Chapter 14
The Ordeal of E. P. McDonald
Three little words—“You are fired!”
They can bring on a sinking feeling, for hardly any salaried professional is in a position to say “take this job and shove it” (to quote a well-known country-and-western song). Salaried professionals, such as stockbrokers, accountants, and college professors, can always find another job doing pretty much what they were doing before. Not airline pilots. A fired airline pilot rarely gets another job. ALPA has therefore worked very hard to make those three little words as difficult as possible for management to utter. ALPA established its Grievance and Conciliation Department in 1944, and only a pilot in serious trouble can understand how reassuring its existence can be.
Not every pilot ALPA has defended over the last 50 years deserved to be reinstated, but the lodestar of its policy has always been that the pilot deserved a full, fair, and orderly hearing. Sometimes Dave Behncke was a bit reluctant to defend a pilot accused of drinking on duty, but he never failed to do it. Historically, an argument can be made that management is far more likely to overlook safety violations than is ALPA—if you consider safety in totality, not just in the single area of pilot performance. And ALPA has never knowingly insisted upon the reinstatement of an incompetent pilot—it has just made sure that management, or the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), proved actual incompetence beyond a shadow of a doubt.
At times, Behncke defended
cases that rankled ALPA members. One such case involved an American Airlines
pilot named Sisto, who jokingly engaged the gust lock of a DC-4 flying between
Edward Patrick McDonald’s case provides the classic example of how an ordinary pilot benefits from ALPA when somebody tries to fire him for no good reason. Of all the incidents in which ALPA has defended pilots over the years, McDonald’s case must necessarily be the microcosm, the one that illustrates all the others.
Ed McDonald is 66 now, retired from National Airlines (NAL) and
living in
Ed McDonald might have been forced to become a businessman, had it not been for ALPA. The story of how he survived on NAL to become a 747 captain despite Ted Baker’s attempt to fire him is a fascinating one. In the aftermath of the 1948 strike, Ted Baker vowed to “get” Ed McDonald and other selected strikers, including Charley Ruby and Bob Rohan. Baker’s religious “conversion” notwithstanding, he would stop at virtually nothing to dismiss the “ringleaders” of the 1948 strike.
Robert J. “Bobby” Rohan, who was actively involved in ALPA’s affairs on NAL from 1945 until his retirement, puts it simply: “The aftermath of the strike was worse than the strike itself.”
They called it “The War of the Blues and Grays,” and survivors of the NAL strike of 1948 unanimously agree that only a miracle prevented somebody from getting killed before it was over. Behncke’s promise that ALPA loyalists on NAL would “never have to fly with a scab” proved impossible to keep. The back-to-work agreement required the scabs to go to the bottom of the seniority list (which meant, of course, that most of them would be furloughed). The 168 scabs had Baker’s “promise” of a permanent job, but his promises in this area were no better than similar ones he had made earlier to ALPA pilots. There was one hitch, however. In the interim, until the ALPA loyalists could be requalified, the scabs would continue flying. This gave both the scabs and Baker a clever idea. What would happen, they wondered, if Baker could afford to keep all 168 scabs on payroll long enough to petition the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for an election to “decertify” ALPA as the airline’s bargaining agent? There were only 145 ALPA strikers to begin with, and by the time the strike was settled, that number had shrunk to 126. That meant that the scabs could outvote the regular ALPA pilots, establish a new “union,” and abolish the old seniority rules. Baker agreed to do it. So began “The War of the Blues and Grays.”
The nickname referred to the color of the pilot uniform. As a token of his pledge of permanency to the scabs, Baker had changed the NAL uniform from gray to blue after the strike began. He had never paid his pilots an allowance for uniforms anyway, so this meant that on top of everything else the returning pilots would be out a good chunk of money for new working clothes. They rebelled at Baker’s vengeful pettiness, returned to work wearing the prestrike gray uniform, and defied Baker to fire them. He backed down—it was only a few weeks since his miraculous “religious conversion,” and he wasn’t yet ready to shed what he called “the armor of faithful righteousness.” So for the foreseeable future, the scabs would wear blue and the ALPA loyalists gray. Occasionally, this confused the passengers when a mixed scab-ALPA crew flew together. Had the passengers known what was going on in the cockpit, they would have been within their rights in asking for a parachute.
“We didn’t get along very well,” says Bobby Knox with considerable understatement. “We learned to control our trips to the bathroom pretty well. We used to sit in the cockpit and never get out, because you couldn’t trust those fellows. Some of them would try to make a monkey out of you.”
“They were simply looking for any excuse to fire us,” says
Charley Ruby. “If the weather got bad and you needed help in the cockpit, you
couldn’t depend on them. They’d sit there with their hands folded. One guy tried
a stunt with me, tried to jimmy the squeeze handle on a DC-4 landing gear so it
would retract automatically. We were going into
There had been occasional fistfights on the picket line, and there would now be blows in the cockpit. It was probably a bad idea to mix scab and ALPA crews, but NAL’s management insisted on it. This difficulty was actually a minor one, however, compared with Baker’s attempts to fire ALPA’s leadership group on NAL outright, in clear violation of the settlement.
His first tactic was medical. As part of the settlement, each ALPA striker had to take a standard medical exam with a physician of the company’s choice. Charley Ruby smelled a rat in Baker’s choice of the examining physician:
Baker went after a lot of
pilots who had been particularly active, or whom he had a grudge against for
some reason or other. He didn’t pick on me, but it was obvious that since I was
a leader, a phony physical exam would only attract attention to what he was
trying to do. We got Dr. C. T. Thompson of
A more troubling tactic initially used by the company was to try
to certify the “National Pilots Association” rather than ALPA, as the bargaining
agent. The scabs hired a lawyer, incorporated under
“I can understand a guy saying he’s antiunion on principle,” Mac Gilmour declares. “That’s what all the scab boys said at first. Then they turned around and tried to form a union to save their jobs. That’s one thing I can’t forgive. I flew with some of these scab boys, treated them just like I would anybody else. But I could never forgive their abuse of the idea of union. That’s a sacred thing to me. Maybe it’s in my blood, from the coalfields.”
Charley Ruby remembers it this way:
This was all happening during the checkout period. Legally, under
Title II of the Railway Labor Act, there was no way they could succeed with
this decertification deal. The legal end of it was handled through the
But Baker hadn’t really given up—he had merely staged a tactical retreat owing to economic necessity. Originally, the ALPA strikers feared that Baker would use the checkout process to eliminate them. They anticipated that trick and avoided it by contractual guarantees in the settlement. All check rides would be given by pilots from other airlines, temporarily assigned to NAL with ALPA’s concurrence. Since the backbone of NAL’s fleet was still the old Lockheed Lodestar, an aircraft few airlines operated anymore, this presented something of a problem. Two pilots, Leo Cullen of Mid-Continent (later Braniff) and Buck Steers of Northeast Airlines, were eventually found to begin checking out the returning strikers.
“Within about six weeks most of us were back on the line, and the scabs were just standing around, never getting a flight, still on payroll and costing Baker a bundle,” says Bob Rohan. “That didn’t mean they were through trying. Lou Dymond was top of the breed, and Ed McDonald was strictly a victim of Lou Dymond trying to get him. It was a setup.”
Flight 406 from
On Dec. 29, 1949, McDonald received a letter from Joe Bailey,
NAL’s chief pilot, informing him that he was fired because of a report submitted
on his performance by Dymond. The report alleged that McDonald had committed six
“unsafe” acts during the December 21 flight, including “poor flying technique,
and extreme poor judgment” during an ILS (instrument landing system) landing at
McDonald promptly appealed to his local ALPA council for help. It had taken a full-scale strike to get a neutral hearing for Maston O’Neal, but McDonald was luckier. His future as an airline pilot would ride with the judgment of Saul Wallen, a professional arbitrator assigned by the National Mediation Board (NMB).
As Sid Wilson put it: “Eddie was just damn lucky he got an honest
neutral.” Saul Wallen was an honest
man, and unlike the arbitrator who had found against Maston O’Neal at
McDonald admits that he had
trouble with the ILS that night, but every veteran of the 1948 strike seemed to
have trouble with ILS approaches, particularly during check rides. They just
couldn’t keep the needles crossed and centered. Neither could the check pilots.
Most of the NAL strikers believe the extreme sensitivity of the ILS needles was
no accident, as Charley Ruby explains:
Nobody could fly the ILS worth
a hoot. We finally found out that somebody had hooked up both heads of what was
supposed to be a dual repeater sending signals to both sides of the cockpit to
just one head on the pilot side. It became so supersensitive you were either on
that thing or way off. Well, we got that straightened out, and then we found
that somebody was tampering with the sensitivity screw just before check rides.
It got so bad nobody would go up for a check ride alone.
The airline was small enough that I knew
everybody, knew the guys who were super, the ones who were marginal. It was the
super-sharp ones who were having trouble with checks. So we pulled the panel off
and found this tampering, and I marched into Rosenthal’s office and threatened
to bring the roof down. We put the fear in them, so the tampering stopped, at
least temporarily. Nobody in management knew how to fool with the instruments
anyway, so they had to use some technician. Whoever had actually done it was
afraid he’d get caught after we figured that little game out. He knew nobody in
management would ever own up to putting him up to it. This involved safety
violations of the worst sort. That ruckus with Ed McDonald was, if anything,
worse because they were laying for him, interfering with his function as
pilot-in-command, and they got the guy so worked up, yelling at him, that it
was a miracle he got the airplane on the ground at all.
“We were under this old-time crazy deal of 500 feet on top,” McDonald says of the approach and landing that would get him fired. “I was trying to concentrate on instruments, and one of them would say, ‘Hey, look out for that airplane over there!’ I’d go off instruments to look, and the plane would be way off, no danger, but by then my needles would be gone to hell.” He made two approaches, broke out wide of the runway on the second approach, but still managed to land. A stewardess testified that McDonald landed two-thirds of the way down the runway.
From Ed McDonald’s viewpoint,
the whole thing was avoidable. The afternoon before the flight, he asked Dymond
to replace Hettenbaugh as his copilot. When Dymond refused, he went to other
company executives, but all of them refused too. The documented fact that
McDonald had asked for a replacement copilot weighed heavily with the neutral
referee, Saul Wallen, when Wallen began digging into the details of what
actually happened that night.
“Hettenbaugh and I had gotten into a fistfight in the cockpit,” McDonald says quietly.
That was a day or two before.
The morning of the flight, I went right into Dymond’s office and told him about
it. I said I didn’t want to fly with the guy anymore. Dymond said, “Well, you’re
going to, and if you can’t handle the job, why don’t you quit?” Then I went to
the airport that night and Dymond came walking in, went over to Hettenbaugh, and
started being very lovey-dovey. I knew right then I was out in the woods by
myself.
I should have called Ruby or Rohan and said, “Hey, look! I want to go on the record right now. I’m rigged. They’re going to try to fire me, they’re going to cause trouble tonight.” I’d give anything if I had.
But I went up there, with all the interruptions and lack of cooperation and antagonism in the cockpit. You know, Dymond hollering, “Look out for Calco stack!” And the stack is two or three miles away. And, “There’s an airplane over there; there’s one over there!”
I had enemies riding with me and I knew it, and they had me distracted pretty damn bad.
In an extensive brief answering the six charges against McDonald, ALPA argued that he had done nothing critically wrong during the approach and landing and that managing to get the aircraft safely on the ground at all was “in the best tradition of airline flying,” because he was coping with an emergency tantamount to mutiny in the cockpit. “Captain McDonald was not given the cooperation from other crew members which a pilot is entitled to receive,” the ALPA brief stated.
One of the six charges
against McDonald was that he “caused the flight to be placed in extreme
hazardous proximity to surrounding obstructions during the missed approach
procedure, thereby endangering the lives of all aboard.” The company cited the
nearness of Calco stack. Another charge, leveled by Dymond, was that McDonald
had allowed the course deviation indicator to deflect full-scale and that his
decision to land after breaking out of the overcast “75 to 100 feet to the left
of the runway could have resulted in a fatal accident.”
Fortunately for McDonald, not a single passenger aboard Flight 406 complained about the rough, long landing Hettenbaugh and Dymond allegedly had observed. Also, the flight engineer, Jesse Mays, contradicted both of Dymond’s assertions in sworn testimony. Neutral Wallen’s conclusions relied heavily on the testimony of Mays, who must have been a courageous individual. Wallen concluded:
Jesse Mays was in a difficult
position. As an individual without the protection of a labor organization, who
flew during the strike with the “blue” pilots before the return of the “gray”
and dependent solely on the good will of management for his job, it was not
surprising that he was uncomfortable. But even he testified that the glide path
indicator was not high to the extent of a full deflection, as Dymond vehemently
asserted, but to the extent of crossing about at the second dot below the
bull’s-eye.
If the sharp corrections attributed to McDonald by Dymond had been made, it is hardly likely that the motion of the ship would not have been apparent to Mays.
The testimony of both Dymond
and Mays refutes the charge that McDonald caused the flight to be placed in
extreme hazardous proximity to surrounding obstructions. Dymond stated that the
pull-up for the missed approach during the first attempted landing began at
least a mile before the stack and that in that mile the aircraft would have
climbed to 1,200 feet above the stack, while a 500-foot separation would be
reasonable.
Neutral Wallen could make these factual assertions because ALPA had financed a full flight test demonstration in a DC-6, with Mr. Wallen himself sitting in the jumpseat so he could observe exactly how dangerous it was to bend the plane around to land from “75 to 100 feet left of the runway” as NAL claimed. The simulation of McDonald’s flight took place on May 29, 1950. Let Ed McDonald tell about it:
Well, you know, 100 feet is not a lot to be off to one side of the runway. They blindfolded Wallen until they told him, ‘Okay, there it is’ when I would have broken out at an altitude of 400 feet, and then the guy just bent it around and pulled the prow up and landed the damn airplane. They did that three times, showing him that you could be off 10 feet and get a full-scale deflection if you’re close enough.
And they just explained it to the neutral like that. He and I
never conversed at all, although I sat right there in the audience for two weeks
at the Monte Carlo Hotel in
As for the company witnesses, Neutral Wallen all but called them liars, particularly with respect to their charge that McDonald landed “4,000 feet up a 6,600-foot runway.” Wallen declared that these charges were “without substance,” and he criticized “Miss Turner’s obvious exaggeration,” which had McDonald landing “three-quarters of the way up the runway.”
Wallen summed up his findings as follows:
While Captain McDonald made a somewhat more ragged approach than normal, Dymond, an observer, usurped the function of the captain and issued instructions that conditions did not warrant.
The conditions precedent to the flight were in large measure responsible for McDonald’s performance. A review of his record shows not one blemish, reprimand, warning, or caution. In his eight years with National Airlines, he has never damaged an airplane, and on the trip which terminated in his discharge, there was no damage to the aircraft nor complaints from the passengers.
The System Board is convinced that the presence of Hettenbaugh and Dymond in the cockpit resulted in an atmosphere of tension that was not conducive to a perfect approach and landing. On a previous trip, Hettenbaugh had argued with McDonald during the flight and had delayed in executing his orders. This conclusion is amply supported by Flight Engineer Cunningham’s testimony about the Dec. 18, 1949, trip.
The job of flying a DC-6 airplane, beyond all other employments of which the referee has knowledge, requires the closest cooperation between crew members. McDonald talked to Dymond regarding Hettenbaugh’s conduct on the December 18 flight shortly before Flight 406 departed on December 21. Both Dymond and Captain Royall had foreknowledge of the difficulty between the two men. Neither took the sensible precaution of separating them, although either of them had the authority to assign another copilot. To permit men overtly hostile toward one another to undertake such a flight when the safety of the public is involved is a serious mistake. But that is exactly what Dymond and Royall did.
The evidence is ample that McDonald did not have the cooperation of his crew mates. All concerned admit that Hettenbaugh did not call out airspeeds during the approach and would not inform the tower of timely maneuvers without prompting from McDonald.
Finally, the System Board is of the opinion that Dymond’s behavior in the cockpit was not helpful. His shout “Look out for the Calco stack” seems to have been needless. His cry “Reverse the props” was of questionable value. A comparison of pilots’ records shows that the carrier has retained in its employ other pilots who have been involved in mishaps more serious. Among these is Dymond, the chief witness against McDonald. There was no background of antagonism between the crew of which he was member to explain an approach short of the runway at Idlewild on April 30, 1949, shearing off certain runway zone lights and damaging the undercarriage. Despite this hazard to life and damage to equipment, no examination of Dymond’s judgment and technique took place, and he was subsequently promoted.
In McDonald’s case, a much
stricter standard of judgment, under circumstances of lesser hazard and damage,
seems to have been applied. Fair treatment to pilots seems to require a uniform
approach to such cases.
It is our conclusion that the
weight of the evidence does not demonstrate that the discharge of Capt. E. P.
McDonald was for just cause.
Neutral Wallen’s opinion is the most devastating indictment of management’s vindictive injustice toward one of its pilots that exists anywhere in the annals of commercial aviation. He ordered McDonald reinstated with full back pay, his personnel record cleared of all references to his dismissal, and a return to active flying after a checkout by “an unbiased check pilot.”
Where would E. P. McDonald have been without ALPA? Would his fellow NAL pilots have bridled at the obvious injustice done to him and gone out on strike once more, as they did in the case of Matson O’Neal? Ed McDonald is realistic about it:
They wouldn’t have done a thing, and I can’t much blame them. They were so beaten down by nine months and three weeks of walking the picket lines, and then the fiasco of that doctor saying some of them had heart attacks, they were just, you know, a little shot down. And the CAA [Civil Aeronautics Administration], we tried to get somebody to show up and testify, just sit in. No-o-o. These CAA inspectors were scared to death of their jobs, afraid of people like Baker. No help at all. It was strictly ALPA, the national office. Without them, I’d have been a goner, without old Dave Behncke, God bless him.
About a year ago at a pilots’ luncheon, Dymond showed up. The
old-timers who retired, all of those who were on the picket line, were sitting
around a big bar at The Brothers Two in south
But I wish I hadn’t.
And what of the principals of this little drama? Hettenbaugh lasted only a few months before drifting away into obscurity, like the great majority of the scabs. Dymond, who had been a nonpilot executive before the strike, never flew the line again after ALPA’s loyalists returned to work.
“When I took the chief pilot’s job in 1954,” Charley Ruby says empathetically, “I sent Baker a letter stating categorically that my main condition was that I would take orders from him and nobody else. I sure wasn’t going to take orders from an amateur like Dymond, who was never anything but Baker’s flunky anyway. He was persona non grata as far as I was concerned. Baker thought it over for awhile, then said ‘O.K.’”
Maybe Ed McDonald got the last laugh after all.