PILOT PUSHING
For the first generation of
professional airline pilots, the most persistent
problem was not low pay, but safety—and the related question of
job security. A pilot who played it too
safe, who canceled flights too often
because of weather or some other
consideration, could get fired.
Airline operators had a
hard-nosed attitude about schedule completion in those days and tended to regard
overly conservative pilots as “slackers.” This kind of thinking was an outgrowth
of the contemporary notion regarding competition, the belief that people had to
be “pushed” to achieve a satisfactory competitive edge. From the operators’
point of view, the fledgling airline industry had to meet the competition,
meaning railroads. Unless airlines, like railroads, ran on schedule, no one
would take them seriously.
The pilots were skeptical about
entering a competition with the railroads for the sensible reason that it could
get them killed. Any serious effort to compete with the railroads in the area of
schedule reliability, the pilots knew, would fall most heavily upon them and
would put pressure on them to take risks. More bluntly, the pilots worried less
about being taken seriously by business moguls of the 1920s than about being
taken advantage of by them.
In truth, there were two sides to
this question. Some pilots were overly timid, reluctant to adopt the new
instrument flying techniques as they began to appear during the late 1920s and
early 1930s. They were slow to abandon the old-fashioned contact-flying
techniques that had seen them through so many flights before. On the other hand,
some operators were too ready to adopt new flying techniques and equipment that
later turned out to have serious flaws. They may also have been too hasty in
their dismissal of the pilots’ weather-related complaints.
Although conflict between pilots
and their superiors over when and how to fly is an old story, going back almost
to the beginning of regular airmail flying, the pace of technological change in
the late 1920s and early 1930s aggravated the situation. Pilots and operations
managers could not agree on the issue of pilots’ authority to cancel a flight
because of unsafe conditions. In a sense, it was a question of image.
By the
early 1930s, the operators preferred to promote commercial aviation as an
industry that had arrived, that was fully developed, mature, and no longer
experimental. The pilots knew better and preferred a more conservative image,
one that portrayed the industry as it really was, essentially a tax-supported
public service. Because it was still heavily dependent upon the government
airmail subsidy, the pilots insisted that airline service should be seen as a
regulated public utility, with safety dominant over every other consideration.
This conflict of assumptions and
image set the stage for a battle over safety that continues to this day. Its
roots are deep in the history of commercial aviation, and one of the keys to
ALPA’s growth and success lies in the way Dave Behncke utilized the safety issue
in the 1930s.
In theory, airline owners agreed
with their pilots that safety was the paramount goal; in practice, it was a
different story. Early airline pilots were made to feel that arriving on time
counted for more than arriving safely, but late. Of course everyone wanted both
safety and regularity of schedules, but to the pilots it was evident that the
two were not always compatible. The operators agreed in principle, although in
specific cases the reasons given by pilots for canceling flights were not always
acceptable to them, particularly if it cost the company money. It all boiled
down to the question of “command authority”—who had it and when.
The issue of “pilot pushing,” or
forcing a pilot to fly against his better judgment, was acute, particularly in
the last days of single-engine airmail operations when passengers were still
scarce. In the easy money climate of the 1920s, a time of cheap nonunion labor
and readily available materials, the operators could well afford an occasional
smashed airplane and dead pilot. On the Boeing Air Transport Division of what
later became United Airlines, the
With the arrival of very
expensive multiengine equipment, airline owners became less casual about the
loss of aircraft and hence of pilots. But even then, a pilot had no recourse but
to fly if a determined operations manager disputed his decision to cancel.
“The operators fired at the drop
of a hat,” says Pan Am’s Roy Keeler, one of the first group of largely
ceremonial vice-presidents elected at ALPA’s 1932 convention. Keeler, who
retired in 1960, had gone to work for Pan Am in 1929. “The operators always
talked safety. Juan Trippe and Musick, sure they wanted it. But they had short
memories, and when things would go along well—no accidents—they’d forget. ‘Just
a little line of thunderstorms,’ sure. They’re not flying it. But you’d better
go if they said to,” Keeler remembers of the days when ALPA was still too weak
to contest every dismissal from an airline. “We were all subject to dismissal
for most anything anybody could think of,” says former President Charles Ruby of
his experience on National during the 1930s.
Closely allied to the issue of
pilot pushing was the related one of competitive flying, a managerial technique
that took advantage of the natural desire of pilots to compete with each
other—to see who could get through fastest or perform under the most trying
circumstances, most often. Operations managers, themselves pilots, used this
device to urge their pilots into flying contests. Some pilots liked it; most
didn’t.
Dave Behncke’s earliest known
utterances on the subject of pilot unionization stemmed directly from the sour
feeling competitive flying instilled in most pilots. In 1928, Behncke was
elected “governor” of the Central District of the National Air Pilots
Association (NAPA), one of several semisocial pilots’ organizations that
flourished in the 1920s. Some airlines were using cash incentives to encourage
pilots to fly in marginal weather, and Behncke was speaking for the sober
majority when he urged
Jim Belding (UAL) remembers
Behncke’s denunciation of the evils of competitive flying as one of the main
reasons junior pilots were attracted to ALPA in the beginning:
Behncke and the senior guys
didn’t include really junior pilots in ALPA when they started it up in 1931,
because they had no protection to offer us. The company could find copilots off
the street if they had to. Then in January 1933, when I got my first command,
flying single-engine night mail, I was transferred to
Thus, to get through the 1920s in
one piece and stay on the payroll was no mean feat. But the first generation of
professional pilots accepted the risks of the flying game the way it was, often
flying under circumstances modern pilots would never accept.
They flew when some unknown
railway telegrapher said he could see five, maybe six telephone poles down the
track. How good was his eyesight? And would you have company somewhere along the
route? Early pilots learned to fly slightly to the right of the tracks just in
case a brother pilot might be fumbling along in the opposite direction.
The mortality rates that resulted
from this kind of flying were staggering. An airmail pilot working for the Post
Office Department in 1918 stood only one chance in four of surviving until 1926,
when the private contractors took over. The situation improved only slightly
thereafter, and as late as the mid-1930s, Behncke was scoring well in debates
with the operators by citing the risk factor. A favorite rhetorical device of
his was to intone solemnly, at appropriate intervals, that one airline pilot
perished in the line of duty every so many days.
One of Behncke’s greatest
political achievements was to convince President Roosevelt that the high level
of risk that working pilots encountered on an everyday basis justified their
getting federal protection. In 1934, FDR’s cancellation of the airmail contracts
opened the door for Behncke. Most pilots weren’t surprised that FDR took this
drastic action. For months, the Senate investigation into the awarding of the
1930 airmail contracts had filled headlines with charges of fraud and collusion
between postal officials and airline executives. And, as we have seen, most
pilots were aware of something peculiar in the way the airmail operation was
being run. Perhaps, in a moral sense, a case could be made that the major
operators deserved to have their airmail contracts canceled. But most pilots
opposed the cancellation because since mail was the airlines’ principal source
of income, “justice” meant that they were going to get laid off—as indeed many
were.
In what can only be called an
inspired act of political legerdemain, Behncke turned this dark hour in the
history of commercial aviation to ALPA’s advantage. Behncke was the only
industry spokesman to support FDR’s decision to cancel the airmail contracts.
While Lindbergh, Rickenbacker, and other aviators by the score were howling for
FDR’s scalp, Behncke won the President’s gratitude by standing behind him. FDR
rewarded Behncke by inserting the following language into the message he sent
Congress requesting new airmail legislation to restore the contracts to private
bidders: “Public safety calls for pilots of high character and great skill. . .
. The occupation is a hazardous one. Therefore the law should provide for a
method to fix maximum hours and minimum pay.” Airline executives were appalled
when they saw Behncke’s rhetoric enshrined in the President’s special message. A
hazardous occupation! To say that pilots deserved special treatment because they
weren’t going to be around very long was hardly calculated to get people on
airliners.
In a tactical sense, though,
Behncke’s harping on the dangers of flying, on the peril a pilot faced each time
he went aloft, was the correct thing for him to do at that time. The airlines’
principal business then was mail, not passengers. Scaring people about flying
wasn’t going to materially damage any airline’s business. In the future,
however, when passengers would inevitably surpass mail as the airlines’
mainstay, ALPA would be able to damage an airline merely by publicizing the
safety angle. In effect, Behncke was saying to the operators: “Look! Either you
take us in as a full partner in this business, now, or we’re going to be damned
disruptive. This is just a sample.”
He made his point. By 1934,
Behncke had considerable political support. Most airline executives knew full
well that he was becoming the kind of talented polemicist it didn’t pay to fool
around with. After 1934 the operators started praising their pilots to
congressmen of all political stripes, agreeing that they needed federal
protection. Since Congress was obviously going to insert protective provisions
for pilots into the Air Mail Act of 1934 anyway, it made sense for the operators
to be good sports about it. Besides, they hoped to pass along the increase in
pilot salaries to the taxpayers. This turned out to be only partly true, as we
shall see, and hence a source of much future friction. But no one could see this
in the spring of 1934, when there was a lot of congressional talk about
“socializing” the airmail, recreating the Post Office’s old Air Mail Service.
The operators wanted their airmail contracts back on any terms, even if it meant
having Behncke and ALPA as de facto partners.
What Behncke proved was that he
knew how to play hardball with the big boys, and he did it brilliantly.
Of course there was grumbling
among some ALPA members that Behncke was getting awfully big for his britches,
attacking their employers like that in
The truth was that early airline
pilots enjoyed wearing the mantle of danger. The devil-may-care attitudes
usually associated with flying were a part of the mystique of aviation. Of
course, by the late 1920s, much of this kind of thinking among pilots was mostly
sham; they were already in the process of becoming quite ordinary
technocrats—sober family men, regular in their habits. But airline flying was
still an exotic occupation.
It could hardly have hurt
Behncke’s cause to emphasize the “danger theme” because it was a major factor in
the public’s fascination with flying, and one that pilots encouraged. In the
1920s, particularly following Lindbergh’s flight, professional airmen were
socially “in’’ because the public was absolutely air crazy. Any schoolboy of the
time could tell you about the aviation feats of Acosta, the Hunter brothers, and
countless others.
Although early pilots faced long
odds on living to fill a nursing home bed, there were other, nonmonetary
compensations. The way kids looked up to you, the thrill of handling the most
advanced airplanes in the world, the knowledge that you had a job most men
envied. We must remember that the typical airline pilot of that era was a very
young man, far younger than the typical airline pilot of today. For young men,
mortality is only an abstraction, and the bottom line isn’t always what’s on a
paycheck. The pay wasn’t really that bad either, even during the depression. It
was the threat of pay cuts, rather than the fact of them, that worried most
pilots. The hours were reasonably short, compared with the usual lot of the
working class, from which most pilots came, and working pilots were beginning to
move well up into the middle class—a far cry from their gypsy status as
barnstormers a few years before. Many a pilot was the first in his family line
to have the leisure to take up the previously aristocratic game of golf. Or, if
improving a golf swing wasn’t a concern, there was time enough to run a
business.
Airline flying was, in short,
just the same then as it is today, in some respects. It was a good job a lot of
people wanted badly—wanted to get paid for what they’d gladly do for free;
wanted the romance of skull-hugging cap and goggles; wanted the looks they got
from attractive young women. And that brings us to another fringe benefit—it
could get a fellow married.
On the other hand, flying could
get a girl widowed.
The issue of pilot pushing came
to a head when just such a widow filed a lawsuit, charging that her airline
pilot husband had been pushed to his death by an overzealous superior. The
pilot’s name was Joe Livermore, the airline was Northwest, and the year was
1936. The roots of the
The airline pilot of today, who wishes to know his own professional roots, must return now to 1919—the first full year of peace following World War I.