end, in 1899 Commander Edward Taussig of the Bennington had dropped anchor and claimed “the Atoll known as Wake Island” as American territory. But it proved unsuitable for a naval base (Midway was better), and for the next couple of decades the island had mostly played host to Japanese pearl hunters, feather poachers, and sharkfin cutters.

  A follow-up report in 1922 noted that USS Beaver, under Lieutenant Commander Sherwood Pickering, had visited the main island for a few hours and discovered that the lagoon was just fifteen feet deep, making it unsuitable for anything other than small boats. He had also measured the total land area, much of it lying only ten to fifteen feet above sea level, at about 2,600 acres (the three-island group surrounding the lagoon was roughly 4½ miles long and 1½ wide).

  Pickering’s report confirmed the existing impression that Wake was useless for naval operations, but it nevertheless contained the information Trippe was looking for. He didn’t need a deep lagoon to land a seaplane, just one sufficiently calm to allow a smooth set-down and takeoff, and Pickering had determined that the island remained above water.

  There was one sentence that particularly excited him: Pickering, rather farsightedly considering it was 1922, had remarked, “If the long-heralded trans-Pacific flight ever takes place, Wake Island should certainly be occupied and used as an intermediate resting and fueling port.”17

  Trippe ordered Schildhauer to find out who was in charge of administering Wake: the State Department or the navy? Schildhauer asked State’s historical adviser, who hadn’t the foggiest idea but called the navy’s Hydrographic Office. The navy didn’t know, either. Wake Island existed in bureaucratic limbo. Eventually, the navy got it.18

  Trippe was also in limbo. He had to decide what to do next. A major strategic dilemma faced him: Pan American’s goal had always been to cross the Atlantic, but Imperial’s backwardness was preventing that, and there were no guarantees that Imperial would fix itself. On the other hand, a Pacific route lay open and beckoning, though whether it was possible to fly it was as yet unknown.

  The distances alone made it seem out of the question. California to Hawaii, at roughly 2,400 miles, and Hawaii to Guam, at about 3,500 miles, were the two longest overwater jumps in the world and made the Atlantic look like a pond in comparison. But add in Midway and Wake Island as pit stops and the calculus changed: Hawaii to Midway was 1,149 miles; Midway to Wake, 1,034 miles; and Wake to Guam, 1,334 miles. From Guam, it was about 1,600 miles to Manila.

  As for the California-Hawaii leg, a stripped Sikorsky S-42 loaded up with nothing but fuel could theoretically get to Honolulu, albeit with zero safety margin and fumes powering the engines. The distances thereafter were within reach, but then the other problem was that Wake, Guam, and Midway were impossibly small tufts of land; the tiniest navigational error would doom a hopelessly lost pilot to a watery death.

  Commercially, too, flying the Pacific was unlikely to make much money. China and Japan were by no means major markets, and relatively few people wanted to vacation in the Philippines when London, Paris, Rome, and Berlin were far more attractive destinations.

  Then again, Hawaii had proved highly lucrative for the steamship companies, and since PZT was a bust, Trippe would be assured of tourist dollars for that leg, at least. If nothing else, since Pan American’s longest water route at the time was between Kingston and Barranquilla, a mere 660 miles, any lessons learned from mastering the Pacific could be applied to the Atlantic when the time came. And anything was better than having his airplanes languishing in hangars for years.

  Trippe rarely blazed trails without official backing, and in the Pacific he could count on strong support in Washington. In 1934, the State Department and the navy were confronted by an expanding Japanese empire in the Pacific. As State sought to buttress American allies there, the navy was trying to fortify its chain of bases against potential attack, though this was loudly denounced in Tokyo as a treaty violation.

  But what if a private company developed the islands with radio stations, fresh water, and seaplane docks? A company like Pan American, for instance, that agreed in the event of war to hand over its facilities at Midway, Wake, and Guam to the navy. With the State Department’s blessing, Trippe and the navy made what they called an “informal working arrangement” to that effect.

  Trippe made the final decision in the early fall of 1934. In the coming year, Pan American would pivot its efforts to the Pacific, he told his disbelieving staff in New York. Despite everything he had said previously, the Atlantic would become the airline’s secondary concern and Glenn Martin’s delayed M-130s would be based in California instead of on the East Coast.19

  When the news was announced on October 14 that Pan American was heading to Asia, Eckener could scarcely believe his luck.20 It meant Trippe was abandoning the Atlantic enterprise and leaving the field wide open for Zeppelin domination. But he had to work fast.

  * * *

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  GOODYEAR’S EMISSARY TO Friedrichshafen, Harold Dick, accordingly reported to a rapturous Litchfield that Eckener was driving his workers hard to finish LZ-129 so as to begin Atlantic service as soon as possible.

  Dick was astounded by what he saw in the hangar. It was not so much the size of LZ-129, for Dick had been up close to the Akron and Macon, and LZ-129 did not dwarf them, being only slightly larger.

  No, for Dick, it was the scale of the ambition, for here at last was the grand transoceanic airship he and so many others had long dreamed of building. While the Akron and the Macon had been utilitarian military vehicles that devoted significant space to their internal (and eternally troublesome) scout-airplane hangars, LZ-129 was intended for between fifty and seventy-two passengers. Eckener had finally overcome one of the Graf Zeppelin’s drawbacks—lack of room for travelers—and the plans he showed Dick depicted luxury in the air far beyond anything else available.

  Dick, however, was a jaded rarity. To any regular observer, LZ-129, even in its then-skeletal state, made the Graf Zeppelin look puny, though it was only thirty feet longer. It was its width and height that exponentially multiplied its dimensions and boggled the senses—as they still do. Whereas the maximum diameter of the Graf Zeppelin was 100 feet, LZ-129’s was a third more, making it nearly five times the height of what is today the world’s largest passenger airliner, the double-decked Airbus 380 (subtracting the upward-protruding tail). Its length was 804 feet, more than twice that of a football field. One of LZ-129’s four tail fins alone measured 105 feet long and 49 feet in breadth, and was 12 feet thick at the base.

  There was still a lot of work to do, Dick told Litchfield. The passenger cabins were mostly complete, but there were no walls, fittings, or water pipes in the crew and officers’ quarters. None of the outer cover was in place and no gas cells had been installed, nor had any of the complex control mechanisms or mooring equipment.21

  He also revealed the “next stage of construction” by adding that a new type of engine was undergoing testing in Stuttgart. This was a reference to a coming changeover from Maybach, which had supplied Zeppelin engines since the count’s day. It was not a sad goodbye. Karl Maybach had lost interest in the low-margin business of manufacturing airship engines and had turned instead
to making an exorbitantly expensive automobile—one could purchase five large houses for the same price—named the “Maybach Zeppelin,” fittingly so considering the car’s gigantic dimensions.22

  Replacing Maybach was Daimler-Benz. The Nazis had lately instituted a “motorization” policy to increase car production (and to build military vehicles for the semi-covert rearmament program).23 A prime beneficiary was Daimler-Benz, whose board of directors was accordingly packed with Nazi Party members and fellow travelers.24 They were no doubt some of the “big industrialists” Goebbels had casually referred to when he once spoke with Eckener about raising money, and they had been prevailed upon to supply Zeppelin with the engines he required.

  The new DB 602 engines were specifically designed for airship use and to Eckener’s specifications. Airship engines were different from airplane engines in that they were expected to run at cruising power for days, rather than for hours. That made them heavier than airplane engines, by up to five times, but fuel consumption was the more important measurement, as a thriftier engine allowed less fuel to be taken—useful, when one had to budget for about sixty-five tons of the stuff for transoceanic voyaging.25 It was time, Eckener had decided, to switch from gasoline and Blau gas to diesel. Not only was it cheaper, but it was a great deal more energy efficient.

  Harold Dick also reported on something else, of greater moment, at Friedrichshafen: the imminent switch to helium.26

  In the aftermath of the R-101 tragedy, Eckener’s American partners had made it very clear that for safety reasons he must use helium instead of time-honored hydrogen. Like Trippe with his turn to the Pacific, then, Eckener had had to calculate the debits and credits involved with such a radical pivot.