CHAPTER 1
What’s a Pilot Worth?
“Sometimes we have to earn a whole year’s pay on a single flight. That’s why they pay us high salaries.” So says the captain, a sudden celebrity following his miraculous feat of airmanship.
Many a pilot, over the
last half century, has said something like this, usually amid glaring lights,
thrusting microphones, and scribbling reporters.
In a modern setting, the
press conference would follow an utterly routine flight that had abruptly turned
sour. There would have been no prior hint of trouble. The cabin attendants would
have been serving drinks, the second officer gazing contentedly at his gauges,
the first officer monitoring the assigned frequency, and the captain keeping an
experienced weather-eye on everything else. Not a worry in the world for these
skilled people at the peak of their professions.
Then, suddenly, the
moment of truth. It always comes without warning. It could be anything from an
engine failure to a systems malfunction. The only common denominator in this
little scenario, whether it happened aboard a Ford Tri-motor in 1929 or on a
wide-body jumbo the day before yesterday, is that life and death hang
precariously in the balance.
Airline pilots have
created their own traditions. They see themselves as calm, mature individuals
who leave nothing to chance, but who never panic if things go wrong. An
important part of this self-image is, admittedly, an almost arrogant
self-confidence, a feeling that if push ever comes to shove, “I can handle it!”
This cocky self-image has sometimes led to trouble, but more often it has
constituted that hidden reserve that has enabled quite ordinary pilots to
accomplish amazing feats in a crisis, avert disaster, and return their shaken
passengers, somehow, to Mother Earth. This attitude was born in the days of
wooden wings and is still bred into airline pilots today.
The success of
commercial air passenger service has always depended, to an extraordinary
degree, on the public’s acceptance of this special mystique. Even today, a
passenger boarding an airliner believes, tucked away in the back of his mind,
that his particular pilot on his particular flight will be able to handle the
danger he half expects to occur. In short, a passenger bets his life that his
pilot is a worthy heir to an ancient tradition of excellence and
professionalism.
The public also believes
that airline pilots earn high salaries because their employers appreciate their
ability to overcome an occasional emergency. Pilots themselves often encourage
this notion.
It ought to be true.
Airline pilots should be well paid solely for the skills they possess and the
responsibilities they bear, and in an ideal world they would be. But in the real
world people get paid what they are worth only if they have the muscle to
command it.
Skill, courage, and
devotion to duty have less to do with why modern professional airline pilots
have the best-salaried jobs in the world than do history and the Air Line Pilots
Association. ALPA is first and foremost a labor union, an AFL-CIO affiliate. It
is also a unique professional association that has made enormous contributions
to the air transportation industry, particularly in the safety realm, but that
is something of a by-product. ALPA’s primary function has always been to make
sure pilots got a decent wage. The corollary to this pursuit has been to see
that they lived long enough to spend it.
In 1981, ALPA celebrated
the 50th anniversary of its birth. The first half century had not been easy.
ALPA’s existence had often hung by a slender thread. It has never lacked
enemies, either. Pilots themselves, against all logic, have sometimes been among
the potential destroyers.
Dave Behncke’s worst
nightmare was that a disgruntled pilot group on a major airline would form a
company union. Behncke (“BEN-key”), ALPA’s founder and first president, knew
from bitter experience how easily a clever airline boss could lure pilots away
with sweetheart deals and personal plums. Behncke feared that if a major pilot
group should ever defect from ALPA, others would inevitably follow. Then, when
ALPA had ceased to represent the bulk of pilots on all airlines, the operators
would crack back, reducing pilots to the kind of peonage they were flirting with
when it all began.
Behncke fully expected
disunity to come someday, and he dreaded it mightily. But he would never have
expected it to come from the American Airlines group. In 1963, they bolted,
nearly destroying ALPA in the process. Fortunately, Behncke wasn’t alive to see
it; he probably wouldn’t have believed it anyway. The American pilots were
Behncke’s solid rock from the old days—the tough guys, ALPA’s historic backbone,
the first to organize 100 percent, and the first to negotiate a contract.
Despite the tragic
defection of American’s pilots, ALPA survived and grew. Someone picked up the
pieces. For half a century now, someone always has. Behncke, who died in 1953,
was gone, but Charley Ruby carried on, doing the best he could, as Clancy Sayen
had before him, and J.J. O’Donnell has since.
What kind of people created ALPA and nurtured it through half a century? How do we explain the courage it took to hold the center when the flanks were giving way? Whence came the integrity of the Century Airlines pilots, who defied the industrial power of E. L. Cord in 1932? There was a depression on, with millions unemployed. Cord knew there were plenty of pilots out of work, so why shouldn’t they be willing to work for a “competitive” wage? Cord figured a fair market wage, given the degree of unemployment, would be about $150 per month. When his ALPA pilots resisted the wage reduction, he replaced them. In the economic climate of 1932, it was no trick at all to get replacement pilots. It never has been. No concerted effort by an employer to replace his pilots has ever failed for want of eager applicants, or on economic grounds alone. But despite this, Cord’s pilots fought him. Other pilots would fight other airlines in the future, on grounds almost as hopeless.
What made Howard E. “Sonnyboy” Hall challenge Jack Frye’s company union on Transcontinental & Western Air (TWA) in 1933? Hall had been a loyal employee since the days when TWA was known as Transcontinental Air Transport and stopped flying at dusk to transfer passengers from Ford Trimotors to trains. He had helped organize ALPA on TWA during a frenetic burst of activity in 1932. Then he made the mistake of going on a two-week vacation. When he came back to work, everyone who declined to join the new “TWA Pilots Association” was in trouble. Some got fired. Others simply ducked, paid their ALPA dues quietly, and gave lip service to the company-approved “association.” Hall did none of these things, and because he was so senior and respected by his fellow pilots, Jack Frye dared not fire him openly. There was a simpler solution. TWA transferred Hall to an unfamiliar route half a continent away, flying open-cockpit planes (he had been flying Fords), over terrain unfamiliar to him, at night!
“They hoped I’d either quit, or worse yet, get killed,” Hall
remembers. “My wife cried when I was transferred from
They played hardball in those days, but Hall wouldn’t quit or get
killed. He had some help by 1933. ALPA was flexing its muscles and beginning to
have some influence in
While some pilots hung tough, others folded, and it is a mistake to view ALPA’s early history as an uninterrupted success story. There was a lot of human wreckage in the beginning. Pilots who were out front serving as ALPA officers were really asking for trouble. Of the first three national officers, Behncke, Homer Cole of Northwest Airlines, and John Huber of Thompson Aeronautical Corporation (later American), not one kept his airline job. And it wasn’t because they were incompetent.
Homer Cole was a Canadian who enlisted during the patriotic
fervor of 1914 and went off to serve king and country in the trenches of
“I got sick and tired of
the rats and rotten food,” Cole said in a taped interview
in 1967. “For six months I went without taking off my outer coat, let alone my
underwear. We were lousy, had crabs, and in the trenches around Vimy Ridge I
would look up and see aeroplanes buzzing around. They, on the other hand, never
flew unless the sun was shining, and I said, ‘Well, if I have to die it might as
well be on a nice clear day.’”
After the war he came to
the
John Huber’s case was
more direct. In 1929 he was Thompson Aeronautical’s top pilot, the one other
pilots referred to as “the weatherman.” Jerry Wood, who later went to work for
Eastern, was a hustling young aviation entrepreneur at the time, and he
remembers the near-legendary status of pilots like Huber, who could always get
the mail through. “Johnny was a pilot of exceptional ability,” Wood said.
But skill didn’t save
Johnny Huber’s job. At first the airmail contractors desperately needed pilots
like Huber, but later, when flying became a little more routine, they no longer
had the need for such expertise. That’s when the harassment began. After
American gobbled up Thompson, Huber was just another pilot—and a union member,
at that.
American had a
straightforward policy of frightening pilots away from ALPA. It never worked
very well, serving only to make the American pilots more militant in their
support of ALPA. Other airlines at that time were engaging in selective firing
of ALPA officers. United’s W. A. “Pat” Patterson had recently been slapped down
hard by the National Labor Board (a predecessor of the National Labor Relations
Board) for trying to sack Dave Behncke. C. R. Smith, American’s president, was
too clever for that. Instead of firing Huber outright, Smith simply saw to it
that the pilot’s life was miserable. The company transferred Huber around on
the spur of the moment, once sending him from
“I had to call my wife
to tell her we were moving,” Huber said. “I told her to send some clothes and
that I’d see her as soon as she could pack the household goods and get to
Of course, American
offered Huber an option—he could quit. It was rough, and Huber’s health began to
fail. In 1935 he resigned, unable to take it anymore. He went on to a
distinguished career in air traffic control with FAA. Now retired and living in
Florida, Huber feels that modern airline pilots do not appreciate the price he
paid in helping to establish ALPA.
What made these people tick? What made a man like Byron S. “Pop” Warner defy the conventional wisdom of the era? In 1929 Warner had what he wanted above all else, a pilot’s job with National Air Transport (NAT, later part of United). He was a university graduate, a trained engineer, and although he loved flying, the relatively low pay, poor working conditions, and the company’s lack of appreciation for the pilots’ contributions bothered him. When he met Dave Behncke, the hulking six-footer who was “talking up” a new pilots’ association, Warner knew immediately it had to be a union, not another toothless, semisocial pilots’ club.
“I could see that unless we got a pilots’ association with real power,” Warner remembers, “there wouldn’t be enough money in airline flying to make it worth my effort. I would have to go back to slipsticking at a desk, and I didn’t want that—I wanted to keep flying.”
So Warner was a rapid convert to Behncke’s cause. He could readily see that all this talk about airline pilots being “high-class professionals who didn’t need a union” was just so much blather. Operating under the code name “Mr. A,” Warner successfully organized the pilots of NAT in 1931. Then he got fired. Management’s spies were good at figuring out the cover names of ALPA’s “Key Men,” as Behncke called them.
It was an angry, frustrating time. Warner was among the lucky
ones. He got another airline job and went on to fly a full career. Now retired
and living in
Then there are the unlucky ones like George L. Hays. He stood up
for ALPA during the Long & Harmon fight in 1934, and, like Warner, he too was
fired. By 1934, the New Deal’s labor protective machinery was operating
effectively, so Hays appealed his dismissal. In one of its first uses of
professional staff, ALPA sent a representative down from
On paper it was a great success. ALPA won the legal battle when NLB ordered Hays reinstated. Another pilot, Maurice M. Kay, also won reinstatement. (A third, L. S. Turner, a previous winner of the Air Mail Pilot Medal of Honor, declined reinstatement in order to pursue other business opportunities.) But while ALPA was busily contesting the illegal firing of pilots for union activities, Long & Harmon sold out to Braniff. The Braniff brothers took over the Post Office airmail routes, but not the pilots. There was nothing ALPA could do.
Kay found another airline job after a long period of unemployment, but George Hays had no luck. ALPA was supporting him with a meager monthly payment raised from members by a special assessment. That was embarrassing enough, but even worse was the humiliating fact that Hays had to fall back on his parents for support at the age of 28.
We must remember that
this was happening in the midst of the Great
Depression, when the
despair of unemployment was epidemic, and that there were other things eating at
George Hays. He feared that standing up for his legal rights had caused other
airlines to blacklist him and that he would never be able to find another flying
job. One day George Hays went out to his car, sat down in the front seat, and
shot himself through the head. It was 1936.
These hard times
required some sassy politicking on Behncke’s part, and it always bothered some
pilots, who liked to think of themselves as nonpartisan. Behncke spent much of
his life trying to educate pilots. The airline business was highly political,
unable to survive in those days without direct government subsidy, and Behncke
(who was from
Many pilots didn’t like
the way Behncke criticized their employers when testifying before congressional
committees. Nor did they like the way he glorified politicians who aided him.
Behncke found this kind of political soft-headedness contemptible. He openly
pursued a shifting series of alliances based on the Machiavellian principle
that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend.” His approach to politics was always
frankly opportunistic. “It doesn’t matter where the coal comes from,” Behncke
once said, “as long as it gets on the fire.”
Politically, the bane of
Behncke’s existence (and of other ALPA leaders to come) was the kind of pilot
who could not understand that there was no political safe ground and that ALPA
must choose on some issues. “Most pilots don’t know any more about politics than
they do pink tights,” Behncke once grumbled.
The Old Man had a way
with words.
Behncke was a quick
study at the game of politics, learning to play it masterfully over the years.
Airline bosses hated him for that, especially Eddie Rickenbacker, who bore an
ancient grudge against him and had once tried to punch him out. “They hated each
other because they were so much alike,” says Eastern’s Jerry Wood of the
perennial feud between Rickenbacker and Behncke. Eventually Behncke and
Rickenbacker mellowed, each coming to have a grudging respect for the other’s
abilities.
But that never happened
with National Airlines’ George T. “Ted” Baker. Behncke’s last, and in some ways
his toughest, political fight was with Baker. There was no quarter given, and
none asked.
It began in 1948, when Ted Baker goaded his pilots into a strike. A nasty situation had developed at National in 1945, following the dismissal of a pilot for questionable reasons. Behncke, who prided himself on working things out, proceeded deliberately, without panic, to settle it through the National Mediation Board. National’s pilots were certainly in no hurry to strike, owing to the large surplus of trained military pilots hungering for their jobs. But then the mechanics got into it. Baker had been abusing them for some time, so they went on strike; the National pilots naturally felt sympathy for them. In addition, there was a safety question involved.
“Baker had a bunch of typewriter ribbon clerks out there working on the planes,” Charles Ruby recalls. “The real reason for the strike was that our planes were a bunch of accidents just waiting to happen.”
When it became apparent to Behncke that Ted Baker was engaging in a calculated effort to break ALPA, there was no alternative to a fight. One thing is clear: ALPA never wanted the National Airlines strike of 1948. Ted Baker provoked it, and there is strong evidence that he had the tacit approval of other airlines. Their theory was that if ALPA could be broken on a major trunk airline (albeit one of the smallest), it could be broken elsewhere.
The National Airlines strike lasted nine months. To the pilots it seemed like forever—picketing, towing banners behind an old T-6 Texan, writing in smoke across the skies of a dozen cities: “Don’t Fly National.”
It was great theater, for a while. Then the public, ever fickle, lost interest. The spectacle of uniformed airline pilots carrying placards, handing out leaflets, and talking on any local radio show that would have them was unusual, but how could it compete with Milton Berle on the hot new medium of television? The new pilots working for National wore uniforms just like the old pilots, though of a different color. It was all very confusing to the man in the street.
In short order, Baker had fleshed out his crews with a full complement of strikebreakers, and it was pretty much business as usual. ALPA was all but beaten, “scabbed out.” Baker had won every aspect of the strike except the purely political one, and that decision awaited only the outcome of the 1948 presidential election between Truman and Dewey. Mr. Gallup had already stopped taking polls by October, calling Dewey’s two-to-one lead over Truman “insurmountable.” Dewey was so certain of victory that he announced his cabinet appointments in advance and allowed bands to play “Hail to the Chief” wherever he went. Ted Baker and Tom Dewey were great friends.
Behncke, already slowing down from the heart condition that would eventually kill him, backed Truman and the Democrats in 1948 against all odds. Many pilots thought he was crazy. When it was over, and Truman had pulled the greatest upset in American political history, Behncke looked wiser than a tree full of owls. He held Truman’s political IOU, and Harry Truman was a man who paid his debts.
Now it was shell-shocked Ted Baker’s turn to sweat it out. He had to admit defeat and settle with ALPA. Truman had left no doubt that if the National strikers didn’t get their jobs back, Ted Baker wouldn’t have an airline. Baker may have been mean and shifty, but nobody ever called him stupid.
In 1960, politics was once again the determining factor in the defeat of Southern Airways’ Frank W. Hulse, a spiritual descendant of Ted Baker. Beginning in the summer of 1960 Southern’s pilots walked the picket lines for more than two years. Like the National pilots in 1948, they were completely “scabbed out.” To be out of work is bad enough, but to see others take your job, fly your trips, and draw your salary is even worse. A complacent FAA bent the rules to help Hulse, actually allowing one strikebreaker who held only a private license with no instrument rating to slip into the cockpit. He flew for several months as a captain! There were plenty of bureaucratic red faces over that one, especially since it was ALPA, not the government, that uncovered this incredible dereliction.
The Southern strike of 1960 was no mere local dispute, despite the fact that Southern was a local service carrier. It employed more pilots in 1960 than National had in 1948, and there were other local service carriers that were even bigger.
“If Mr. Hulse had won,” says John Boyd (whose fellow Southern pilots dubbed him “Senator” because he spent so much time lobbying in Washington), “the regional carriers’ association would have broken ALPA on every feeder line, Trans-Texas, all of them.”
Everything hinged on a presidential election, just as it did in 1948, this time John F. Kennedy’s. The Southern strikers formally endorsed him after Richard Nixon crossed their picket lines.
The gamble paid off. After his election, Kennedy paid his debts to organized labor, of which ALPA was one cog, by appointing a prolabor Democrat to the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB). One must remember that CAB held the power of life and death over airlines like Southern, owing to the fact that they could not sustain themselves without government subsidy. In 1962, after the long, drawn-out series of lawyerly confrontations called “due process” had run its course, CAB ruled that Frank Hulse had “bargained unfairly” and must either reinstate his pilots or lose his operating certificate. The crucial vote was along straight party lines, three Democrats to two Republicans.
“If Richard Nixon had won the election of 1960,” says Harry F. Susemihl, former Southern master executive council chairman, “neither I nor any other Southern pilot would ever have worked again.”
Close calls like that dot ALPA’s history. They were interesting times, but it is well to remember that interesting times are usually gut-wrenchingly grim to live through.
Every airline pilot working today owes a substantial debt to those who came before, men whose names they do not know, who sweated and fought to make ALPA what it is today, sometimes at great personal cost.
A long series of beacons winks out of the past at modern airline pilots. They mark a rough and perilous course. Flying it again would be tough. Modern airline pilots owe it to themselves to know their own history—warts and all.