An American Saga
Juan Trippe and His Pan Am Empire
Juan Trippe, the first and last aviation tycoon in history, learned to fly in the rickety machines of World War I, when the sky appealed only to daredevils, and his life expectancy could have been counted, probably, in days. He was as star struck as any of the other young aviators of the day, but he was also a Yale educated banker’s son who believed the world was crying out for air travel but didn’t yet know it, and he thought he saw a way to turn this risky game into a business. At 25 he began to found airlines, all of which failed, but in 1927 he took over floundering Pan American, which had only one route, 90 miles from Key West to Havana. Within eight years at great risk and against fantastic odds Pan Am had regularly scheduled service across the Pacific, and after that Trippe thrust his tentacles into all of Latin America, into Europe, Africa, Australia, China. He was a nerveless, sometimes vicious competitor who bought up or drove out of business anyone who got in his way—President Roosevelt once referred to him as a “Yale educated gangster”---until he had built Pan Am into the by far the mightiest airline that had existed up to that time.
“A story that has never been told before…Especially strong on Pan Am’s tortured corporate history—there were dozens of subsidiary and affiliated companies, including the fabled CNAC in China” --Houston Post.
“Pictures a visionary who had human failings, a man inexhaustible and insistent…a hard driver with guts who was a leader from the time he became a teen-age pilot” --Milwaukee Journal.
“Sparkling…the acts of daring, courage and vision that led to a global route system are recounted with drama and verve” --Baron’s
“This is not an official or worshipful biography. Daley went to government and other records and he talked to Trippe’s enemies—his strong-armed competitors and ousted rivals—as well as his friends. And then he told his story” --Detroit News
OTHER BOOKS BY ROBERT DALEY
Nonfiction
Portraits of France
An American Saga
Prince of the City
Treasure
Target Blue
A Star in the Family
Cars at Speed
The World Beneath the City
Fiction
Pictures
The Enemy of God
The Innocents Within
Nowhere to Run
Wall of Brass
Tainted Evidence
A Faint Cold Fear
Man With a Gun
Hands of a Stranger
The Dangerous Edge
Year of the Dragon
The Fast One
To Kill a Cop
Strong Wine Red as Blood
A Priest and a Girl
Only a Game
The Whole Truth
Text and Photos by
The Swords of Spam
The Cruel Sport
The Bizarre World of European Sport
Copyright © 1980 by Riviera Productions, Ltd
Postscript copyright 2010 by Riviera Productions, Ltd.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions
Originally published in the United States by Random House, Inc , New York and
simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto
Library of Congress cataloging in Publication Data
Daley, Robert - An American Saga
Smashwords Edition
Bibliography
1 Trippe, Juan Terry, 9-
a. Aeronautics—United States—Biography
3 Pan American World Airways, inc I Title
TL.T7D34 0 7'o92'4 [b]
isbn: 978-1-4661-5075-1
For John C. Leslie
An American Saga
Juan Trippe
And His Pan Am Empire
by Robert Daley
C o n t e n t s
Part I • A YOUNG MAN PLANS
1. The Island
2. Trippe
3. Colonial Air Transport
4. First
5. A New Company
6. First Flight
7. Priester
8. Key West
9. Leuteritz
10West Indian Aerial Express
11. NYRBA
12. The Mad Cutthroat Struggle
13. The First Clipper
Part II THE PACIFIC
14. The Next Step
15. Staking Out the World
16. North to the Orient
17. China Airways
18. Europe via Greenland
19. The Long-Range DF
20. A Switch to the Pacific
21. The Public Decision
22. Practice Flights
23. To Hawaii Nonstop
24. Wake
25. The China Clipper
26. Life on the Atolls
27. Trippe around the World
28. New Zealand
Part III THE ATLANTIC
29. The Obstacles
30. The First Across
31. The Correct Vehicle
32. The Whitney Takeover
33. The Boeing Accident
34. Trippe Returns
35. Trippe versus American Export Airlines
36. Blitzkrieg against TACA
37. Trippe versus the U.S. Government
Part IV • WAR
38. China
39. "Delousing" SCADTA
40. The Airport Development Program
41. Africa
42. The Day of Infamy
43. Loyalty
44. The War Routes
Part V THE NEW WORLD
45. The Community Company
46. High Stakes
47. The Hearings
48 . The Plan to Save China
49. The Jets
50. Priester Demoted
51. The Tycoon
52. The Biggest Gamble
53. The Great Day
54. Epilogue
Postscript, 2010
Pan Am's Generation of Capital
Source Notes
Bibliography
About the Author
Part I A Young Man Plans
I
The Island
Topographically the island is singularly undistinguished, being a sand spit bent into the shape of a hairpin and barely awash in the heaving sea. Total land mass is two and a half square miles, and mean elevation at high tide is twelve feet. The hairpin's long gaunt arms are in some places only a hundred yards wide.
As a type, it seems more suited to the Bahamas or the Florida Keys, where such islands swell up out of a shallow sand bottom and lie in clusters. People sail to them in pleasure boats for snorkeling or beach parties.
But this island is in a different sea. Three-quarters of a mile offshore the water is 16,000 feet deep. The island is actually a mountain, all but the flattish, top twelve feet of which are underwater. It sits alone amid a million or more square miles of empty ocean. No one has ever sailed to it for snorkeling or picnics or any other amusement.
It has no coves or inlets, and an unbroken reef encircles it as tightly as a wedding band. It has no harbor. There is no safe anchorage. Against the encircling reef on all but the calmest days pounds a constant surf. No vessel of whatever size has ever been able to approach very closely.
There is no way that anyone making a survey could ever have singled out this island saying, "Here's one of the world's important ones." It seems particularly unsuited to heroic events. It has no water. There is nothing to eat. Vegetation is extremely scant, amounting to a few warped trees, some clumps of scaevola shrubs and tangled carpets of octopus vines which lie like hairpieces on the crowns of the dunes. These dunes are lumpy and uneven, having been rearranged many times over the years both by weather and by high explosives. Typhoons have struck every fifteen years or so. There is nothing to impede their swollen movement, or to slow them down for hundreds upon hundreds of miles in all directions. When they strike, they scalp the dunes, and indeed the entire island, as if with razor blades. There is little shade here at the best of times. After each typhoon years go by before trees and bushes grow back—before shade itself reappears.
A true desert island.
A beach rims the outside of the entire hairpin. It is composed partly of sand, partly of sharp coral rubble, and is no place for bare feet. One tramps it in shoes only. It seems immensely empty. One faces out into the northeast trade winds for a thousand miles. A good deal of military junk protrudes from the sand, most of it sharp-edged, all of it rusty. It competes with nature for attention, and will for some time more. Here are two concrete pillboxes. With beetle-browed eyes they still stare out over the sea, their mouths empty where the long cigars used to protrude. Both are canted to one side, whether by shellfire or erosion is by now impossible to say. Beyond them a rill of water crosses the beach to lap against an upside-down, half-buried half-track. Theirs? Ours? Somebody's gravestone, anyway.
Ahead, half hidden in the scrub, still commanding 180 degrees of ocean, stands a great naval gun. Its eight-inch barrel looks burned out, as if from firing too many rounds too quickly. This was one of their guns, or so it is said today; no one is really sure. Its inch-thick carapace has been rusting for so long now that it has begun to peel in layers, like plywood.
The two arms of the hairpin, reaching out from the shoulders, seek to enclose a great round lagoon. They don't quite make it, but the encircling reef completes the job offshore and the lagoon is there, fully formed, limpid, placid, ablaze with tropical fish. It shimmers with color, from sapphire blue, where the water is deep, to the emerald green of the shallows, to opalescent white, where the water may be only inches deep. This is color more glorious and brilliant than the eye can absorb.
The lagoon dominates the island. This is partly because it alone is beautiful, and partly because it alone first brought men here. See that dark-blue patch underwater, that long straight channel across the center of the lagoon? College boys dredged that channel out in the summer of 1935, which is the year the island entered history.
Facing the lagoon on the inner side of the hairpin stand the island's buildings, all but a few boarded up, presumably forever. Most are quite old. They can be dated by their pockmarked foundations—modern man has learned to reckon age from bullet holes. Old or new, their architecture—what might be called twentieth-century military—is the same.
There used to be a 48-room hotel here too, built in a more luxurious style. It is gone now, along with nearly all it once represented. Poking around amid the weeds one can still discern its foundations. There used to be a pier out front as well, stretching out into the lagoon for a hundred yards, where the great flying boats used to tie up. It is possible to imagine the scene still: the wealthy passengers disembarking, walking up the pier toward the hotel veranda, where, after ten or more hours in the air, cool drinks awaited them. Today the pier is ruined; a few of its concrete pilings jut like broken teeth above the surface of the water.
When the flying boats had been emptied, they could be taxied along the shore toward the service area nearby. Swimmers wearing goggles and the two-piece bathing costumes of the day would position a flatbed contraption under the hull. When all was ready, the immense flying boat would get winched up out of the lagoon via a sloping concrete ramp. Water would spill from it as if off a duck. Up on land it would rest there looking ungainly, far too clumsy to fly.
The underwater ramp is still intact. In a few places sand has drifted across it, but the concrete looks solid. It hasn't been used since the world it was built to serve ceased to exist. It is still known to the few current inhabitants of the island as the Pan Am ramp. Hardly any of them knows why.
Standing at the top of the ramp one can survey the entire lagoon. It is about a mile wide here. On it nothing moves One can look across to the other spit of sand.
This is Wake Island in the middle of the empty Pacific. It was discovered, in effect, in the New York Public Library by Juan Trippe. For a brief time—only
the blink of an eye as history is measured—it was one of the most famous places in the world.
2
Trippe
At the beginning Trippe was both a dreamer and a daredevil, a youth with mind and heart literally in the clouds, and he could reasonably have expected to die either young or impoverished or both.
He was born on June 27, 1899, son of a New York investment banker. When he was about ten, his father took him to an air race over lower New York Bay. The Statue of Liberty was one of the turning pylons. The planes were open kites with pusher engines, and the boy could see the pilots manipulating feet and hands. He could see propeller blades flailing. On each lap the planes flew close over the heads of the awed crowd, and one plane crashed. On the way home the Trippe family car wouldn't start.
From then on young Trippe yearned to become an aviator. When he was about seventeen, his father sent him to Marconi School to learn Morse code, together with what little was known about radio at that time, because, although the Trippes were rich, the Puritan ethic prevailed in their household; their son would have to work for what he wanted. Radio first, then flight. So young Trippe learned radio, after which his father sent him to the private Curtiss Flying School in Miami. Soon he had about 100 minutes of dual flying under his belt—flying was counted in minutes in the summer of 1917.
That fall, having enrolled at Yale, he went out for freshman football and made the team as a guard, for he was a big hulking youth who could push other youths around. By then the United States had entered World War I "to fight the Huns." Young Trippe wanted to fight the Huns too, as did most of his teammates, and once the season ended, almost the entire freshman squad quit college and joined the Marine Corps en masse; 1917 was a patriotic year.
Trippe's patriotism was more specific than most. The place he wanted to fight the Huns from was the air and when he discovered that the Marine Corps had no facilities for training him as a pilot, he managed to get himself transferred to the Navy, which did. He was sent to ground school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he soloed over Long Island, a twenty-minute flight in a Jenny. From there he was sent to Hampton Roads, Va., where he first flew flying boats, and then to Pensacola, Fla., where he volunteered for night flying, and for bombers, even though the romance and glamour of flying that year lay elsewhere. There were many heroes of the air battles of the Great War. All flew tiny pursuit planes. They engaged in dogfights high above France, and they fired their machine guns out through whirling propeller blades. Hardly any big bombers got into action at all; certainly Trippe never did, and his other new skills—radio, night flying—did not change the course of the war either. Planes of any description rarely flew at night, nor did they normally carry radios.
But Trippe was already obeying his own instincts, and moving in his own direction: bombers, night flying, radio. Though not yet nineteen, he was already thinking of after the war, of the time when he would become a man, and of the commercial possibilities of aviation.
Of course he enjoyed the training, as any youngster would have. He learned to machine-gun big wooden rowboats adrift in the sea, to make dead-stick landings into the wind, and he made a single parachute jump. He was once accused of zooming a Navy blimp with his bomber and, as punishment, was obliged to walk tours of the yard for two days with a pack full of bricks on his back. Upon graduation he and some others rolled about twenty cannonballs down a hill into the streets of the town, doing some damage.
The war ended there. Trippe went back to Yale, enamored of flying. He played guard again on the football team, rowed on the crew. He was six feet tall, and his weight was moving upward toward two hundred pounds. As a rich man's son he also played golf, and he became a superb golfer, with a handicap of five.
During his sophomore football season he was kicked in the spine in a pileup. His three bottom vertebrae had to be fused. It was one of the first times this operation was tried. Trippe spent three months in the hospital, and when he came out, his football and rowing days were over, and it would be a long time before he played golf again.
On Juan's twenty-first birthday his father died. The Trippe bank failed. Juan went back to Yale, where, while other students caroused, he founded and edited the Yale Graphic, a kind of general-interest college magazine. He was not then, and never became, a literary man. He was learning how to run a business, how to meet a payroll. It was not art that interested him, but bringing in advertising linage. He made a profit of a few thousand dollars, which went into the bank to gather interest alongside his small inheritance from his father.
During the long summer vacations he lived with his mother in New York, on East 76th Street, and he worked for Lee, Higginson and Company, the investment house. He worked as a runner, he worked in the cages. He learned how companies were organized, how funds were raised, what it meant to operate on margin. He learned the investment banking business, and it failed to excite him.
Back at Yale he studied principally business courses, accounting, engineering, transportation. He absorbed what interested him, and ignored what did not. Yale never counted him a brilliant student, but then Yale's norms were not Trippe 's. He was well-bred, a gentleman. He was affable, polite and shy with girls. Even among his classmates, he was not one to assert himself. But he did have the ability to win long, persistent arguments. He would argue patiently until no one had any energy left to argue back. His classmates called him Wang, a corruption of Juan, the name he had been given in honor of his Aunt Juanita. Juan was a name he often hated. But he hated Wang more. He was also sometimes called Mummy because, except for the long arguments, he seldom spoke.
Flying was one of his few outlets. A great many war-surplus airplanes were being released to the public during those years. Trippe organized the Yale Flying Club, which bought a plane with two open cockpits. Trippe entered it in an intercollegiate air race against ten other planes representing that many other schools, most of them Ivy League. The race was to be held on Long Island around a four-cornered course, and the planes were supposed to fly about a hundred feet above the treetops. Trippe studied his plane. He thought that by changing the incidence of the dihedral he could make it fly faster; all his life he seemed to know more about the mechanics of flight than anyone gave him credit for. He was in third place at the first pylon. The second leg was down the Merrick Road for twelve miles to Amityville, and the Cornell, Princeton and Yale planes were flying neck and neck, ten feet apart and thirty feet above the road. The Yale plane (Trippe) dove to within ten feet of the ground at the pylon, got the inside position and took the lead. Two miles from the finish, Trippe took the lead for the final time, and brushing the treetops all the way, crossed the finish line six seconds ahead of the second-place plane. It was a heady moment for a youth who could no longer engage in the more athletic team sports that college crowds turned out to see.
When he graduated he was twenty-three, and he saw life as a rather more serious affair than did most of his classmates. The banker's son, all assumed, would become a banker, but Trippe refused. He was determined to make a business out of aviation. This was partly an intellectual decision, partly an emotional one. The only place where Trippe felt special was around airplanes. He was part of a small, select fraternity there. He was a pilot—though there was a certain devil-may-care glamour to the word which did not quite fit Trippe. Nonetheless he knew the adventure of flying. He understood the machine, and the mechanical laws that governed flight. He sensed where commercial aviation could go— not completely perhaps, but certainly more sharply than most other people did.
And so he determined to buy some planes and found an airline. His credentials were more considerable than they might have appeared. He had his inheritance from his father, plus access to the world of money in which his father had moved; among his own classmates were other young pilots, including William Vanderbilt and Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney. William Rockefeller had lived across the street from him in Greenwich, Conn.; they had once climbed cherry trees together. These young men were connected to three of the biggest fortunes in the world.
Trippe also knew that seven war-surplus planes were about to be auctioned off at the Philadelphia Navy Yard—single-engined pontoon biplanes of the model designated 49-B. Trippe entered a bid of $500 apiece. This bid and all others were thrown out as too low, but when bids were called for again a month later the boy who would become the tycoon thought it over carefully, entered the same bid a second time—and got the planes.
Now to make them into an airline.
Most young men of Trippe's time—or any time—might not have bothered to organize a formal company just to sell airplane rides, for this took work and time, and it cost money in legal fees. Trippe, however, did organize a company. He capitalized it at $5,000, putting up half himself, selling stock for the other half, and incorporating as Long Island Airways. One of Trippe's partners was his uncle. Another was a boyhood friend, Dave Robbins, whose father owned the Robbins Conveyor Belt Company. Though Dave had been a World War I pilot and was no longer a child, Robbins Sr. was furious, and began bombarding young Trippe with angry letters. "I would prefer that you didn't encourage Bud to stay in the aviation business," one read.
The seven planes were in crates in Philadelphia, and they reached Rockaway Beach, where Trippe had rented an abandoned hangar, on seven railroad cars. Trippe and his pals began to assemble them, and then to test-fly them, and with that Long Island Airways was in business.
People, in 1922, sometimes ran through the streets after airplanes, congregating at the spot where the plane seemed likely to set down. They waited in lines to pay money to be taken aloft. A stunt or two by the hovering pilot, and the crowd was there, and the cash registers started ringing. This was especially true in summer at the beaches. There were potential customers sprawled on the hot sand from Coney Island to Fire Island. And behind the dunes there was plenty of still water on which pontoon planes could land.
Trippe did very little piloting himself. He was too busy trying to turn Long Island Airways into a business. He could hire men to fly— ex-military pilots were all around him clamoring for a chance to handle the controls. What could not be hired, at least not easily in 1922, were aviation-oriented young men willing to study the "art" for its business possibilities. This was what Trippe had to do himself, and he soon found it inordinately satisfying.
His planes had been built to carry two people only: one pilot and one passenger. The Oxx engine, though considered mighty for its day, could lift no more weight than that. Furthermore, with gas tanks built into the fuselage, there was no room for more than one passenger.
Two passengers would mean double the revenues, of course. It would mean more than that. A three-seater plane would mean carrying couples, something very few planes could do in 1922. It would mean commanding a bigger share of the beach business than any of his competitors. But how were two passengers to be crowded aboard? How was such a load to be lifted off the ground?
It was possible to buy French Hispano-Suiza 220 engines that provided more horsepower, and could lift more weight—theoretically, at least. However, their propellers were so big that if Trippe installed them in his Aeromarines, the props would cut the pontoons off. Besides, there would still be no room in the fuselage for the second passenger.
Trippe's dark brown eyes studied this machinery, his mind mulled over the possibilities, and he sought advice from every mechanic who crossed his path. At length he concluded that the Hisso engines could in fact be installed in his Aeromarines, and if the engines' reduction drive was removed, smaller propellers could be substituted for the big ones. The engines could then be revved up fast enough so that the original power would still be achieved and the pontoons would not get cut off. As for making space for an extra passenger, why not put the gas tanks on the outside of the fuselage? So he bought the Hisso engines and the smaller props, and he ordered these alterations carried out.
Able now to carry two passengers in the front cockpit, Trippe moved from the beaches into the charter business as his planes began carrying rich couples out to the Hamptons, or up to Newport, or down to Atlantic City—these were the important resorts that year.
In his spare time he began to haunt the New York Public Library, where he studied business tomes on railroads, on cross-country bus companies, on shipping lines. What laws regulated them? How much did it cost them to carry ten pounds of express freight, or a hundred pounds, or a thousand pounds from point A to point B? What was the elapsed time of such transport? How much might people be willing to pay if an airline could offer extra speed'
This last question, of vital importance to Trippe, interested almost no one else. In 1922 the airplane, when actually flying, was only slightly faster than crack trains or cross-country buses; it was much slower when its handicaps were considered—it could not fly at night or in bad weather, or land in the center of a city. It could beat ship travel, of course, but not over any considerable distance, for it had no range. Above all, it had almost no useful load.
None of these drawbacks dampened young Trippe's energy or drive. He was, in 1922, like an inventor. He was on to something and was sure of it, even if no one else was. He had just doubled the capacity of his current planes, and this seemed to him to prove that it would always be possible to make planes bigger, to double capacity again and again.
He had seven pilots and seven planes and he kept them in the air as much as possible. One day he hired out a plane to a newsreel company and flew it himself down Broadway below the level of the buildings, while his passenger ground out film. This stunt seems to have outraged New York, but there was no law against it. It was almost the last time Trippe himself would take part in what amounted to a boyhood prank. His boyhood was just about over.
He began contacting college friends whose fathers could provide letters of introduction to such companies as United Fruit, then one of the principal shippers of produce in the world, or the Pennsylvania Railroad. These letters opened doors to high officials who received him and patiently answered his questions, for he was very young, very serious, and of the same social stratum as themselves. He wanted to know their operating costs, terminal costs, carriage costs en route. He wanted to know if time and money could be saved by sending bills of lading and other such documents ahead of each shipment by airplane.
3
Colonial Air Transport
At the downtown offices of the United Fruit Company one day he met the general manager for Honduras, who told him something of the geography of that part of Central America. Company ships docked at Tela on the coast, the man said, but official documents frequently had to be stamped in the capital, Tegucigalpa, which was some three days away by road on the other side of 9,000-foot-high mountains. Perhaps, Trippe suggested, United Fruit ought to charter one of his Aeromarines. The actual distance between the coast and the capital was only about a hundred miles by airplane. They could fly their documents up to the capital in an hour and a half.
An agreement was soon signed. United Fruit would secure flying rights and landing rights in Honduras, and possibly an airmail contract between Tela and Tegucigalpa. Long Island Airways would provide the plane and the pilot, and the two corporations—one new and tiny, the other old and gigantic—would divide the profits.
At twenty-three Trippe had just struck his first deal with a company bigger than his own, and his first deal in Latin America as well. He ordered one of the Aeromarines disassembled into several crates and loaded onto his flatbed trailer, and he himself jumped into the tow car, a Model-T laundry van so disreputable that his mother had forbidden him to park it in front of the house. The ride to the United Fruit Company's ship, which was moored to a pier on the lower West Side, began. The pilot sat beside Trippe, who meant to deliver plane and pilot simultaneously. He wanted to see them both loaded aboard ship. The only problem was that the laundry van lacked power. It staggered up each hill. It staggered up onto the deck of the Brooklyn Bridge also, and then on the downslope a terrible thing happened. The van and its trailer began to gather speed. Faster and faster they rolled. Trippe couldn't stop them. He had the brake pressed onto the floor, but the van and the trailer kept accelerating. At the bottom of the bridge came a right-angle turn. The laundry van made it around this turn, but not the trailer, which piled into the wall, spilling crates of airplane onto the road. Out jumped young Trippe and the pilot. Behind them traffic began to back up. Trippe was at his most persuasive as he explained to fuming drivers that these many crates represented an airplane on its way to Central America. An airplane? The word "airplane" excited everyone, and soon the stalled motorists were helping lift the crates back onto the trailer.
And so Long Island Airways began to operate in Honduras.
But by 1924 Trippe's business had begun to taper off. There were now far too many planes flocking to the beaches, far too many pilots able to carry wealthy passengers from New York out to resorts. Looking around him, he quickly found other spots where planes and pilots could be hired out. He sent two of each to Canada to service isolated logging companies, and others went off on private charters. They kept getting farther and farther away from Long Island, and several, including the one in Honduras, were wrecked. Those that remained Trippe managed to sell to the pilots flying them, until Long Island Airways had neither planes nor pilots, and ceased to exist.
Trippe was not unhappy. He had escaped with a small profit. He had faced payrolls. Pilots and mechanics had all been hungry by Friday, and some Fridays there had been no money, or very little money, in the till, and they had had to wait, and he had learned to think of having a reserve fund always on hand. He had acquired a good deal of economic data— what it cost to fly planes, to maintain them, what people were willing to pay to fly. Now, as he went forth to find new investors, to found a different kind of airline, he had cost data with him. He could talk about aviation, and he could talk about money as well.
What was his new venture to be?
An airline must have a route, he decided. It must have regular schedules. It must carry mail. The future of the airline business was in a substantial company, in big names, in big money. The Post Office certainly would never award an airmail contract to an airline like Long Island, capitalized at only $5,000, and a postal subsidy was essential if an airline was to survive long enough for passenger and freight traffic to build up.
In Europe, KLM and Lufthansa, heavily subsidized by their governments, already existed as airlines in embryonic form, and they kept more or less regular schedules. But in the United States Trippe's Long Island Airways had been about as substantial as any "airline" that had yet been tried. As for the U.S. mail, it had begun to move by air just after World War I, first by the Army and then by the Post Office itself, which had conducted demonstration runs as far as the California coast. The pilots flew open-cockpit planes under Post Office contracts with the mailbags piled into the second cockpit, and they had begun now to fly at night. There were beacons akin to lighthouses at various points, fires were kept blazing at the bases of mountains to warn pilots away, and all pilots wore parachutes. Airmail in the early twenties was as perilous and primitive as the pony express, neither more nor less, and people learned to send duplicate letters by train. As a result, the idea had never really caught on. The system was underutilized, and there was some danger that the Post Office Department might soon decide to abandon it. When the Kelly bill was passed on February 2, 1925, giving the Post Office broad authority to contract with private parties for the carriage of mail by air, this was thought of in many quarters as the only viable means of saving an airmail system.
During the years following the collapse of Long Island Airways, Trippe founded a number of companies: Alaskan Air Transport, Buffalo Airlines, Eastern Air Transport, Colonial Air Transport and more, in each case bringing together groups of men, arranging financing, laying plans, in each case bidding for mail contracts.
Alaskan Air Transport started as one man, a pilot named Ben Eielson, and one plane, a surplus DH-4—plus an idea by Trippe. To Trippe the quickest future for aviation was in places where transportation was terrible, and nowhere was it worse than in Alaska where mail and passengers moved by dogsled. It took six weeks to cover a few hundred miles. The same passengers flying in the open cockpit of an Alaskan Air Transport airplane would get red noses, but at the end of a few hours they would be there. Mail would move at the same speed.
Trippe's idea extended further. From Alaska he planned to hop across to Siberia. The land bridge that had sunk beneath the sea eons ago would be replaced by Trippe's air bridge, and weeks could be cut off mail runs to Russia and Asia. A company with such a base would seem to have an unlimited future.
Trippe actually went to Seattle, where skis were installed on the plane. He saw it and Eielson off toward the frozen north, where the pilot competed with the dog teams for three months, flying south out of Fairbanks down the Kuskokwim River, touching all the small communities along its banks.
However, the dog-team drivers insisted that the law governing the so-called Star Route mail contracts made no mention of airplanes. Though Trippe went to Washington to argue with postal authorities for the right to carry mail, they ruled against him. He tried to get legislation written, but failed. He would get no mail, no subsidy, and therefore he had no viable airline. Eielson flew the plane home, and Alaskan Air Transport ceased to exist.
So Trippe incorporated Eastern Air Transport in Delaware on September 12, 1925. Its directors were Trippe; Lorillard Spencer, who was a World War I combat pilot of independent means; L. L. Odell, a transportation engineer with the consulting firm of Ford, Bacon and Davis; Robert Thach, a pilot from Trippe's squadron, now a lawyer; and Sherman Fairchild of the Fairchild Camera Company, who was interested in aviation chiefly as a means of selling his new aerial cameras. Two days later Eastern Air Transport submitted a bid signed by Trippe and Odell for the New York-Boston airmail contract, and Trippe went to Washington and began to lobby fiercely. Unfortunately, he was only twenty-six years old, and looked younger, and the mail in 1925 was serious business. Postal authorities were hoping to award their contracts to older, more weighty figures than Trippe.
There was a second company bidding for the New York-Boston route. It was called Colonial Airlines, and its investors came mostly from Connecticut and Massachusetts, as did its board of directors, which included some important financial and political figures, such as the incumbent governor of Connecticut, John Trumbull. Postal authorities seemed to like this group better, for on its board were no daredevil young aviators, and Trippe was advised to merge with this Colonial Airlines. On October 5 he changed the name of his own company to Colonial Air Transport, and two days later his Colonial and Governor Trumbull's Colonial merged.
At the last minute Trippe had bolstered his own board by adding young William Rockefeller, young Sonny Whitney and his great friend young John Hambleton, a World War I combat hero and son of a prominent Baltimore banker. Hurriedly Trippe now began to salvage what he could from the merger, and he managed to salvage a good deal, for he was bringing in money. First, though the surviving corporate structure was Governor Trumbull's, its name was changed to Colonial Air Transport, Trippe's corporate name, which perhaps made it appear to outsiders as if Trippe had done the swallowing up himself, rather than the other way around. Secondly, he got himself appointed managing director of the combined company. Thirdly, he argued that the combined board of directors, now comprising more than thirty men, was too swollen and unwieldy to exert control, and he suggested that a voting trust be appointed. This was done. Seven men were named: Trippe, Rockefeller and Hambleton from Trippe's group, and Howard Coonley, Irving Bullard, Harris Whittemore.Jr., and Governor Trumbull himself from Trumbull's group. Although this seemed to place actual control of the company with Governor Trumbull, Trippe saw clearly that if he wanted to control the company himself, he needed to win over only one opposition trustee. Furthermore, he was going to work full time at his job; these older men all had many other interests to distract them. So even without the voting trust it was going to be relatively easy to take Colonial Air Transport wherever he wanted it to go. Or so Trippe thought.
The moment the merger was signed, the Post Office awarded Air Mail Route No. 1, New York-Boston, to Colonial. This gave Colonial nominally the senior position in the United States. In fact, all of these first airmail contracts were awarded on the same day, and service was inaugurated on all of the others before Colonial's first flight the following year.
Upon winning the contract, Colonial had a corporation, but no planes, no employees, no route system, no landing fields. During the next nine months prior to Colonial's first flight on July 1, 1926, Trippe hired men, negotiated for aircraft, rented fields and planned for the future. The company roster swelled to twenty-one, "the most complete air-transport organization in the country," Trippe bragged. The rest of the brand-new airlines were happy with single-engined planes, but Trippe had ordered four trimotors, two of them Fokkers, two Fords. He called this "the largest order for commercial aircraft ever placed in the United States."
His board of directors, composed principally of middle-aged investors with no background in aviation, became quickly disenchanted with young Trippe. Not yet twenty-seven, he was committing them to expensive multiengined aircraft and they did not know why. Other companies were satisfied with open cockpits and single engines, were they not? There were as yet no planes flying, no revenues at all, but already the Fokker factory was dunning Colonial for first payment on the two trimotors under construction, and Colonial did not have the money.
In addition, Trippe was often out of the office and could not be found. Some days he was at the Fokker factory asking questions about the planes under construction. Other days he was in Washington, talking about aviation with anyone who would listen, including Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover and even, on one occasion, President Coolidge.
The man he had most wanted to meet was the Pittsburgh congressman, Clyde Kelly, who had sponsored the first airmail bill and was now working on a foreign airmail bill. Trippe's college roommate had been Alan Scaife, son of a multimillionaire Pittsburgh industrialist, who had married the niece of Andrew Mellon. Mellon was the richest man in Pittsburgh and one of the richest men in the world. He was the richest constituent Kelly had. He also happened to be Secretary of the Treasury. Trippe went to Scaife, who introduced him to Mellon, to whom he explained his plans for commercial aviation. Mellon provided the introduction to Kelly, and now Trippe sat down and helped the congressman work out the details of his new bill.
Day after day also, Trippe waited at the dirt airfield in New Brunswick, N.J., to watch the airmail planes come in from the other side of the continent, and when they landed he quizzed the pilots about their problems. There was much to learn, and he was learning all of it as fast as he could. One of the pilots he talked to was the young Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh never remembered the meeting afterwards. Trippe did. Trippe forgot nothing.
Trippe took virtually no time for himself at all, and when invited to social events by his married friends, his "date" was often his sister.
As early as October 1925 Trippe was considering an airmail route from Key West to Havana—it is mentioned in one of his letters—and by December of that year he had persuaded Anthony Fokker to fly him down there in the first trimotored airliner ever seen in the United States. The bald little Dutchman, whose triplanes had been employed by Baron von Richthofen and his Flying Circus during World War I, had recently opened a factory in Teterboro, N. J., and was building the two Colonial planes there. This one, however, had been built in Holland, and had just arrived by ship. The place to take it, Trippe convinced Fokker, was to Havana on a barnstorming junket. This would attract favorable publicity for Fokker and his planes, Trippe promised, and would help Fokker's sales. Of course, it would also raise the stature of Colonial Air Transport, which was soon to be flying similar planes.
The flight took place during the final days of 1925. At the start there were four men aboard: Trippe, Fokker, mechanic Ken Boedecker and the pilot, a former Navy aviator named George Pond. At Baltimore the tri-motor landed to pick up John and Peg Hambleton, and at the nearby naval air station the ship was shown to Navy officers, with Fokker boasting with particular pride of the ship's toilet—in 1925 a toilet aboard an airplane was a remarkable innovation.
The next day the plane continued south, running into rough weather somewhere between Atlanta and Augusta. Soon no one knew where they were, and as fuel ran lower it was decided to make a forced landing in a cotton field. Mrs. Hambleton was placed behind the rear cabin partition to protect her, and Pond bounced the plane down across the cotton rows. The passengers got out and continued to Augusta by car. When the plane had been radically lightened, Pond was able to get it airborne again, and to fly it to the Augusta airstrip, where his passengers rejoined him.
Such heroics as this attracted considerable press attention, but it went to Fokker and to Hambleton, who was the glamour boy of Trippe's group. Not only was Hambleton young, rich and handsome, but he had also won the Distinguished Service Cross in aerial combat over France. Trippe himself was scarcely mentioned. He had a way of shrinking into the background when reporters came around.
Even Peg Hambleton got more press than Trippe did, because, in a time when air travel was still thought to be terrifying, she was supposed to have fallen asleep in the air. She got off the "giant airship" at Tampa, and Hambleton deplaned at Miami, the last stop before Key West. The next to quit the flight was mechanic Boedecker, and he had reasons.
The Fokker was powered by three Wright J-4 engines, and these were designed to fly on aviation fuel. Aviation fuel in 1925 was hard to find, and so at each stop Fokker had been topping up his tanks with 50 percent automobile gas and 50 percent benzol. Boedecker, whose job was to watch the dials, had noted that the engines had begun heating up in flight. Oil temperature was especially high, and there was a bit of detonation in the engine. When Fokker informed him that the next stop was Havana, Boedecker replied, "Well, you can count one Wright mechanic missing."
"What's the matter, are you afraid to fly behind your own engines?" asked Fokker.
"No, I'm not afraid of the engines, but I am afraid of the automobile gasoline you are using, and I'm not flying over ninety miles of ocean behind anybody's engines with that kind of fuel."
"Those engines should operate on any kind of fuel," said Fokker.
"They were designed for high-test fuel," said Boedecker, who argued also with the pilot, Pond. The left engine's tachometer had broken down some days before, and Pond could not be bothered to get it fixed. "Anybody who knows anything about engines knows whether they are doing their stuff even without a tachometer," he said.
"Well, I can't tell if an engine is turning sixteen hundred or fifteen hundred RPM's without a tachometer," retorted Boedecker, "and if the RPM is one hundred low, something is wrong." With that, he refused to continue the flight. Trippe took no part in these arguments.
From Key West the Fokker took off for Havana, leaving Boedecker behind. His warnings at first appeared exaggerated, for the plane made the crossing successfully, landing at Campo Colombia, a military training field outside the city. There Trippe and Fokker put on a flying demonstration for President Gerardo Machado and other Cuban dignitaries. They showed off the ability of the Fokker F-7 to fly on two engines, or even on one. Machado was reported to be extremely impressed, and the next day Trippe made contact with a Havana lawyer who drew up for him what Trippe afterwards described as "a simple two- or three-page letter." Later this document, which was brought to Machado and signed by the appropriate official, proved extremely important, and not so simple. It appears to have accorded Trippe a variety of rights essential to any airline that wished to serve Havana, such as permission to use Campo Colombia as a landing field, the use of customs and immigration inspection facilities, possible tax exemptions and perhaps other concessions too. The essential point was that Trippe now, in December 1925, owned landing rights in Cuba, and Cuba not only was an important destination itself but it was also the gateway to the entire chain of Caribbean islands to the east and to the Yucatan Peninsula to the southwest.
All this Trippe did before his competitors back north were really aware of his existence.
And so the Fokker trimotor started back toward Florida. Again Boedecker's warnings had not been heeded, but there were no problems over open water. Landing on the golf course at Key West, pilot Pond refueled his plane with the same gasoline-benzol mixture as previously, after which he and his two passengers took to the air again, bound for Miami. But as they flew over the Keys the engines began to knock and to overheat, until finally the entire aircraft was vibrating. The left engine, the one with no tachometer, at length cut out entirely, and the plane began to settle toward the earth. The other two engines, choking on bad fuel, could not keep the Fokker aloft. But there was no place to land. The individual Keys were too small, too heavily forested or too snarled with mangroves. With no choices left him, Pond put the plane down on what he hoped was a mud flat, but which turned out to be a flattish reef barely awash. Both tires blew out. The plane skidded along on its rims, but came to a stop at last. The three shaken men climbed out. They were six hundred feet from the shore of Key Largo, and the tide gradually came in over their shoes.
A man came out in a rowboat to take them ashore, and they were marooned there until they lit a fire on the railroad track to stop the train. Once in Miami, Trippe and Fokker found Boedecker and sent him down to rescue the Fokker if he could. He managed to change the engines, planks were brought in and laid along the reef, the tires were replaced, and at length Pond managed to get it off and into the air.
4
Fired
Back in New York, Trippe found himself in trouble with his directors. The New York-Boston route they had invested so much money in was not yet even functioning, so what was young Trippe doing in Cuba? He had ordered these big trimotored planes; not only was there no money to pay for them, but also the Post Office airmail contract specifically called for the company to run single-engined planes. These were serious charges, and Trippe was obliged to answer them. "Chances of failure are increased at least ten to one if we are restricted to the use of single-engined ships," one letter read, "not to mention the greatly increased hazard and almost certain loss of life to our pilots."
Two weeks before Colonial was to start service, the Post Office began to insist that single-engined planes be used. To buy a fleet of them now might bankrupt the company, and certainly no funds would be left to pay for the trimotors. The situation—and possibly Trippe's neck—was saved when Dwight Morrow, one of the most respected financiers of the day, and later the father-in-law of Charles Lindbergh, went to Washington and persuaded authorities not to enforce the letter of the contract.
Of course the trimotors had not yet arrived, and practice flights from New York to Boston got under way in Fokker Universals, single-engined planes with a closed, four-passenger cabin. These planes operated totally at the mercy of whatever weather they might fly into, for the company was too poor to afford regular use of the long-distance telephone, which was the only quick way to send weather reports back and forth along the line. Nor was there any hangar for the aircraft, meaning that the weather would ravage their thin skins—dope-painted linen for the most part— even when on the ground.
All this time Trippe had been trying to raise more capital, for he had big ideas and wanted to expand. One prospect was Robert Wood Johnson, of Johnson and Johnson in New Brunswick, who listened to his arguments, reserved decision, then sent him a long letter outlining the following points: (1) the airplane as a means of transportation was not safe, not fast enough, and didn't carry enough payload; (2) air travel was not interesting to a large number of people; (3) an industry based on a government mail subsidy was uninteresting to capitalists such as himself; (4) as opposed to the railroads, which were more or less monopolies, the air would be open to competition for many years, if not indefinitely, meaning cutthroat prices and no profits; (5) eventually the government would regulate the airlines—again this was not interesting to capitalists. Saying that he didn't see any great need for immediate development of air transport, Johnson refused to invest in Trippe's airline.
Unfortunately, Trippe had begun to encounter one or another of these reasons in nearly every direction he turned, but he was persistent and thick-skinned. Shame was not part of his makeup. He always went armed with cost-analysis figures, and wherever possible he sought out as prospects only people who were pilots themselves or were already interested in aviation. Despite all this, the rejections came one upon the other.
Colonial Air Transport, still without the trimotors, commenced airmail service between New York and Boston on July 1, 1926. Trippe was still running every detail of the operation himself, but dissatisfaction from the board of directors was increasing. Trippe's main problem, he judged, was that he seemed to the directors too young, and he decided to cure this by bringing in some middle-aged president, who would stand between himself and the board but who would be in all other respects a figurehead.
The man he settled on was a retired brigadier general named John F. O'Ryan. By October 1, 1926, with Trippe continuing as managing director and vice president, O'Ryan was on duty spreading exactly the aura of confidence and maturity Trippe had hoped for.
By then Trippe was urging the expansion of Colonial westward, first to Buffalo, and then to Chicago and California. In Buffalo, where a new airport had just been built and opened, Trippe was sure that capital could be raised, and so he headed there, together with his friend Bill Rockefeller, and W. B. Mayo, chief engineer of the Ford Motor Company, in a Ford trimotor.
Hardly anyone had ever flown over this terrain before. Once aloft it was important to keep an eye out for pastures and meadows that would make emergency landing fields, and when Trippe wrote his report later he listed every such field that passed below. He also noted certain factories, especially the General Electric factory, near Schenectady, and the American Locomotive Works. When his proposed Buffalo Airlines began operations, he wrote, it ought to be possible to solicit these factories for shipments by air of important documents.
The plane set down at Utica after 2 hours and 15 minutes of flight, and there refueled. Afterwards it followed the Erie Canal and the New York Central tracks to Syracuse, to Rochester and to Buffalo. Before landing, the pilot circled Niagara Falls. (A unique aerial view of the falls might lure plenty of customers to Buffalo Airlines, Trippe noted in his report.) The flight, including the refueling stop, had consumed 5 hours and 17 minutes.
Eleven days later Trippe started a second journey to Buffalo. This time the plane set down in Albany, where the mayor and other dignitaries made speeches, and a twenty-pound mail pouch was placed aboard. But the plane got only as far as Rochester before being forced down by bad weather. Trippe was trying to reach Buffalo to attend a gala dinner in honor of Major John Satterfield given by the Buffalo Chamber of Commerce. Satterfield, who ran one of Buffalo's biggest banks, was being cited for his work in developing Buffalo Airport. Trippe was hoping to persuade him to invest in Buffalo Airlines.
But in Rochester the rain poured down. Trippe secured a watchman for the plane, sent the pilot to a nearby hotel, caught a train into Buffalo with the mail pouch, and just made dinner. Following it, he went to Satterfield's house, and there the two men—the eager young airman and the middle-aged banker—discussed a New York-Buffalo-Chicago air route until dawn.
By November Trippe was writing Satterfield about a proposed meeting with Henry Ford, who by this time not only was building his own trimotor planes, but also had an air service from Detroit to Chicago and Cleveland. Established the year before, it carried company freight only, but it operated with the regularity and the reliability of a public carrier. Trippe was suggesting that Buffalo Airlines propose a joint operation with Ford. Buffalo Airlines would carry the mail from New York to Cleveland, where it would link up with Ford's airline.
Presently Trippe was back in Buffalo still again. Satterfield had got together a group for dinner: bankers, brokers, real estate operators, all of them apparently both interested in aviation and rich. To these men Trippe submitted a definite plan for financing Buffalo Airlines. The rest of his plan was even bigger. If he could raise altogether $1.5 million, he could bid for the New York-Chicago airmail contract and probably get it. Capitalization of Colonial at this time was $500,000. Buffalo backers would put up $500,000, he hoped, and an additional $500,000 could be raised in Cleveland and Chicago. The present Colonial investors would come up with the rest.
Up till now, each new airmail contract had been awarded by the Post Office not so much on the basis of low bid as on the basis of financial responsibility. Bid bonds of up to $500,000 were required. Postal officials were not interested in flying enthusiasts. They were as judicious as bankers. They wanted to see the financing.
Trippe traveled constantly—to Washington to confer with postal officials, to Boston, Baltimore and Buffalo to confer with bankers. He wrote scores of letters—to bankers about money, to politicians about bills.
He also wrote to airplane factories about building his newest ideas into Colonial's planes. One letter urged the Fokker factory to install a fuel-dumping arrangement. At the time of his Key Largo crash last winter, he wrote, it had occurred to him that the flight could have continued another fifty miles had it been possible to dump four or five hundred pounds of fuel. A second letter went to the Ford factory: he wanted sliding windows installed in their planes. By far the biggest factor in airsickness, he wrote, was the lack of clear fresh air. The Fokker had such sliding windows. When bumpy air was encountered, these were thrown wide open, and the extra-large heater that he had ordered installed in each of the planes was turned on full blast. Not one passenger, he wrote, including several women, had yet got sick.
Perhaps he concentrated on technical matters to take his mind off the rest of his life, which had suddenly gone very wrong. The money wasn't coming in. In addition, O'Ryan had begun ordering him around, had begun making decisions on his own even in Trippe's absence. The figurehead was refusing to behave like a figurehead, and Trippe was miserable. It was his airline, but this man O'Ryan was now thoroughly in the way. Trippe wanted to expand. O'Ryan wanted to get Colonial in the black first. O'Ryan even seems to have considered merging with National Air Transport, the only other airline of substance operating in the eastern United States.
"In view of the fact that I personally persuaded Messrs. Weicker, Rockefeller, Whitney, Fairchild, Hoyt and others to invest in the company, in the firm belief that its expansion would be laid out along lines most advantageous to the individual stockholders, I cannot agree to [O'Ryan's] policy," Trippe wrote Hambleton.
At one executive committee meeting Trippe charged that Colonial did not appear to have any definite policy or plan for the future. But the voices of older men were immediately raised against him, and the executive committee approved O'Ryan's policies in toto.