Chapter 17
Safety and Crew Complement in the 1950s
Featherbedding is an ugly word. It conjures up images of cynical union bosses extorting wages from helpless employers on behalf of lazy, corrupt workers. From the very beginning, ALPA’s crew complement policy has suffered from charges that it was pure featherbedding, merely an attempt to make work for pilots who would otherwise be unemployed. The third man in the cockpit, critics said, might as well be at home in a feather bed.
Only a fool would deny that ALPA was worried about technological unemployment when the crew complement issue first arose. When it became apparent that the DC-3’s days as the standard airliner were numbered, junior pilots began worrying about layoffs. Although the DC-3 has probably been overly romanticized, it was nevertheless a comforting machine for a whole generation of pilots. C. V. Glines spoke for most when he wrote in The Legendary DC-3, “We formed an attachment for this ingenious collection of aluminum, rivets, wires, and gadgets.” In an economic sense, airline pilots were attached to the “Three” because its relatively low productivity meant jobs.
The size, speed, and capacity of the first generation of four-engine aircraft represented a quantum jump from the typical airline pilot’s experience with the DC-3. These large, impressive machines intimidated some pilots, particularly those who began flying in the days of open cockpits. The legendary E. Hamilton Lee reportedly took one look at the first DC-4 at United Airlines (UAL) and said, “That’s too big for me, boys. When the last Three retires, so do I.” But most airline pilots made the transition to larger equipment after the war without undue difficulty. There was something tentative about the first operations, though, as any veteran airline pilot will tell you.
“There is always concern on the part of a pilot making a transition to a new airplane,” says UAL’s George Douglass (“Mr. V” among the Key Men), who retired in 1958. “We had a tremendous amount of trouble with the first big four-engine planes right after the war, all the bugs and engine failures and fires and unknown crash causes. I personally dumped enough gas following engine failures on the Boeing Stratocruiser to have kept Varney, my old airmail outfit, operating for two years.”
So, although a desire to maintain employment was a small part of the crew complement issue, the difficulty of operating these new, more complicated aircraft in increasingly crowded airspace was by far the most important reason for ALPA’s crew complement policy. We must remember that ALPA was always dominated by senior captains, and as Clancy Sayen’s troubles prove, it remained pretty much a captain’s club even after copilots achieved theoretically full equality. Particularly just after World War II, when the insistence on a third crewman first arose, the senior captains who ran ALPA were not worried in the least about being laid off. They wanted a third crewman to help them get home safely, not to featherbed.
In fact, ALPA’s crew
complement policy represented something of a threat to senior captains because
it exposed them to competition from young eager beavers fresh out of military
service, some of whom actually had more time in military versions of four-engine
aircraft than older pilots did. In 1946, Business Week declared that
airline pilots, “many of whom are getting along in years,” feared competition
from “fiery newcomers who need minimum training.” So, it would have seemed
logical for ALPA to insist on two-pilot crews instead of three, thus limiting
access to the cockpit for a competing generation of fliers.
ALPA’s first position on crew complement goes back to the Behncke era. In 1932, Behncke urged airlines not using copilots to do so “in the interest of public safety.” Arguing that copilots were an “essential safety backup,” Behncke also appealed to the airlines’ self-interest by pointing out that it was a cheap way of “preparing young men for promotion to first pilot.” Behncke got nowhere with this appeal to sweet reason. Airlines that had not used copilots continued to resist them until technological changes and government mandate forced them to do so. As some airlines began advertising that their planes had “copilots fully qualified to take over in case of emergency,” the pressure of competition forced laggards to respond.
The serious student of the airline profession’s history should be aware that some of the resistance to ALPA’s crew complement policy has come from pilots themselves. As early as December 1932, Behncke criticized pilots who resisted flying with copilots. He cited a letter to headquarters from the pilots of “a western airline” who denounced copilots as “half-baked kids.” “I want it clearly understood,” Behncke said, “that this does not in any way exemplify the attitude of the Association toward copilots.” Obviously, ALPA had to get its own house in order on the crew complement issue before confronting management, which has always resisted increases in crew complement on purely economic grounds. For thoughtful pilots, even as far back as 1932, the crew complement issue was about safety—not economics.
Pan American World Airways (PAA) played only a small role in the early history of the crew complement issue, even though it was the first airline to fly with multiple crews. When PAA’s Paul Bauhlstrom commanded the first transpacific China Clipper flight in 1936, he carried not only a radio operator and navigator, but also a “flight engineer.” The first “flight engineers” on PAA were in reality mechanics who could, in an emergency, make repairs on remote Pacific islands where no regular facilities were available.
In 1937, the well-known aviation medicine specialist Dr. R. E.
Whitehead began describing symptoms of “aeroneurosis” among PAA pilots owing to
the “concentrated flying” of the first year of Pacific operations. PAA pilots
had to fly 135 hours in a two-week period during a Pacific round-trip, the
equivalent of nearly two months of domestic flying. The first leg alone, from
In 1945, when it became
apparent that the four-engine aircraft developed during the war would become a
significant factor in postwar international travel, the Civil Aeronautics
Administration (CAA) mandated that all “over-ocean” flights would have to carry
a “flight engineer.” The CAA’s decision extended wartime rules. Civilian crews
operating four-engine aircraft under contract to the military were required to
carry a “crew chief’ in addition to at least two pilots. The crew chief’s
responsibilities were essentially the same as those of PAA’s prewar flight
engineer. PAA set no precedents, however, because it always operated under
special international rules. The nature of PAA’s operations seemed irrelevant to
domestic operations, although everybody wondered how much PAA pilots should be
allowed to deviate from domestic airline norms.
The modern parameters of the crew complement issue began to take shape in July 1940 with the introduction of the Boeing 307 Stratoliner, which had a distinct flight engineer station. During the brief operation of the Stratoliner on Transcontinental & Western Air (TWA) (before the aircraft were commandeered by the Army owing to the war emergency), the flight engineer was neither fish nor fowl. He obviously was not aboard to make emergency repairs at remote bases, as was the case with PAA’s flight engineers, and his in-flight functions were essentially those of an airman. So was he a mechanic or a pilot? TWA had no need of mechanics in flight—they were available at every TWA Stratoliner stopping point.
Through inadvertence, TWA staffed the Stratoliner flight engineer position with a “mechanic-trained” crewman. Everybody admitted that a “pilot-trained” crewman could carry out his functions just as well, but it seemed an unimportant matter at the time. They were wrong. The nature of the training of the crewman who would fill the “third seat” was the first phase of what would prove to be one of ALPA’s most vexing controversies. It was also a crucial part of what would be ALPA’s greatest crisis in the modern period, the defection of the American Airlines (AAL) pilots in 1963.
Charley Ruby, elected to ALPA’s presidency in 1962, inherited this buzz-saw of an issue from Sayen:
On National, the first four-engine aircraft we had was a C-54 we got from the military for crew training. Now, there were no flight engineer positions on the DC-4. On the C-54, really the same airplane as a DC-4 except that the Four had larger engines, higher gross weight, and a very much larger fuel capacity, there was a station for what the military called a flight mechanic. He could reach the throttles, landing gear, flaps, things like that. Pan Am had previously used what they called flight engineers on some four-engine aircraft. They really were mechanics, and they used to look after the aircraft in places where flying facilities were poor and minor repairs had to be done.
There was confusion about what the flight engineer’s function was really supposed to be. Was he a mechanic along to make a repair, or was he a guy who was supposed to help you fly the airplane? There was never any doubt in my mind, because I was a mechanic before I was a pilot, and I can tell you that whether the airplane was big or small, that third crewman’s job was not to be a mechanic—it was to be a third pair of eyes in the cockpit. Ted Baker was always harping on the added cost of the flight engineer, but as the airways got more complex and as you spent more time talking on the radio, it was a safety factor to have the third man. Really the third man, if he was a pilot, too, could be depended upon to do a lot of things.
It was my judgment then, and it still is, that any place you have high-density traffic you are better off with a third guy from a safety standpoint.
By the time ALPA awakened to the seriousness of the crew complement issue immediately after World War II, the controversy was about to sharpen. On the one hand, the airlines would argue that the third crewman was unnecessary; on the other hand, a new breed of “airman” would argue that the third crewman should hold a special license and have mechanical background previously required only of ground maintenance personnel. This new breed of airman, the flight engineer, could also argue logically enough that since he was not really a pilot and not really a mechanic, he ought to belong to neither ALPA nor one of the unions representing ground maintenance personnel. In 1946, before ALPA was quite aware of what was afoot, a group of enterprising flight engineers secured an American Federation of Labor (AF of L) charter under the title Flight Engineers International Association (FEIA). So the crew complement issue was destined to become a three-sided struggle among ALPA, management, and FEIA.
Almost unnoticed, a competing union had slipped into the cockpit with ALPA. Although a good case could be made that ALPA had exclusive jurisdiction over all cockpit jobs as a result of its original 1931 charter from AF of L and that FEIA’s charter was thus illegally granted, Behncke wasn’t sufficiently on top of things to make that argument. Sayen later would declare that FEIA was an “illegal union” under AF of L’s own rules and threaten disaffiliation because of it. By then, however, the “camel had his nose inside the tent,” as Jerry Wood put it.
Ironically, were it not for ALPA’s concerns about safety, no airline would have been using any flight engineers—pilot or mechanic. A series of fatal airline crashes in 1947 forced President Truman to appoint a special presidential board of inquiry into air safety under the chairmanship of Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) head James M. Landis. Three domestic airline crashes during a two-week period in July 1947 killed 145 people. Truman appointed Bart Cox of AAL, Bob Buck of TWA, and Jerry Wood of Eastern Air Lines (EAL) to the board, which met for seven months to investigate the general safety of U.S. commercial aviation. Ernie Cutrell of AAL also played an important technical role in these proceedings.
In October 1947, while the presidential board of inquiry was in
session, one of those rare crashes occurred that focuses attention on a larger
problem. A UAL DC-6 flown by Capt. E. L. McMillen and First Officer G. C.
Griesbach crashed near Bryce Canyon, Utah, after an in-flight fire. It was one
of a series of baggage compartment fires in the new pressurized aircraft.
Fortunately for posterity, McMillen and Griesbach lived long enough to give
accurate radio descriptions of their predicament and to give investigators
enough clues to pinpoint the combination of design and operating deficiencies
that caused the DC-6 crash. Fuel for the cabin heaters came directly from a main
wing tank. A malfunction in this system caused a fire that broke out in the
baggage compartment. One of the passengers who died in the
After the
Taking time out from his duties on the Truman board, Jerry Wood
helped ALPA Treasurer Bob Strait of TWA, A. W. Stainback of UAL, and Bill
Masland of PAA testify during the CAB hearings. They made excellent use of the
This information arrived just when the industry, the CAA, and
public opinion were on the verge of pinning nearly total blame for airline
accidents on pilots. The Sisto incident added fuel to the antipilot fire. In
October 1947, Capt. Charles R. Sisto of AAL was riding in the jumpseat of a
DC-4 en route to the West Coast from
“I finally decided the joke had gone far enough,” Sisto said
later. But when he disengaged the gust lock, the unusual trim tab settings
caused the DC-4 to nose over inverted into an outside loop. Luckily, Jack Beck’s
seat belt was loose, so when the force of the DC-4’s downward tuck slammed him
to the cockpit roof, he accidentally feathered three of the four engines, thus
averting a power-on dive. Copilot
So had it not been for the courage of Captain McMillen and Copilot Griesback, who managed to radio enough clues to allow investigators to pinpoint the cause of the mysterious fatal fires aboard the DC-6, CAB probably would have once again fixed “pilot error” as the cause of a series of unexplained crashes. The Sisto case certainly pointed to that, as did the crash of a nonscheduled Burke Air Transport DC-3 in July 1947. The investigators found that the Miami-based airline’s two pilots had been airborne for 23 hours during the previous 37, and that the crash almost certainly occurred because both exhausted pilots were asleep. This incident was actually more a case of CAA’s lax supervision of nonscheduled airline operations than of pilot incompetence, but the public didn’t see it that way.
In his testimony before yet
another federal board investigating safety, Behncke told the so-called Finletter
commission, a blue-ribbon panel appointed by Truman to look into aviation,
“Pilots have become the scapegoats.” He savagely attacked the CAB’s
investigation of accidents and recommended the firing of CAB Chairman James M.
Landis, who was then heading the full investigation of air safety. Behncke kept
pounding away, defending any and every pilot, including the unfortunate Sisto.
Luckily for ALPA and the industry, the DC-6 that landed safely with a baggage
compartment fire in
Exerting every ounce of political influence, Behncke sought the firing of CAB Chairman Landis. Landis had been noncommittal about the idea of a third crewman in four-engine aircraft, but ALPA regarded it as crucial in improving air safety. Admittedly, Landis had other enemies besides ALPA. Airline management was angry with him because he was niggardly with subsidies and because he favored an early form of “deregulation” that would permit nonscheduled airlines to compete more directly with the scheduled airlines. Against this Landis proposal, Behncke and the airlines could make common cause, for the “nonskeds” were almost totally non-ALPA.
Behncke’s steady drumfire of criticism took its toll. For ALPA, the December 1947 emergency grounding of all DC-6s proved that pilots weren’t the only problem, as the Landis-approved psychological study had seemed to argue. In January 1948, Truman reacted to the mounting criticism of Landis by curtly refusing to reappoint him to another term. This step was unusual, because Landis was a Truman appointee and a protégé of the powerful Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. (father of future President John F. Kennedy). Ironically, Behncke and Landis patched up their differences, and Landis became one of the principal architects of the victory over Ted Baker during the National Airlines strike of 1948. After a long absence from aviation when he became an important financial adviser to the Kennedy family, Landis would reemerge in 1960 to challenge Clarence Sayen for ALPA’s presidency.
After Landis’s departure from CAB, ALPA policy solidified in
favor of the three-crewmen concept for all four-engine aircraft. After a series
of hearings in early 1948, CAB ruled on April 4 that on “all aircraft
certificated for more than 80,000 pounds maximum gross takeoff weight, and on
all other four-engine aircraft certificated for more than 30,000 pounds where
the Administrator has found that the design of the aircraft or the type of
operation is such as to require [it] for safe operations,” a flight engineer
would be mandatory, whether there was a specific crew station for him or not.
The Lockheed Constellation series had such a crew station, but the
ALPA regarded the April 1948 CAB ruling as a great victory for safety—not for “featherbedding,” as AAL’s C. R. Smith contended. AAL fought the CAB ruling to the bitter end, challenging it through a lengthy series of hearings and arguing that there was “nothing whatsoever for a third man in the cockpit of a DC-6 to do” and that he could only “get in the way.”
Other airlines began complying at once, as soon as the DC-6 was
returned to service after major modifications. There was, however, no
agreement among them as to whether the flight engineers should be pilots or
mechanics. Some, like Delta Air Lines (DAL), employed only pilots from the
beginning, but others, like
The scene was now set for conflict with FEIA during the 1950s over the twin problems of second officer qualifications and a rival union’s right to represent them. This cross would become Clarence Sayen’s to bear. It undermined support for him among pilots who were particularly strong in their support of “brother airmen.” This disaffection was particularly evident on AAL, as Frank Spencer remembers:
It was during the early 1950s that the leadership of the American group became extremely dissatisfied with Sayen. One thing they were unhappy about was the third crew member concept. They somehow got the idea that Sayen was misleading management to the effect that they might settle for something less than they wanted in exchange for a deal on crew complement. They misrepresented Sayen’s position to the rank-and-file AAL pilot. Sayen was very refined, and airline presidents and big officials in government always treated him with kid gloves. You could tell that they considered him to be better than the people he worked for. That didn’t sit well with a lot of AAL pilots.
Aside from Sayen’s problems
with some pilots, which, as Frank Spencer suggests, might well have been due
more to personality than policy, the troublesome conflict with FEIA remained. A
jurisdictional dispute between two unions is always messy, and historically
there are seldom any clear winners. In this case, ALPA won the fight with FEIA,
but it was so bloody as to be Pyrrhic, if not for ALPA itself, then at least for
Clancy Sayen. Put simply, FEIA had to be controlled, and Sayen had to do it.
With a competing union in the cockpit, the captain’s authority could always be
directly challenged in theory, and it frequently was in practice. Armed with a
complicated series of work rules and engineering performance charts, an element
within FEIA set out to establish the “professional” flight engineer as a coequal
force in the cockpit. Of course, this element did not include every nonpilot
flight engineer, but it included enough of FEIA’s leadership to alarm thoughtful
ALPA members. Sayen’s great burden was that he had to confront the FEIA
leadership head-on to establish firmly ALPA’s primacy in the cockpit. Many
pilots who had worked side-by-side with nonpilot flight engineers never
understood the true nature of the FEIA leadership’s challenge, and they resented
what they regarded as Sayen’s “shafting” of fraternal coworkers and their
union. This was particularly true on AAL and constituted a major weapon in the
hands of the anti-Sayen element there. “It was bull----,” says AAL’s Roy Dooley,
in a typically outspoken denunciation of the AAL leadership during the later
1950s. Articulate and tough, Dooley is a towering six feet five inches tall. He
survived health problems in his mid-50s and returned to line flying. He never
joined the splinter union that replaced ALPA on AAL, and he is still bitter
about the way Sayen was treated:
Tom Latta and I were not in tune with the leadership group on AAL, but we did know ALPA policy. Clancy wanted us to represent ALPA in negotiations with management on this third crew member thing in 1956. Of course, he couldn’t just send us over—the MEC [master executive council] would have to do it. Well, the MEC wanted no part of Dooley and Latta, so we were dead as far as representing our airline. Sayen typed up this list of major things about the crew complement policy and asked me to take it over and give it to Tommy Boyd, who was a vice-president, trying to explain to him just exactly what the third crew member thing was and why he thought it was important to airline management. I personally gave it to Tommy Boyd, just so AAL would never be able to say they didn’t know what ALPA meant. Sayen absolutely could not depend on the MEC relaying straightforwardly what our policy was.
Stewart W. Hopkins of Delta
Airlines (DAL) knew a crunch was coming with FEIA almost from the beginning.
The really great problem came on the Lockheed Constellations because it was absolutely imperative that a third crew member be included, there was a great deal of work back on that panel, and he had several controls to operate. On Delta, I think they made the right decision to use pilots, although it was mainly a matter of luck, not well thought out.
On C&S [
There were these people in FEIA who were trying to build up a little empire. They tried to make it as complicated as possible, accumulating great masses of manuals, and they’d haul this stuff aboard every flight, and they were trying to isolate that area from pilots. The first thing you knew, they were in a pretty strong economic position, because you couldn’t operate the plane without them.
I think that to a certain extent the mechanic flight engineers did a pretty good job of brainwashing average pilots with the idea that what they were doing back there was so special that a plain old pilot couldn’t begin to know how to do it. Well, that was baloney. But they almost got away with it by infiltrating FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] with their people up there in engineering positions that were also policy-making positions.
I remember Clancy called me up to the Feinsinger board on the flight engineer problem. We were in a war with FEIA at the time. So I took along Phil Morgan, who’s dead now. There were people from ATA [Air Transport Association] there, and they sat back and kept their mouths shut. They weren’t about to get involved in the conflict. FEIA had a parade of witnesses, and they were trying to make something bigger out of the flight engineer’s job than it really was. My god, you’d think a flight engineer had to have a Ph.D. in engineering!
FEIA embarked on a consistent policy of mystifying the flight engineer’s function, and it led directly to a conflict over authority in the cockpit. What it boiled down to was we put a monkey back there on the panel, and when we turned around he was King Kong.
Since the early 1950s, the
crew complement issue has confronted every ALPA president from Behncke to J.J.
O’Donnell. The cornerstone of ALPA policy was laid in 1954, when the Board of
Directors mandated that the third crew member, regardless of his function, ought
to have a commercial pilot’s license. It stood to reason, the board believed,
that people working in the cockpit ought to be fully cognizant of the nature of
the pilot’s work. The goal, of course, was to make the flight deck fail-safe
inasmuch as humanly possible. Although this policy did indeed have some adverse
impact on FEIA, ALPA never adopted measures that specifically eliminated the
competing union from the cockpit. But ALPA was determined in the interest of
safety that, regardless of previous experience, the flight engineer must be able
to take over temporarily for another crew member. As ALPA conceived the policy,
it would also be a superb training device, allowing junior pilots to handle the
controls regularly while serving primarily as flight engineers.
On AAL, C. R. Smith’s recalcitrance, plus the resistance of the MEC, meant that to be the first airline to operate the Boeing 707 domestically, there were briefly four crewmen aboard instead of three: three pilots plus a nonpilot flight engineer who was a member of FEIA. (Technically, National Airlines was the first to operate the Boeing 707, owing to an interchange agreement with Pan Am.) FEIA resisted cooperating with ALPA in any way, even denying its members the right to take flight instruction paid for by the company, which was ALPA’s policy.
Says EAL’s Jerry Wood:
We never tried to get the old-time flight engineers out of the cockpit. We did want three pilots on the plane, and the point was to get the flight engineers qualified as pilots. FEIA tore up the industry because of that, not ALPA. We weren’t trying to tear up their union either, because some of them are still around on some airlines, still represented by FEIA.
It was the right way to go, I believe, even though it was tough. The leader of FEIA was named Jack Robertson, and he was a lot like Behncke in that once he got an idea into his head, there was no way you could get it out. We employed 500 nonpilot flight engineers on EAL, and we had taken care of them. But Robertson called them out, all 500, and we had no choice but to break them. We gave them every opportunity, and eventually 104 of them came back.
The company paid every penny for their flight training, thanks to ALPA, and some of them are retiring right now as captains. The 10 or so who were unable to check out as captains did have to get their commercial and instrument rating to keep their jobs, but they maintained the same jobs they had as flight engineers with all protection.
Jerry Wood served on the 1956
Turbo-Prop and Jet Study Committee, and he personally wrote every word of the
crew complement section of the report. “I had been more or less continuously
involved with the issue since 1947, and strangely enough, Behncke left me 100
percent alone on that one,” Wood adds with a chuckle. “As Dave put it, ‘Boys,
we’re getting the plough under a pretty big stump.’ And that was certainly the
case on crew complement.”
The hidden tragedy of the crew complement issue is the effect it had on Clancy Sayen. He was a dogged administrator, and he always carried out the mandates the pilots gave him to the fullest extent of his abilities. He never complained about the implementation of an ALPA policy once the board mandated it, no matter how much he might have disagreed with the policy personally.
“Clancy was very, very much opposed to what we were starting out to do on crew complement, incidentally,” says Jerry Wood. “He told us that we were really getting ourselves into a period that was going to be rough. He was right—it turned out to be a bloody war.”
Perhaps it was premonition that made Sayen oppose the mandatory crew complement policy. Eventually, it indirectly cost him his job. ALPA’s crew complement policy was the rock upon which the AAL dissidents built their secession from ALPA in 1963, and they made Sayen’s life so difficult that he resigned ALPA’s presidency in 1962.
And what happened to the hundreds of professional flight engineers who declined flight training and persisted in the FEIA’s fruitless strikes against the ALPA crew complement policy on several airlines?
“They picketed for about two years,” says Jerry Wood. “Eventually they lost their cases in court, and the companies trained pilots to fill their jobs. They were just too stubborn to change. Those individuals who went along with the ALPA policy came out smelling like a rose, and those who didn’t scattered to the four winds, and nobody knows what they are doing today.”
In short order, a group of ALPA pilots on Southern Airways would be in a similar predicament—staking everything on the judicial process. It was a troubling episode with ramifications extending far beyond the question of whether 100-odd airline pilots would keep their jobs and be paid a decent wage.