FOREWORD
I
have this
recurring Walter Mitty dream.
I’m a
passenger on a 747 and all three pilots get food poisoning. Just before
the captain passes out, he gasps to a flight attendant, “Find someone
who can land this plane.” She runs frantically through the
cabin and, in true
Walter Mitty-Arthur Hailey fashion, she finds me—the world’s most frustrated
would-be airline pilot. A man who got most of his flight training
from watching
The High and the Mighty
27 times. An
aviation writer who in
the course of research
managed to set a world’s record for crashing flight
simulators.
I land the
747 without anyone getting a scratch.
I’ve never
been psychoanalyzed, but I strongly suspect that this Mittyish
dream simply reflects my
long-standing hero worship of airline pilots. The
truth is, I not only envy
them but respect and admire them. Many have
been close friends for years. I have not always agreed
with them or the policies
of their union, but I yield to no one in my defense of their professionalism
and dedication. Pilots have taught me much about aviation and in
doing so have made me a fairer, more balanced observer of
the airline industry
over the past 35 years.
This is why I
consider George Hopkins’s history of the Air Line Pilots
Association a long-overdue
addition to the annals of commercial aviation.
For ALPA, like so many of its members, is a vastly
misunderstood organization. Traditionally, it has worn two hats—that of a
militant union and that of
an underrated professional group which has contributed more to the advancement
of civil aviation than many people realize or care to admit.
What the public, the news media, and government and
industry see too
often is the ALPA with the union hat—“the only union in the world whose
members ride to the picket
line in Cadillacs,” as some cynic once wrote.
Quite literally, the union’s long struggle in behalf of
safety, better working
conditions, and pay consistent with a professional’s training and skill
has been obscured by
judging the end results. We look at today’s $100,000 annual
salaries for senior captains and forget too easily what it was like in the
airlines’ infant years.
Hopkins
doesn’t let us forget. Here is the story of ALPA’s humble beginnings,
by necessity a union so secret that its existence on one airline was
not revealed until an ALPA membership card was
found on the body of a
pilot killed in a crash. Here, in prose whose objectivity never dilutes
the basic drama, are
the gallant pilot pioneers who formed the world’s first
real brotherhood of airmen.
Here are the fascinating stories of the family
feuds, the intraunion battles and bickering, the crippling
strikes, the dogged steps toward safer air travel. Here are the finely etched
portraits of ALPA’s
leaders through the years—controversial Dave Behncke, erudite
Clancy Sayen, stolid
Charley Ruby, and the inheritor of both history and
headaches, J. J. O’Donnell.
It’s all in
these pages, from the dramatic deposing of Behncke to the defection
of American Airlines pilots, a move that almost wrecked
ALPA. As a
fellow writer and aviation
historian, I salute Professor Hopkins for his incredibly
detailed research; there will be some who disagree with his conclusions and interpretations of certain events, but
history has always been seen through the eyes of the beholder and time can
distort memory, particularly
memory of controversy.
I began
covering civil aviation in 1947 when I was assigned to report on the crash of a
Pennsylvania Central Airlines DC-4 in the Virginia mountains.
That was when I was first exposed to the sensitivity of airmen toward
that damning phrase “pilot error.” That was when I first
became associated
with airline crews, and I sensed the comradeship and unity of a fraternity
with wings. They
became my teachers as well as my friends, the innocent
instigators of my Walter Mitty fantasy. They made
a near-sighted, 5-foot,
6-inch writer feel like part of every cockpit crew who ever flew the
line.
So I welcome
this book as a long-delayed tribute to the union of U.S. airline
pilots—each and every one of them sworn to uphold ALPA’s motto: Schedule with
Safety.
Robert J. Serling Tucson, Ariz.