Chapter 25
The Rise of J.J. O’Donnell
From the Association’s beginning in 1931 through its first half
century, just over 55,000 airline pilots have carried an ALPA membership card.
Only four have risen to become president of ALPA and to speak for their fellow
professional airmen. By way of comparison, the people of the
When Charley Ruby replaced
Sayen at ALPA’s helm in 1962, it was obvious that the people who made up the
core of ALPA’s power structure, the movers and shakers like Jerry Wood, Bobby
Rohan, and Grant LeRoux wanted somebody who was as unlike Sayen as possible, yet
who still would maintain the vital inner continuity. Charley Ruby fit the bill.
He was a rock-solid technocrat of the old school, enormously competent as an
aviator, and deeply schooled in ALPA’s inner workings, but never one to stir up
trouble for his own advantage. Nevertheless, Charley Ruby, like Clancy Sayen,
faced tough internal opposition. Ruby went through a recall effort in 1968,
which failed.
What did the first three ALPA presidents have in common? For one thing, each one of them had to fight to keep the ship afloat and to hold on to the presidency. Each president faced detractors who persistently lashed out, often seemingly heedless of the potential for destruction in the action.
Welcome to the club, J.J. O’Donnell.
Through the first four years
of his presidency, J.J. O’Donnell performed well enough so that opposition to
him was relatively muted, but still sufficient to raise a sharp challenge to his
reelection in 1974. The majority of professional airline pilots took the random
criticism of O’Donnell in stride and concluded that he had acquitted himself
well in the struggle against skyjacking. O’Donnell’s handling of ALPA’s
financial and administrative problems also was well received by most pilots, so
they reelected him to a second term. It was a traditional judgment.
At the 1978 Board of Directors meeting, the only opponent to J.J. O’Donnell for the presidency was Bob Shipner of Eastern Air Lines (EAL), who withdrew after finding little support outside several EAL councils. O’Donnell was then reelected by acclamation.
Given all the bickering in ALPA’s past, the majority of working airline pilots have a remarkable way of sticking calmly with leaders who have demonstrated ability, after, of course, allowing the opposition to have its full say. But these decisions were never easy or smooth.
In 1980, after 10 years in office, J.J. O’Donnell (who had come to the ALPA presidency via an EAL captaincy) like Behncke, Sayen, and Ruby before him, would have to face the challenge of a recall movement. Like his predecessors, O’Donnell considered the recall movement a mischievous attempt to harass him, a “scare tactic” to put pressure on him because of their disagreement with him on several issues. One of the keys to understanding the dissidents’ complaints lies in the dislocations that began to afflict the profession after passage of the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978. Although O’Donnell had foreseen the problems deregulation would bring and had warned strenuously of the adverse effect deregulation would have on the established airlines once new competitors appeared, most ALPA members either weren’t listening or were so committed philosophically to the conservative economic and political notions that underlay deregulation that they rejected his warnings. When, two years after deregulation became an accomplished fact, the very problems O’Donnell had earlier warned against burst upon the airline piloting profession like a thunderclap, some ALPA members began searching for a scapegoat. J.J. O’Donnell was conveniently it.
“ALPA has a tradition of eating its own young,” says Stewart W. Hopkins of Delta Air Lines (DAL), the former first vice-president who struggled so mightily to save Clancy Sayen from his detractors.
Before analyzing the rise of J.J. O’Donnell, a historical caveat is in order. The historian has to separate what contemporaries must know about the past from what is merely nice to know. To do the job effectively, the historian needs distance. Good history needs aging, and the enemy of historical perspective and detachment is current events. For some ALPA old-timers (as readers of this history have surely noted), the events of a generation ago are still “current” in that they are still keenly felt and unresolved. The passage of time allows the historian perspective. At some point in the life of any living organization like ALPA, history plays out. When Charley Ruby relinquished the helm to J.J. O’Donnell, ALPA’s era of current events began, and it is still in process, with J.J. O’Donnell and the people of ALPA “making history” as each day passes.
Nevertheless, the time that J.J. O’Donnell has served is long enough to allow the historian to form at least some partial judgments and make a few tentative comparisons. First, the most obvious link between J.J. O’Donnell and his predecessors is the fact that some pilots don’t like him.
“If Jesus Christ were ALPA president,” says former EAL Master Chairman W. T. “Slim” Babbitt, “there would still be some guys asking Him, ‘What have You done for me lately?’”
Time in office has never been kind to ALPA presidents, largely because of the character traits of those who are drawn to airline flying. Put simply, the kind of man (and, lately, woman) who is likely to become an airline pilot is a self-assured individual who is comfortable with having to make important decisions in the cockpit. After becoming a successful airline pilot, the individual ALPA member is likely to assert this cocky self-confidence in other areas of life. This syndrome, often referred to jokingly as the “God complex,” afflicts many airline pilots, particularly when it comes to ALPA affairs.
“Most of the people I dealt with during my tenure as a national officer,” says Stu Hopkins, “came to me unhappy about something.” The internal sniping at the president, any president, comes from ALPA being so democratic. A guy can get up on the floor of a convention and shoot his mouth off, and usually the only thing that cuts off debate is exhaustion”
“Attending a convention,” says EAL’s W. T. “Slim” Babbitt, “was usually quite an education for a pilot who was mad at ALPA. He’d come in an expert on everything, but by the time it was over he usually had a better understanding of ALPA’s complexities.”
In the final analysis, why
would anybody want to be president of ALPA? In 1970, when J.J. O’Donnell decided
to seek the office, he was fully aware of the hazards involved because he had
been loyal to both Clancy Sayen and Charley Ruby during the internal bickering
that marked their presidencies. “Charley’s attitude was that most of the guys
biting at his heels, some of whom were from my own airline, were incompetent
destructionists,” muses O’Donnell.
I’ve had my hardest times with people from the same mold. I was just appalled that he had to waste so much valuable time massaging individual egos, time that could have been more wisely spent on resolving the problems that faced all of us. But I guess that’s the price for full democracy.
A lot of the members feel the need to have a one-on-one relationship with their president, even though they have elected someone to act as their representative through the council structure. Of course, it’s just impossible for me to respond to 30,000 members on an individual basis.
There is no way the president can take every telephone call from every dissatisfied pilot; if he did, he could never do the job. In every organization of ALPA’s size and complexity, the chief executive has an assistant, an alter ego, who is more accessible to the rank and file. Jack Bavis, an EAL first officer who holds the position of ALPA executive administrator, has filled this role for O’Donnell.
Like every ALPA president confronted with the recurrent headaches
of leadership, J.J. O’Donnell often wonders why he ever agreed to give up what
he considers to be the best job in America—regular airline flying—in the first
place. O’Donnell was born in 1925, in
O’Donnell recalls that the most difficult tasks since becoming
president in 1971 have been shaping the kind of efficient administrative machine
that all pilots demand, and that the Board of Directors had mandated as its
number one priority, and maintaining the reputation for integrity that ALPA had
painstakingly established over the years. “ALPA is a representational
organization with a high degree of visibility nationwide. How we are viewed by
Congress, the administration, and the public is vital to every goal we seek.”
Success on the
Almost from the beginning of his career as an airline pilot, O’Donnell was involved in ALPA work. During his probationary period, O’Donnell interested himself in EAL insurance and pension programs, found several things not to his liking, and wrote a letter to Clancy Sayen saying so. Sayen, who also rose to prominence in ALPA via an expertise in these areas, liked the tone and thrust of O’Donnell’s letter and invited him to participate in subsequent negotiations with EAL. In 1958, O’Donnell’s fellow EAL pilots, impressed with the quality of his work, elected him to local office. The next year, he was elected copilot representative, serving two consecutive terms as a member of the Board of Directors. From then until his accession to ALPA’s presidency in 1971, J.J. O’Donnell served continuously in ALPA office as a member of the Eastern Air Lines Pilots Negotiating Committee and the ALPA Retirement and Insurance Committee, establishing a reputation for hard work, accuracy, and an ability to get along with pilots of differing views and airlines. During the Sayen-Ruby eras, which saw almost continuous intramural bickering, his almost uncanny diplomatic ability to meld the differing viewpoints of disparate airlines into a consensus attracted attention. By 1970, ALPA needed a harmonizer to lead it. J.J. O’Donnell seemed to fit that role.
By the late 1960s, O’Donnell had demonstrated the kind of skills usually associated with aggressive and high-priced legislative insiders. His appearances on Capitol Hill increased ALPA’s credibility. “If you don’t have an overwhelming appetite for the day-to-day pressures of the Hill, you just won’t make it,” O’Donnell says of his efforts to push legislation through Congress. But like every ALPA president who has entered the maelstrom of Washington politics, O’Donnell has found that not everything he has done meets with the approval of all pilots, and those who disagree with him, like ALPA members since the beginning, let him know about it—in spades.
Criticism is not only expected but essential to an effective operating entity such as ours. But mischievous and destructive criticism can ruin any team effort. Those who continually harass their elected leaders and hinder their ability to accomplish anything are a small minority, but in the long run every pilot suffers. If the younger members, those 40 and under, could only realize some of the extreme hardships those pilots back in the 1930s and 1940s had to endure, and if the more senior pilots could only understand the fears and frustrations the junior pilots experience when faced with furlough possibilities and other uncertainties of the industry, this whole system would work better.
Early in 1970, several pilots came to me asking me to run for president. I had no ambition to be president because I had been at the board when we went through Clancy’s resignation and Charley Ruby’s recall efforts. I knew how easy it was to sit outside and tear an organization apart, rather than to become a constructive participant and try to make it work. During the 1966–70 period, when Ruby was running into problems, I tried to help him by responding to the questions directed at him in the pension and loss of license fields. Some of the members questioned why I was assisting President Ruby. My view was that once you elect a guy, you forget politics and stick your oar in the water and try to help him do the job.
The pilots of several airlines found much in J.J. O’Donnell to admire. As it became apparent that Charley Ruby, having reached age 62, would step down, support for O’Donnell as his successor began to develop. The pilots of United Airlines (UAL), who have historically been among the most steadfast supporters of incumbent ALPA presidents from Behncke to Sayen to Ruby, were surprisingly strong for O’Donnell, largely because some of them appreciated the team spirit he had displayed in troubling times. “I think that was why some of the pilots approached me to run,” O’Donnell believes. “I was working to help President Ruby, rather than being counterproductive or destructive.”
Capt. Max Davis was O’Donnell’s leading supporter at EAL. In early 1969, Captain Davis began trying to persuade him to formally announce for Charley Ruby’s job. “I told him no,” O’Donnell says flatly. “I had served continually for 14 years and that was enough. I had told my wife that I would get out of ALPA work for awhile. I had done my share. I think every member has an obligation to serve his fellow pilots in some way, to put something back into our Association for all it has done for our profession. I was ready to turn my area over to someone else.”
But Max Davis refused to accept O’Donnell’s “no” and began setting up meetings with the pilots of other airlines, creating, in effect, a J.J. O’Donnell campaign committee, although nobody called it that yet. If the pilots who answered the summons to the banner of J.J. O’Donnell had anything in common, it was that they were familiar with his work and respected it. One fear haunting every loyal ALPA member was that an inexperienced outsider using scare tactics and “hairy-chested campaign slogans” might capture enough temporary rank-and-file support to win the election. In short, the O’Donnell supporters (who included some of the profession’s most respected and senior pilots) wanted somebody who was known as a team player, who had eschewed the wild political maneuvering that had characterized the Sayen and Ruby eras, and who was knowledgeable enough about ALPA to get the job done once he was elected.
Finally, Max Davis and others supporting O’Donnell’s candidacy persuaded him to run, but only after overcoming the last-ditch opposition of Fran O’Donnell, J.J.’s wife. “Max and a couple of others talked to Fran, and she OK’d it on one condition—that if I didn’t win, I would take a break from ALPA work. She believed she would have me back home for a while,” O’Donnell quips.
As the campaign of 1970 developed, one of the surprising things was the extent of Charley Ruby’s neutrality. Unlike Clancy Sayen in 1962, who had pulled every string available to defeat his nemesis, John Carroll of Trans World Airlines (TWA), Ruby wanted no lingering animosity from the presidential contest sandbagging the eventual winner. Ruby believed that the feeling of some pilots that he had been the choice of the Sayen “clique” in 1962 had caused him problems later, and he wanted no disability hanging over the head of his successor.
“Charley knew I was running and campaigning,” says O’Donnell, “but he never pushed my candidacy, and I respected his decision. In retrospect, his judgment was correct.”
In June 1970, J.J. O’Donnell made his first formal campaign swing around the circle to address various local councils.
I visited United Council 12 in
The endorsement by the largest council of the largest airline in ALPA gave a tremendous boost to O’Donnell’s candidacy. Shortly thereafter, the EAL master executive council (MEC) also endorsed O’Donnell, but unlike the UAL endorsement (which had ignored UAL pilots who were also announced candidates), the EAL endorsement was qualified—Captains Bob Tully and Dick Jones of EAL later received endorsement also.
“The Eastern MEC said anybody who wants to run for ALPA president had better appear before the MEC in Boston on Cape Cod in August 1970, O’Donnell remembers. “I was the only one to appear.”
The subsequent endorsement by the EAL MEC, coupled with the
endorsement by UAL Council 12 in
J.J. O’Donnell became president after the longest balloting process in ALPA’s history. From Wednesday afternoon until Saturday morning, the supporters of the five surviving candidates haggled, horse-traded, and plotted strategy. The Steward and Stewardess (S&S) Division, sensing the potential disruption in the lengthy balloting, began to abstain after the eighth ballot and were not a factor in O’Donnell’s election. A recurrent nightmare of ALPA insiders was that the S&S Division, owing to the coming of jumbo jets that would increase the number of cabin attendants in relation to the number of pilots, would someday come to dominate ALPA. Various rule changes were tried through the years, but obviously if ALPA were to remain a pilot’s organization, the S&S Division would have to go. This was, for many people in 1970, “the problem,” and whoever got elected would have to deal with it. Ultimately, of course, J.J. O’Donnell would guide the S&S Division on its own way to become the independent Association of Flight Attendants (AFA), but this was not apparent yet, and the effect of the S&S vote on the outcome of the 1970 contest bothered many people. It was a mark of the S&S leaders’ integrity that they voluntarily abstained from the process, lest they fatally compromise any winner who might depend upon their support.
The first vote taken after the S&S withdrawal saw no change: O’Donnell led the field with 9,000 votes, Flournoy and Bonner each had 5,000, Arsenault had 4,000, and Jones 3,000. Braniff played a curious game, shifting to O’Donnell on the sixth ballot, and then back to their favorite son, Clyde Haggard on the seventh and eighth, only to return once more to O’Donnell on the ninth.
Al Bonner suggested a deal after the ninth ballot. In return for O’Donnell’s votes, Bonner offered to name O’Donnell either first vice-president or executive administrator. It was a curious proposition, for O’Donnell’s total nearly doubled Bonner’s at the time.
“I told Al I didn’t have the votes to give,” O’Donnell recalls. “It was very clear from my steering committee that if there were any deals with anybody, I would lose their support. I thought that was a fair and proper condition.”
On the tenth ballot, Rich
Flournoy of TWA, seeing no chance of his winning, switched his support to Dick
Jones of EAL. Flournoy and his supporters expected this act to precipitate a
surge away from O’Donnell to Jones, and for a while this tactic appeared to
work. Through the next two ballots, there was a steady accretion of support for
Jones, but not from J.J., until on the eleventh ballot Jones pulled even with
O’Donnell at 9,600 votes. But O’Donnell’s strength held firm at that point and
Jones’s stalled, still well short of a majority. Then finally the logjam began
to break. Braniff, which had swung away from Haggard to O’Donnell before, tilted
to O’Donnell once more on the thirteenth ballot. Braniff, which had a
substantial pro-O’Donnell faction from the beginning, now precipitated the swing
that everybody had been waiting for.
On the fourteenth ballot, Continental and Flying Tiger went to
O’Donnell, leaving him only 2,700 votes short of a majority. Sensing that he
would go over the top on the fifteenth ballot, several airlines rushed to win
the honor of casting the decisive vote. Among them were Pan Am, two large TWA
councils,
“If anybody was in position to make mischief,” says J.J. O’Donnell of the period after the election, “it was Bill Arsenault of UAL. But he didn’t. He was a very capable person and absolutely dedicated to a strong, unified Association. He never hesitated to express the differences we had over the long period we worked together, but his criticisms were constructive.”
The newly elected ALPA
president would need the help of men like Bill Arsenault, for an uncertain era
was about to dawn. If ALPA were to remain a viable organization (something no
pilot should ever take for granted), with working pilots calling the shots and
running things in fact as well as in theory, then someone was going to have to
do the thankless tasks, attend the endless committee meetings, and staff the
tedious study groups. It would fall upon J.J. O’Donnell to tap those wellsprings
of service among his fellow pilots, to somehow cajole them into serving ALPA’s
needs in a hundred ways with the time they might have as easily spent playing
golf or running a business on the side.
By the beginning of J.J. O’Donnell’s tenure, even the most casual observer could see that the airline industry was reaching full maturity. This coming of age meant that airline managers would begin to reevaluate the old formulas and patterns by which the industry had lived. Simultaneously, a new era of diminished expectations beset the airline business as it suffered from a series of unexpected economic shocks. The Arab oil embargo of 1973 seemed to trigger the faltering economic climate of the rest of the 1970s, and the deregulation of the industry at the end of the decade placed stresses on the airline business that adversely affected pilots. O’Donnell was quick to recognize these threats, and he came to office already pursuing courses of action that he hoped would preserve jobs and minimize the impact of economic stress upon the industry and the profession.
More than any other factor, ALPA’s success has depended historically upon the notion that the airline business, was, at heart, a regulated public utility. An inherent part of this idea is that regulated businesses by their very nature ought to be immune to certain market forces. In return for good service at a fair price, government regulators would offer guaranteed profits. This idea is not new—it goes back to the era of Teddy Roosevelt.
The airline business, after the early disastrous years of free market competition in the 1920s, eagerly embraced the idea of government regulation. If the government expected airline managers to invest large sums to provide decent passenger service, managers reasoned, then the government at least ought to offer some protection against fly-by-night upstart operators who would undercut them. Dave Behncke agreed wholeheartedly with this approach, largely because he saw the opportunity to force all airlines to pay their pilots the same wages.
By the late 1920s, during the
Historically, ALPA has always thrived when the industry was booming and faced problems when it was either stalled or shrinking. A time of prolonged stagnation in the industry would change relations between management and labor, not necessarily to ALPA’s advantage. Nothing indicates these reduced circumstances better than the diminishing opportunities for pilot employment and the frozen promotion lists that characterized most of the 1970s. Although the scarcity of jobs and a massive pool of pilots aching to have them were hardly new problems, the dimensions were quite unlike anything any ALPA president had ever faced before. Historically management has used every instance of stress, no matter how fleeting, as an excuse to cut the size of its pilot workforce while demanding increased productivity from those still working.
So airline pilots in the
O’Donnell era would live in an age of diminishing prospects, made all the more
distressing by an explosion of technology that promised, but never quite seemed
to deliver, a better future. A professional airline pilot’s working
environment, in the purely physical sense, would change only marginally during
O’Donnell’s decade, unlike the abrupt dislocations that Behncke had to cope with
caused by the coming of instrument flying, the problems of crew complement that
Clancy Sayen faced, or the painful jet transition that was Charley Ruby’s cross.
But O’Donnell would encounter problems that were at once more subtle and more
menacing than his predecessors had faced. Although it would be grossly unfair to
say that “just anybody” can fly a modern jetliner, the truth is that the jets
(once the transition period was over) were easier to fly than the airliners of
the late piston era. But if the equipment pilots flew during the 1970s improved
technologically, the same cannot be said for the environment in which they
operated. The availability of radar and increasingly automated cockpit systems
promised to make life easier for pilots, but actually they added new and
formidable complications that were difficult to explain to the public. In the
past, ALPA presidents had always been able to rely to some extent on a
sympathetic public. Not so with J.J. O’Donnell. The ultimate loss of the third
cockpit crewman, once the issue finally came before a study commission appointed
by President Reagan, illustrated this point. The safety advantages of the third
crewman, long the cornerstone of ALPA thinking, were lost largely because the
public did not care any longer and was not receptive to ALPA’s arguments. Could
anyone have salvaged more than J.J. O’Donnell? Only after a long, cool view from
a distant historical peak can we answer that question, and probably even then
with no real certainty.
In the 1970s, troublesome, repeated strikes on Northwest Airlines (NWA), Continental (CAL), and Wien Air Alaska (WAA) would demonstrate that the limits of the old system had been reached. ALPA, under J.J. O’Donnell, would have to cling to the status quo, tenaciously resisting a variety of corporate efforts to redress the balance in management’s favor. In this environment, O’Donnell pressed to preserve jobs even in face of objections from a few very senior members. The philosophy of “sharing the injury during downturns” was born.
In a sense, things had come full circle by 1981, with J.J. O’Donnell once more moving ALPA back into the mainstream of organized labor, where Dave Behncke first placed it in 1931. For J.J. O’Donnell and the future of ALPA, a close association with organized labor had become, by the late 1970s, a matter of life and death, although few professional airmen seemed to realize it. Few modern airline pilots seem to understand that ALPA had tailgated the labor movement or that today’s high salaries and favorable working conditions would not exist without the concept of the airline business as a regulated public utility. Put simply, the status of the airlines as a government-supervised public utility, with guaranteed levels of profit, meant that management could pass along pilot salaries, no matter how high, to the traveling public. More than any other professional-occupational group this historian knows of, modern airline pilots owe their current status to the traditional alliance between labor and government regulators. The average airline pilot has, until recently, seemed unaware of how fragile this alliance is, but certainly J.J. O’Donnell was aware of it from the beginning:
There is a core in ALPA that says, “What the hell are we in the AFL-CIO for anyway?” At the last Board of Directors meeting [1980], 70 percent had never been to a meeting before, and somebody always brings it up, so you have to educate a new group. I sit here with 30,000 votes, while organized labor has 15 million votes. George Meany and Lane Kirkland on numerous occasions let me go out around the country and to Congress to testify on behalf of the airline pilots with 15 million votes as my base, and that is a powerful force that has been very helpful with many of ALPA’s problems. The average pilot is a very intelligent individual, and it only takes a few moments to get him to understand the need for unity during times of decline and trouble.
The question of ALPA’s continued affiliation with the AFL-CIO has been brought before the Board of Directors on numerous occasions during the past several decades. Each time, after lengthy and in-depth debate, the board has voted overwhelmingly that our members’ long-term interests are best served by continuing our relationship with the AFL-CIO.
More than anything else, the deregulation of the airline industry, coinciding with the economic decline of the past year, will bring reality home to the professional airline pilots. Unionized employees are the target of the deregulators. Those of us who understand this tried to get our membership involved and committed to defeating that legislation. But too many believed in the great benefits that were promised from it. All the benefits that are going to flow from deregulation are going to be at the expense of unionized workers—ALPA members—and others.
In a sense, many airline pilots were asking for trouble long before it happened, largely because they had committed the cardinal sin of forgetting their roots in the labor movement. Perhaps it is a measure of ALPA’s success as a trade union that it has allowed its members an income in the same bracket as the country club set. It was natural that the values of the people with whom pilots associated (which can be summed up as conservative Republican) would rub off, even to the extent that many pilots seemed embarrassed to admit their trade union affiliation! The hard-line old-timers, who made the lifestyle of today’s airline pilots possible, knew that their dependence on the labor movement was complete. But by the Ruby era at least, modern airline pilots had begun to believe that they were professionals in the traditional sense of the word and that they did not need a labor union. If history teaches any lesson at all, it is that people who start believing their own propaganda are heading for a big fall.
The fall for professional airline piloting as a privileged occupation may have been the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978. From the beginning, the threat to airlines with established labor contracts was apparent, and J.J. O’Donnell was in the forefront of those who warned that deregulation of the airline industry would not work.
“In the long term, deregulation of the airlines is going to be a total disaster,” says J.J. O’Donnell earnestly. “They will have to re-regulate five or ten years down the road, and the shape of the industry then is not going to be in the best interests of pilots. Free market forces do not bear well unless you have a whole bunch of airports that everybody can get access to.”
In a nutshell, the limited nature of the environment in which commercial air transportation functions means that the free market is limited. There are only so many gates, at a fixed number of airports, connected by a finite airspace. Somebody is going to have to say who flies where and when, if not necessarily how, and with what kind of pilot. In short, the very nature of the airline industry demands regulation by somebody other than a vague and impersonal force called the free market.
And here the modern profession of airline piloting has come smack up against a crushing historical irony. By the 1970s, the typical airline pilot had become a knee-jerk conservative whose political vocabulary consisted mainly of Chamber of Commerce clichés. The absurdity of a group of trade unionists talking like independent entrepreneurs was not lost on J.J. O’Donnell, who took a considerable amount of flak from some of the ALPA membership for his opposition to freedom from government regulation.
“You have to remember where
deregulation came from,” says O’Donnell.
It came under Carter, but it was a carryover from the administration of President Ford. You can’t blame Ford—he truly didn’t know what was going on—but it was his advisors, some young guys who wrote books on free market forces, and they wrote on local service carriers, showing how free market forces would provide better service and increased frequency at a lower cost. These free market book writers are a major part of our problem in the air transport industry today. They enlarged their ideas on local service carriers to cover the whole system. Right now, fares are up over 75 percent in the last year, service is down, and the small markets are getting shafted. It’s a disaster; there is not a free market environment out there. People say, “But look at all the new airlines!” They’re hiring guys at New York Air for $3,000 a month to fly a plane that a Texas International [TXI] pilot flies for $6,500 a month, and copilots are paid $16,000 a year in flat monthly salaries, but they had taken the calendar year and divided it up into 28-day months so they have 13 months. New York Air is a runaway shop, a spin-off of TXI in an attempt to start a nonunion airline.
In the wake of deregulation
and the economic decline, J.J. O’Donnell faced many problems. On one hand, he
had to function as a politician, and the first prerequisite of any politician is
that he satisfy his constituents. On the other hand, O’Donnell also had to
function as a leader. A leader must educate his followers so that they will not
insist on his taking them over a cliff. O’Donnell knew instinctively that the
typical airline pilot of his era was riding for a fall, and he also knew that no
amount of adroit maneuvering on Capitol Hill (and O’Donnell, after a decade on
the job in Washington, was an acknowledged master of the corridors of power)
could disguise ALPA’s reputation as a “gold-plated union” whose members were
little concerned with issues of vital interest to ordinary trade unionists. The
typical liberal Democrat also knew full well that the average ALPA member was
not only unlikely to vote for him, but was usually an ardent supporter of the
kind of conservative politician who was overtly hostile to the interests of
organized labor.
Although it is impossible to prove that these feelings and attitudes governed the work of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the liberal Democrat whose senatorial committee gave birth to the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, the likelihood is strong. Put simply, the liberal Democrats allowed the free market program for air transportation (long supported by their conservative opposition) to become law. Those who would ultimately be most affected and most damaged by that free market solution, namely the nation’s professional airline pilots, were ideological conservatives in their voting habits, thus making it easy for traditional liberals to abandon them.
In short, the nature of the ALPA membership by its mid-century point had made J.J. O’Donnell’s leadership task almost impossible. O’Donnell had, in a technical sense, wrung just about everything out of the industry that a traditional approach could muster. He realized early that the changing nature of the air transport industry made it absolutely essential for ALPA to reestablish its reputation as a good neighbor in the community of organized labor and that politically ALPA was going to have to adopt a flexible, pragmatic approach. But a leader can only lead his troops so far, and occasionally he must look back over his shoulder to see if anyone is following.
The twenty-sixth meeting of the Board of Directors in November 1980 was faced with several issues that posed serious threats to the piloting profession. As its initial course of action to combat these problems, the board directed that a nationwide shutdown be called, through a “suspension of service” (SOS), to ensure that regulatory agencies would listen and respond to the concerns of airline pilots. Dubbed “Operation USA,” the real purpose of the SOS program was to assess just how firm the commitment of modern airline pilots was and whether they were sufficiently resolved to stand firm in areas vital to their professional well-being. In short, ALPA’s leaders had to know for sure if the membership would support the directives laid down by their representatives—the Board of Directors. Did the blood of the early pioneers who founded ALPA still course through the veins of their modern counterparts? The 1972 skyjacking SOS had left that question unanswered.
Under the terms of Operation USA, ALPA would shut down the
nation’s airlines for a short period if it did not get a satisfactory resolution
to the major issues confronting airline pilots, which included primarily a plea
for reform of the aircraft certification process and a fair resolution to the
crew complement issue. The program, carefully structured to give O’Donnell the
opportunity to work out a compromise with the incoming Reagan administration,
suffered at first from a lack of grassroots support. O’Donnell was fully aware
that this course of action justifiably scared many ALPA members, but from the
volume and type of complaints received in
The SOS was essentially a
strike, although of a very special kind, that would require an expertise in the
ancient art of “withdrawing from service.” ALPA had lately little experience in
the grubby business of striking. During the O’Donnell era, strikes had not
figured prominently as an ALPA weapon. Only on NWA, which endured nasty strikes
three times during the decade, was there anything like a pool of pilots who had
sufficient knowledge to carry off the organizational and administrative tasks
an SOS would require. For that reason, O’Donnell, in consultation with First
Vice-President Gerry Pryde of UAL, liberally sprinkled NWA pilots about the
Operation USA structures, where their recent experience with shutting down an
airline could be put to practical use. Bob Kehs of NWA wound up running the
show, assisted by Dave Koch of UAL. The success of the shutdown effort, however,
would depend on work done in the trenches by pilots like Dick Turner, Charley
Young, and Gene Kragness, all of NWA, who took on the grass roots communication
task in sessions at various pilot domiciles around the country, explaining the
intricacies of setting up a “war board” to track every crew and every flight on
every airline. As Turner and Young made clear to the
If the SOS scheduled for early 1981 had actually come off, the nation’s airlines would have been crippled. For a day or so, nobody in this country would have been sure of getting anywhere. Out of this new awareness of their potential power, a rising sense of self-confidence began to spread among those who were committed to Operation USA.
As the March 1 SOS commencement date approached, O’Donnell met continuously with representatives of the new Reagan administration. But with no response from the Reagan team to ALPA’s request for a special committee to review the crew complement question at the next generation of commercial airliners, O’Donnell had to continue the SOS threat. The clock was running. The supporters and believers of Operation USA continued their vigil. Two weeks before the deadline, Department of Transportation Secretary Lewis appeared before a special session of ALPA’s Executive Board and announced that the administration would establish a presidential task force, as sought by ALPA’s Board of Directors. ALPA agreed to abide by the task force’s findings and to stand down on the SOS.
The ALPA members who had worked so doggedly on Operation USA were, needless to say, disappointed. For the first time in the professional careers of most of them, the old ALPA idea of unity across company lines had become something more than an abstraction, and they were anxious to test their mettle, to see if they actually could carry off an action that rivaled in gutsiness those of ALPA’s founders.
As Jerry Lawler of TWA, who headed the SOS effort in
From J.J. O’Donnell’s point of view, the SOS was a mixed bag. The
latent spirit of unity that Operation USA brought to the fore convinced him that
when professional airline pilots could be brought to see their own interests
clearly, they were still capable of taking great risks to defend them. John
Ferg, the UAL MEC chairman, spoke to this idea at the
To O’Donnell, Operation USA was the card he could play if all else failed. The Reagan administration would eventually appoint a commission to study ALPA’s crew complement grievance and subsequently act on the other issues raised by the pilots. Most ALPA members were heartily sick of what they regarded as harassment of airline pilots by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and they also wanted to expose failures in FAA’s aircraft certification process. ALPA, first and foremost, wanted an objective evaluation of the crew complement question. But what was not to be expected, and what J.J. O’Donnell as a prudent leader would not assent to, was the playing of a hole card like Operation USA as anything other than a last resort. The fissures such an action might open could very well lead to ALPA’s destruction. O’Donnell had succeeded where every previous ALPA president had failed, in one sense, against the combined opposition of both the FAA and the industry. ALPA won an official role for line pilot participation in the certification of a new aircraft and the monitoring of the process during its useful life.
“We started out with the assumption,” O’Donnell continues, “that we would never get all the things we wanted, but my feeling was that we could shut it down, unless we got a legitimate response on the important issues.”
And so the circle has turned. Fifty years after its foundation in
struggle, sacrifice, and tragedy, the airline pilots of
History is waiting for its answer.