Chapter 5
The Livermore Affair
What sent Joe Livermore and his copilot Art Haid into the midst of an 80-mile-per-hour winter gale on the night of Dec. 18, 1936? En route from St. Paul, Minn., to Spokane, Wash., in a Northwest Airlines (NWA) Lockheed 10 and carrying a cargo consisting solely of Christmas mail, they made their last radio contact at 3:00 a.m., reporting over what they thought might be Elk River, Idaho. They were off course, overdue, and nowhere near their destination.
From Seattle, the western terminus of NWA’s “northern transcontinental” route, Operations Manager A. R. “Bob” Mensing told newsmen the next morning that he felt confident the plane had been forced down northwest of Elk River, and that the pilots had been unable to reach a telephone.
Newsmen in
The reporters besieging NWA’s Bob Mensing for news of his overdue plane didn’t know that yet. Consequently, they spent the day of December 19 camped outside his Seattle office, hoping to get a story that would scoop the reporters covering the WAE plane search several hundred miles away in Salt Lake City.
Then, on the following day
something happened on the East Coast that upstaged everybody: Henry T. “Dick”
Merrill, celebrated transatlantic flier, bon vivant, and Eastern Air Lines (EAL)
pilot, disappeared somewhere in the mountains of southern
Of the three airline disappearances in the nation’s news that week, only Merrill’s had a happy ending. Owing to static that rendered his radios useless, Merrill had become lost in heavy fog. Just before running out of gas he managed to set his DC-3 down on the side of a 1,500-foot mountain near Port Jervis, N.Y. The plane was demolished, but the only person injured was Merrill, who had several teeth knocked out and a broken ankle.
Spokesmen for WAE dampened the high spirits raised by Merrill’s
good fortune when they announced that they “had given up hope days ago” of
finding any of their people alive. A crushing blizzard had descended on the
probable crash site in northern
But there was still hope for the NWA plane and its two pilots.
Rescuers had narrowed their search to a series of unnamed ridges along the
Wyoming–Idaho border. A ranger in the
There was nothing to do but wait.
On December 26, a fur trapper who had volunteered to snowshoe his way up to the wreckage mushed out to report that there were no survivors—both Livermore and Haid were dead.
When reporters asked Bob Mensing how copilot Haid’s young widow
was taking it, he said: “She’s true blue. She simply asked that Art’s body be
sent home to
Mensing said nothing about Lorna Livermore, Joe’s widow. He had good reason, for an angry Lorna Livermore had already sent a notarized statement to the Department of Commerce (DOC), the principal federal agency regulating aviation in those days, all but accusing Bob Mensing of murdering her husband.
Any roster listing airlines with the worst pilot-management relations records would show Northwest Airlines somewhere near the top. On other airlines, bad blood between pilots and supervisory personnel would ebb and flow, but on NWA it seemed to stay pretty much at flood stage. Before catching on with United Airlines (UAL), Dave Behncke himself had worked for NWA. In fact, he would have been first on the seniority list if he hadn’t gotten fired and if NWA paid any attention to seniority.
So it came as no surprise that something like the
Joe Livermore was an “old” pilot.
“I would say that he was maybe in his late 30s,” says R. Lee Smith of NWA, one of six pilots who met secretly with Dave Behncke in 1930 to begin planning what would later become ALPA.
The Lockheed 10 could operate IFR (instrument flight rules), but the state of the electronic airways was still so rudimentary over NWA’s routes that in a crunch many pilots still preferred to fly visually, relying on the Post Office’s old lighted airways with their reassuring beacons winking every few miles. Joe Livermore was one of them, and he is a classic case of an older pilot caught in the transitionary bind between what pilots still called “contact” flying and instrument or “blind” flying.
In the late 1920s, when the
first practical passenger aircraft, such as the Ford and Fokker Trimotors, began
to appear in regular airline service, the instrument panels already had a modern
look. They usually sported a complete array of instruments, including even the
revolutionary gyro-driven artificial horizon, so a pilot could easily keep his
plane right side up when he inadvertently ventured into clouds. The problem was
navigation. Effective IFR operations were still impossible because the
electronic airways were not yet complete.
Even as late as the 1930s, after low-frequency ranges began dotting the nation’s airways and suitable in-flight radios were available, the all-weather concept could still be hindered by elements such as static.
In those days, a pilot navigated under instrument conditions largely by his ears—like a bat. Each low-frequency range transmitted steady “As” and “Ns” in Morse code, in alternating 90-degree quadrants. That is, if you were flying in an “A” quadrant, you would only be able to hear “A,” “dit-dah.” In the next quadrant, the “N” quadrant, you would hear a “dah-dit”—“N.”
At the point of juncture between these “A” and “N” quadrants, the Morse code signals blended to form a steady aural “tone,” which designated the airway. So each low-frequency radio range was capable of producing only four airways (or “legs”), and static could play havoc with the radio reception necessary to delineate them. And that wasn’t the only problem.
The feature of early IFR flying that drove the first generation
of airline pilots crazy was “ambiguity.” Each 90-degree “A” and “N” quadrant had
a mirror image exactly opposite. Which “leg” were they on? Were they going
toward the station, or away from it? (There were no convenient “to” and
“from” flags.) Did they have the range correctly identified by its Morse code
call sign, or was a similar station in
The most troubling aspect of
early IFR flight was the approach—what pilots called the “let down through”
procedure. It was one thing to sit up high, clear of surrounding terrain, and
take a chance that the “beam” was on course. But when it came to dipping down
into the soup, trying to fly the beam into the field, that was something else. A
pilot had to be absolutely certain he had gotten station passage during the
approach, and the only way he could determine that was, again, with his
ears—something called “the cone of silence.” Directly over the station there was
an electronic null that could be either very small or very large, depending on
your altitude and atmospheric conditions. Static could have a number of effects
on a low-frequency radio range, but from the point of view of early airline
pilots, the worst thing it did was to interfere with reception to the point
where they could not determine the cone of silence.
In theory, the low-frequency radio ranges worked well enough that airline executives and government officials declared that the age of all-weather flying had arrived. Working pilots knew it wasn’t true. They knew from firsthand experience how vulnerable to such factors as atmospherics and poor maintenance the early IFR system was. They knew the terrors of wandering ranges and all the other problems they encountered on an everyday basis. Most pilots developed their own tricks to avoid betting their lives on their ears. Some only grudgingly endured the new instrument training and rarely flew “blind” They would take off and submit fraudulent position reports, saying they were at “9,000 instruments,” when actually they were dodging sagebrush, flying visually underneath, just like they used to in the old days. How was anyone to know before radar?
Joe Livermore was such a pilot. On the night of Dec. 13, 1936, he
did something that got him in serious trouble with Bob Mensing, his immediate
superior.
Bob Mensing was furious with
So Bob Mensing exercised his managerial prerogative by chewing
out Joe Livermore over the telephone. “What in the hell is the matter with you?
Is your job too tough for you?” Mensing demanded of
“You mean I must either take this ship out now or resign?”
Lorna Livermore’s notarized deposition stated that Joe was highly
upset by the dressing-down Mensing had given him over the phone in
Five days later
It is apparent that Joe Livermore, on the night of Dec. 18, 1936, should probably have canceled his flight. But he was so depressed, under pressure, and fearful of losing his job that he didn’t. He and Art Haid would pay with their lives for that error in judgment.
If it were not for the use Dave Behncke made of the
Between 1934 and 1938, from the airmail cancellations crisis to
the passage of the cornerstone legislation of 1938, the air transport industry
was in constant turmoil. In
The National Recovery Administration (NRA) “code” hearings of
1933 provide a good example of Behncke’s use of a phalanx of uniformed airline
pilots to establish an ALPA “presence” in
John H. Neale, who stood No. 1 on the seniority list of Capital Airlines prior to its merger with UAL in 1961, remembers what it was like to help Behncke during these trying times:
Almost my first contact with Dave after joining the union was
when he asked me to sit with him before a hearing on the National Recovery
Administration Code Authority. Our good friend Mayor LaGuardia of
Many pilots were puzzled by Behncke’s opposition to the inclusion of pilots in the code. On the surface, having their wages and working conditions spelled out in the code appeared advantageous, as did the contractual provision requiring employers to bargain collectively with their employees and to recognize the right of labor unions to exist. (Later, after the NRA was declared unconstitutional, Senator Wagner of New York would extract these labor provisions from the NRA legislation and salvage them in the Wagner Labor Relations Act of 1935.) But Behncke became alarmed when he discovered that the operators were proposing ridiculously high maximums of 140 hours per month as in the Air Transport Code, higher than the 110 hours per month the Commerce Department established as the monthly maximum in 1931. Behncke had been battling to lower the maximum to 85 hours, so he fought hard to stay out of the code, preferring instead to seek specific congressional action on pilots’ wages and hours.
The NRA code hearings were
held in the ballroom of the Mayflower Hotel, under the supervision of Malcolm
Muir, deputy director of the NRA. There was an all-star cast of airline
executives present, so Behncke made sure that well-known airline pilots, such as
E. Hamilton Lee of UAL (probably the senior professional pilot in the country)
and Mal Freeburg of NWA (recent recipient of the Air Mail Pilot Medal of Honor),
were present. LaGuardia flew down from
The primary fear haunting these men was that if they did not succeed in establishing ALPA as an effective vehicle for pilot representation, pilots would almost certainly never get another chance. The 1920s were littered with failed experiments like ALPA, short-lived organizations bearing prestigious names like the Air Mail Pilots of America, the National Air Pilots Association, and the Professional Pilots of America. As we have seen, the first airline pilots were under no illusions about their economic vulnerability or the ease with which their employers could replace them. They knew a prestigious name wasn’t enough, nor was a glamorous image. Leadership, the ability to function as a group, and timing were everything.
Leadership was something Dave Behncke supplied, sometimes brilliantly. Functioning as a group was something the pilots were doing on two levels: first, with their peers, their fellow pilots, and second, as part of the American Federation of Labor, identifying themselves with the political and economic aspirations of the labor movement. Timing, although hard to categorize, essentially meant knowing when the iron was hot, and how to strike it cold-bloodedly in your own interest.
Of the three, timing was probably the most important factor, because even brilliant leadership and aggressive group action cannot succeed in the absence of opportunities. Dave Behncke’s genius lay in knowing when to press the issue of safety. Thanks to Lorna Livermore and his own gift for theatrics, Behncke made the safety issue almost irresistible by 1938.
In the anti–big business climate of the depression years, Behncke was adept at hitting the right rhetorical notes with his charges that the operators cared less about safety than about their profits. He did this in speeches that, despite their occasionally shrill, ungrammatical, and overly sentimental content, never struck people as being particularly “radical.” Partly, it was because of the way Behncke looked. Although he seldom wore a tie, he had a well-manicured appearance, reminding some people of a Philadelphia Main Liner. He was, as more than one airline executive discovered, an exasperating foe to tangle with before a congressional committee.
In another sense, Behncke was something of a pioneer, thanks to a devastating new wrinkle he injected into the debate over airline safety—an attack on government bureaucrats. The feeling of ordinary people in the 1930s was that government power was good, but Behncke argued that it was rather like Frankenstein’s monster—it needed watching. Specifically, Behncke was highly critical of the stewardship DOC exerted over aviation, particularly in the area of accident investigation. On that point, Behncke caught the public’s fancy, for he had survived a crash and walked with a limp and a heavy cane, which served as constant reminders.
In a 1937 article published in
On Dec. 21, 1934, I took off from
The thrust of Behncke’s argument was that only pilots could speak for safety, because only pilots had the same interests as the traveling public. Government officials, Behncke insisted, were too closely tied to the industry they supposedly regulated, and when it came to investigating accidents, they often conspired with the airline operators to fix the blame on dead pilots. His argument was plausible because of a long history of interchangeable personnel moving through a revolving door between DOC and the airlines.
The worst conflict of interest, Behncke maintained, was that DOC, which maintained the airways and wrote the regulations governing commercial aviation, was allowed to investigate itself. Behncke wanted an independent federal agency to investigate accidents. He was the first to advocate the concept that would ultimately become, in 1966, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).
The
Behncke appeared on February 6, the final day of the conference. Pointing out that DOC had attributed 16 of the last 27 airline crashes to pilot error, Behncke raised publicly, for the first time, the issue of “pilot pushing.” Gung-ho supervisors were regularly intimidating their pilots into dangerous flights under threat of dismissal, Behncke testified, and DOC was doing nothing to stop the practice. Furthermore, Behncke said he had affidavits to prove his charges.
Behncke’s testimony provoked anger from airline executives in attendance, among whom were C. R. Smith, W. A. Patterson, and Eddie Rickenbacker.
Patterson, Behncke’s old boss, who had recently reversed himself on the subject of pilot unionization, nevertheless disputed charges of pilot pushing on United. The New York Times called the interchange between the two men “a lively battle of words.”
Eddie Rickenbacker all but snarled at Behncke: “If you’ve got proof of pilot pushing, then produce it.” Rickenbacker said he was confident Behncke had no such proof.
With a small secret smile, Behncke listened to the various airline executives heatedly deny any pilot pushing on their lines. When they were finished, Behncke asked chief of the Airline Inspection Division, Major R. W. Schroeder, to confirm the existence of Lorna Livermore’s deposition, which had not yet been made public because the investigation was still incomplete. The reluctant Schroeder had no choice but to make the information public. He read selected portions, including the closing sentence of Lorna Livermore’s deposition: “I am writing this letter so that the Department of Commerce will have an understanding of the attitude of the operators. This attitude can be verified very easily.”
Behncke then called attention to an affidavit from Roy P. Warner, a recently fired NWA pilot, that supported Mrs. Livermore’s charges.
Behncke had succeeded in putting the operators on the defensive about the safety issue, and in so doing he had seized the initiative. He now had his choice of two mutually exclusive courses of action. The first choice would be to grab all the headlines he could, levy a barrage of additional charges, and try to make more waves in commercial aviation’s already troubled pond. The second choice would be to play ball with the industry, making a reasonable deal in exchange for defusing the pilot pushing controversy. He chose the latter.
“The companies have seen the error of their ways,” Behncke testified. “Northwest has seen their mistakes, and they have eradicated them.”
What did Behncke mean by this enigmatic statement?
In effect, Behncke was using the
The upshot was that Lorna Livermore would have to shift for herself on the pilot pushing lawsuit against NWA. “Old” Joe Livermore might well have been totally wrong. Rather than Bob Mensing killing Joe Livermore, it might well have been Joe Livermore who killed copilot Art Haid by willfully getting off the electronic airways to fly contact too soon.
It was admittedly a murky case, but the facts are that NWA’s
young copilots were up in arms about Joe Livermore and two other “old” captains,
both of whom later got fired. The copilots did not have bidding rights in those
days, so they flew with whichever captain they were assigned. Several of them
had already flatly refused to fly with
Speaking for the majority of NWA pilots, R. Lee Smith sums up the
I suppose Joe was pushed. We were just beginning to fly
instruments, and he was reluctant. The copilots had complained about him and
[two unnamed pilots]. They were really unhappy. They complained through ALPA, in
fact. Livermore and [the unnamed pilots] only got away with it because Fred
Whittemore, who was general manager, was the same way. He wouldn’t fly
instruments either. Of course, he didn’t fly every day, but when he did it was
all contact. Mensing wanted to fire
Behncke knew what he was doing when he refused to render any
further assistance to Lorna Livermore after having exploited the issue raised by
her husband’s death. She wanted ALPA to appear on her behalf in the legal action
she brought against NWA, alleging wrongful death under
Despite all this, Lorna Livermore won her lawsuit. Her victory came early in 1939, at the end of another very bad year for NWA. The cause of NWA’s trouble was the Lockheed 14H, successor to the 10A, called the Super Electra and a real loser according to many old-timers.
“What nobody could figure out,” says R. Lee Smith, “was why
Whittemore didn’t insist on the kind of structural changes on the 14H other
airlines did—the Dutch on KLM, for instance. That was the mystery. We were
strongly suspicious of that plane long before Nick Mamer had one come apart on
him at
The trouble with the 14H was control surface flutter, which increased in harmonic series, quickly becoming uncontrollable (in perhaps a second or so), until it wrenched the double vertical stabilizers completely off the aircraft. When it happened to Nick Mamer on Jan. 11, 1938, he had a planeload of passengers. Everyone died. The weather was clear and there were eyewitnesses on the ground, so there wouldn’t be any pilot error findings on this one. They saw the tail come off during straight and level flight. Subsequent investigation of the wreckage confirmed it.
Somebody had to be at fault, and since it couldn’t be a dead pilot this time, NWA itself was the prime candidate. DOC came down hard, sending in a special team to conduct what Secretary of Commerce Daniel C. Roper promised would be a “thorough investigation.” As a first step Roper, no longer trusting his beleaguered Aviation Branch to calm public apprehension, personally announced the grounding of all NWA’s Lockheed 14Hs. Then, on Feb. 4, 1938, citing “failure to comply with regulations for aircraft maintenance,” Roper suspended NWA’s operating certificate, grounding the whole airline. It was an unprecedented action. On February 6, Roper permitted NWA to begin carrying mail and express freight again, but not passengers. Finally, on February 10, NWA passed muster and Roper allowed passenger service to resume, but there were few takers.
NWA’s unsavory reputation almost surely had an effect on the
By 1938, ALPA had positioned itself so favorably in
But it hadn’t come about overnight. No single issue, not even one
as flashy as the
In order to understand that, we must go back to the beginning of
the decade.