CHAPTER 2
THE LEGACY OF FOUR GOLDEN DECADES, 1938–1978
Flying the Line under Regulation
In 1990, as the last decade of commercial aviation’s first century began, three professional airline pilots took stock of their careers. Each man was in his early 50s. Their lives dramatize much of what had happened in the 1980s, the tumultuous decade of “deregulation.”
Richard D. “Dick” Russell of Miami, Fla., who once criss-crossed Latin America as a DC-8 captain for Braniff International, knew he would never fly the line again. In his own mind and in his inner conception of who he was, Dick Russell would always think of himself as an airline pilot, even though he was running a maritime machine shop instead of commanding a flight deck. A compact man with a muscular build and startling blue eyes, this Naval Academy graduate still wore his Navy wings on a custom-made belt buckle. But despite his wealth of aviation experience, he no longer flew; and he looked back on his career as a professional airline pilot with anger. The Russell family’s finances were tight. Sally, Dick’s wife of more than 30 years, began working outside the home after Braniff’s 1982 bankruptcy—something she never did while Dick was flying the line.
Dick Russell blamed ALPA for this state of affairs.
Frank Robert “Bob” Harper, with his thinning hair and sober appearance, might easily be mistaken for a lawyer or accountant. Instead, he was a Boeing 767 captain for United Airlines. After graduating from Albion College, a prestigious private liberal arts school in Michigan, he too became a Naval aviator. Bob Harper and his wife were living well in a fine suburban home near Seattle, which commanded a sweeping view of Puget Sound. Life for Bob Harper had been good, and he was looking back on his time as an airline pilot with fondness. The few years he had remaining before retirement were secure, and he was looking forward to upgrading to the left seat of the Boeing 747. One day soon, he hoped to return to flying the Pacific routes to Japan and the rest of Asia, just as he had during his Navy tour. Under the terms of United’s most recent contract, Bob Harper would earn more than $200,000 per year as a B-747 captain, should he choose to give up his domestic B-767 captaincy. Katie Harper, Bob’s wife of more than 30 years, had no need to work outside the home.
Bob Harper credits ALPA for this state of affairs.
Louis R. “Lou” Squillante, a slender and laconic man who was living in the
waterfront Maryland
community of Leonardtown, spent 23 years with TWA before finally achieving his
DC-9 captaincy in 1990. At the age of 54, this former Navy pilot and zoology
graduate of the University
of
Lou Squillante, who was intending to retire as soon as possible, saw ALPA as irrelevant to his professional life.
Dick Russell, Bob Harper, and Lou Squillante, all of whom were ex-Naval
aviators, went through flight training at Pensacola at the same time,
served together in the same Navy squadron, and subsequently went to work
as airline pilots at about the same time in the mid-1960s. By a process
that lies beyond the parameters of rational analysis—out there somewhere in the
twilight zone of existential fate, Dick Russell had the bad luck to choose a
doomed airline; Lou Squillante hired on with an airline whose prospects in 1990
were dim; and only Bob Harper had the good fortune to pick a winner. At the
time of their hiring, none of them could have foreseen the fates of their
airlines.
Was ALPA responsible for the state of affairs in which these three professional airline pilots found themselves in 1990?
History is made up of many discrete facts, stories, and events, each distinct, some unique and original, others recurrent and part of a tapestry. The historians’ duty is to take this welter of historical circumstance, sort out the merely nice to know from what really must be known, and distill those truths that persist over time into a “usable past.” This “usable past” must necessarily be selective, a careful weeding of events that conveys enough of the substantive details, the flavor of the times, and the reasons behind human actions to allow people living in the present to understand the choices that people very much like themselves—people like Russell, Harper, and Squillante—made in the past. In the last analysis, those choices will be made by people who actually walk on history’s stage—not by historians who merely chronicle their passage across it. History is not a roadmap that governs choices—it is a catalog of possibilities—past, present, and future.
Every work of history has its own audience. Every historian must select from the vast web of the past those telling moments that illuminate for that audience the present in which they live.
But which story tells it best? Is it the “success” story, like Bob Harper’s? the cloudy story, like Lou Squillante’s? or the “tragic” story, like Dick Russell’s? Count Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian novelist who wrote War and Peace, once said that the stories of “happy” families are all the same. By inference, the tragic stories are the ones from which we learn. Consequently, historians have more often relied on misfortune to provide the “shock of recognition” that carries historical narrative toward truth.
So we must know the story of Dick Russell, whose story will stand as the surrogate for many thousands of stories like his.
From the cold perspective of official analysis, Dick Russell would be described as “a highly specialized middle-aged technocrat whose skills are in oversupply.” Until May 1982, he ranked near the top of the American economic pyramid, easily able to afford his comfortable Miami home and 35-foot sailboat. Then, in what seemed the flick of an eyelid, Dick Russell and 1,100 other Braniff pilots lost their careers—Braniff went bankrupt, the first “major” airline to do so in modern history. Dick Russell, then 46 years old, began doing odd jobs on other people’s sailboats while worrying about the legacy of fixed expenses from his vanished $70,000 salary.
“I used to help friends at the yacht club for free,” Russell remembered in 1990. “They understood when I started charging a fee to put down a teak deck or something; and after a while, I had more business than I could handle. But it wasn’t flying. That’s what I do, what I am, a pilot.”
When the air transport industry peaked in 1979, a year after the first rush of deregulation, nearly 40,000 men (and a few women) earned their livelihoods as pilots for U. S. airlines, 2,200 for Braniff, Dick Russell’s airline. By April 1982, a month before Braniff’s bankruptcy swelled the total, 4,525 airline pilots were already on indefinite “furlough.” When the sharp economic recession of 1982–83 reached bottom, the overall jobless rate for airline pilots approached 20 percent. By Department of Labor reckoning, airline pilots suffered from unemployment at nearly double the national average for all workers.
Surprisingly, nobody felt much sympathy for either airline pilots in general or for their union, ALPA. If the overall unemployment rate for ordinary workers had been that high, Congress would have taken action and the President would have reacted. But owing to the prevailing opinion that airline pilots were “overpaid and underworked,” this holocaust of jobs in the nation’s airline cockpits evoked only yawns. Indeed, many people believed that airline pilots, whose reputation for haughtiness and self-assurance approached the legendary, were deserving of the comeuppance that the Airline Dergegulation Act of 1978 had visited upon them.
For 40 years, from the passage of the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938 to congressional enactment of the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, professional airline pilots had lived charmed lives at the heart of an industry that was, perhaps, America’s finest technological achievement. Airline pilots became, in their lifestyles, income levels, and technical expertise, the subject of almost universal admiration or envy. They were the critical few who dominated the apex of the airline industry, and from this position, through a combination of toughness, canniness, and hard-nosed unionism, airline pilots created for themselves, out of nearly nothing, all the trappings of “professionalism.”
But if the truth be known, more than a little good luck also aided the pilots who lived through the four golden decades. Historically, most airline pilots were either unaware of this good luck or unwilling to acknowledge it. Although they became perhaps the best examples of how skill, personal discipline, and unsentimental adherence to unionism can result in rich personal rewards and high professional status, far too many airline pilots complacently took their situation for granted—the way things currently were, they believed, is the way things would always be.
As the era of direct government regulation of the airline industry neared its “sunset,” the salary and benefit packages of U. S. airline pilots were among the highest in the world. The captain of a jumbo jet flying prime North Atlantic runs approached $150,000 in annual earnings. Even a run-of-the-mill Boeing 727 captain flying domestic routes might take home $100,000. Airline pilots clearly owed their privileged position to government regulation and unionization. No purely economic justification existed for high airline pilot salaries. Airline operators have always been able to find plenty of pilots willing to work for less-than-union rates. But so long as the Civil Aeronautics Board regulated the industry, and friendly politicians presided over the web of labor laws that controlled the relationship between management and workers, unionized airline pilots lived in the best of all possible worlds.
In this environment, strikes tended (with some major exceptions) to be short, almost symbolic. Airline managers preferred to pass high pilot salaries along to the traveling public rather than engage in protracted fights. On those occasions when strikes and other unpleasantries occurred during the four golden decades, ALPA won far more often than it lost. Many airline pilots lapsed into complacency, shrugging off the legacy of hard struggle that had made their lives so enviable.
Of course, ALPA had to occasionally demonstrate its toughness and political clout against a few hard cases (notably Southern Airways in 1960–1962); but on the whole, labor relations between pilots and management became comfortable, almost ritualized, or so it seemed.
General Counsel Henry Weiss, who has fought ALPA’s legal battles since the days
of Dave Behncke, watched the slow, steady lapse into complacency of airline
pilots with alarm. 1 More
and more, Weiss feared, airline pilots were taking for granted the benefits of
government regulation while they concentrated on issues that were obviously
important, like skyjacking and air safety, but peripheral to their basic
interests as employees working within a labor union environment.
“Quite candidly, what went on during these forty years of government regulation that I personally observed,” Weiss says, “was the tendency of pilots to pour their energy into interstitial things. Meanwhile, the character of the people the pilots were confronting was changing, from pilot-oriented management to professional management. These new professional managers explicitly designed deregulation to reduce pilot wages.”
By the late 1960s, most airline pilots flying the line believed they had seen the last of predatory managers who might threaten their livelihoods. ALPA had won repeated victories at the bargaining table and had beaten back challenges to its status as the preeminent voice of professional airline pilots. A certain mythology emerged, which found far too many pilots willing to believe that the tough, disciplined Old Guys who had created ALPA during the era of wooden wings had won all the wars and that only tranquillity stretched ahead for their legatees in modern jet cockpits. Far too many airline pilots contented themselves with running businesses on the side, polishing their golf games, or simply relishing the good life they lived.
By the beginning of the 1970s, the fateful decade of deregulation, most working airline pilots had forgotten one of the most fundamental axioms of history: “No victory ever stays won.” When they looked at history, modern airline pilots saw only the victories the Old Guys had won. They did not see how close some of those calls had been—even under benign government regulation. For example, Henry Weiss believes that the Southern Airways strike of 1960, the last time an employer tried to destroy ALPA (until deregulation), should have provided an object lesson to airline pilots. 2
“I must tell you that there were times when I thought the Southern pilots were gone,” Weiss admitted during a 1990 interview.
The kinds of pilots who involved themselves in ALPA’s active affairs generally did not share the complacency that riddled the rank-and-file. But because these active pilots were “political,” they necessarily had to keep a low profile or lose their ability to represent ALPA. When airline deregulation first began to make headway in Congress, most ordinary airline pilots paid little attention. ALPA’s leaders opposed it, as did most of the major airlines for which they worked. ALPA’s presidents and national officers, who have always tended to be more politically aware than the rank-and-file, saw clearly that deregulation posed dangers for their union. But by the early 1970s, the typical airline pilot, like military officers who extol free enterprise while living in a cocoon of government benefits, had become a reflexive political conservative who seemed oblivious to the benefits derived from unionization and government regulation. Consequently, ALPA’s officers took considerable flack from rank-and-file pilots for opposing “free enterprise.”
“I often marveled at the utter ignorance of my colleagues,” says Bill Himmelreich, a retired Northwest Airlines captain. “Sometimes I had to sit there and listen to a kid copilot making sixty grand a year say, ‘What good is ALPA? We’re professionals! Why do we need a labor union?’ The little jerk actually thought he was worth his salary. He wasn’t! What he was really worth was what Frank Lorenzo would pay him on New York Air, about $16 an hour. All the rest was gravy, courtesy of our union.”
Perhaps if airline pilots had bothered to read Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose, it would have tempered their enthusiasm for deregulation. Friedman, the Nobel laureate from the University of Chicago who was the leader of the “Chicago School” of conservative, free market economists, exercised enormous influence over Republican policy-makers during the Nixon and Ford Administrations. In Free to Choose, Friedman chose as his prime example of the evils of government regulation, the high salaries paid to airline pilots! Friedman argued that curbing airline pilot salaries would lead to better service and lower fares. By the mid-1970s, with full backing from the Ford Administration, legislation that would end federal economic regulation of the airlines emerged.
Jimmy Carter, perhaps the most conservative Democrat to occupy the White House in the 20th century, adopted Gerald Ford’s airline deregulation policies as his own. Surprisingly, liberals like Edward M. Kennedy, whose Senate Judiciary Committee was instrumental in the process, joined forces with conservative, free-marketeers to make airline deregulation a reality by 1978.
Although impossible to prove, it seems likely that pro-labor liberals were sufficiently put off by airline labor’s “gold plated” image to allow the deregulation experiment to begin with them. After all, when one thinks about unions and airline pilots during that era, the legacy of Charley Ruby pops readily to mind. On more than one occasion during the 1960s, Charley Ruby made his distaste for associating with other labor unions clear, and he all but boycotted the AFL-CIO. Ruby’s attitudes would leave a lot of wreckage, in a purely ideological sense, for J. J. O’Donnell to repair when he became ALPA’s president in 1970. But we must remember that Charley Ruby was merely reflecting the dominant attitudes of rank-and-file ALPA members, and also that many ALPA members were cordial supporters of politicians who were overtly hostile to other labor unions. Gordon J. Humphrey of New Hampshire was not only one of the most conservative, antilabor members of the U. S. Senate, he was also a former airline pilot.
By the early 1980s, as deregulation began to hit home, the absurdity of a group of trade unionists mouthing the platitudes of free market ideology was obvious. What was not so apparent to an airline pilot living in a snug Republican suburb during the 1970s, was painfully clear by the early 1980s. But in fairness to ALPA’s leadership during the 1970s, we must remember that they did not pull their punches in denouncing airline deregulation. The problem was that the rank-and-file ALPA member simply wasn’t listening. J. J. O’Donnell never ceased evangelizing against deregulation, despite considerable flack from his rank-and-file.
“We are a trade labor movement,” O’Donnell constantly warned skeptical pilots during the 1970s. “When we forget that, we start getting dumped on.”
Later, O’Donnell reminisced: “I was just stunned at the way some of our guys never wanted to use the word ‘union.’ Here’s a guy drawing down a hundred grand a year—he’s all for ‘free enterprise.’ We had to keep pounding it in: ‘We are workers, we are union!’ They don’t know that their salaries are the result of our unionism. We put it out in writing, but it almost appeared that our guys couldn’t read!”
Until tragedy hits home, few individuals are ever willing to believe it can happen to them. Pilots going into combat must believe that the SAM launched skyward has somebody else’s name on it. The “Titanic syndrome” affects everybody—not just airline pilots. “Hey, my end of the boat’s not in the water! It’s those guys at the other end who have a problem!”
This attitude sorely tested one primary article of faith in the professional airline pilots’ creed—the notion of unity across company lines. The storied “brotherhood” of the air, which had been a fixture of the pilot’s mentality since the 1920s, began to erode in the late 1950s with the passing of the pioneer airmen who founded ALPA. As elite technocrats, airline pilots during the late 1960s felt less kinship with these notions. Then in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as the twin blows of deregulation and economic recession slammed into the profession, the ancient notion of aerial brotherhood faced its most serious challenge. The crisis at Braniff brought it about.
Among the Braniff pilots, as among no other group, the ideal of a community of interests among professional airline pilots would face its moment of truth. Their colleagues at Eastern Airlines would test their adherence to this ancient precept by plunging them into stark conflict. The specific cause was Eastern’s purchase of Braniff’s Latin American routes.
“If our Latin American Division was such a loser,” asks Len Morgan, the retired Braniff captain whose considerable writing talents earned him a regular column in Flying magazine, “why were Eastern and Pan American falling all over themselves to grab it?”
For Dick Russell and his fellow Latin American Division pilots at Braniff, the primary question was why didn’t ALPA do something to save their jobs!
When Braniff, lurching ever more desperately into debt, sold off its South American routes to Eastern shortly before bankruptcy, the faltering airline’s pilots, counting on ALPA help, assumed that the provisions of ALPA’s merger mechanism, or some other aspect of ALPA policy, would provide them a safe haven. When Braniff actually declared bankruptcy in May 1982, the South American routes were sold to Eastern. Bilateral agreements required Eastern to serve the former Braniff route structure in South America. Eastern hired nearly 1,000 former Braniff personnel—but no pilots.
Didn’t some ALPA policy, perhaps on “fragmentation,” or their contract’s “scope” clause, or simple necessity (not to mention decency) dictate that Eastern should take at least a token number of pilots with the airplanes? After all, weren’t they “brother pilots?” Didn’t their Eastern brothers owe them something?
Naturally Eastern’s management opposed the expense of indoctrinating new pilots into their corporate culture, and the Braniff pilots didn’t expect much help from that direction. But when Eastern’s pilots turned their backs and sustained their management’s position by failing to offer any jobs to Braniff’s pilots, their anger and sense of betrayal knew no bounds. Wasn’t J. J. O’Donnell, ALPA’s president, an Eastern pilot, they raged? Didn’t this mean an ALPA- Eastern conspiracy existed, that ALPA was favoring another pilot group at their expense? This was all ALPA’s fault, they stormed. Otherwise, why didn’t J. J. O’Donnell do something?
Former ALPA president J. J. O’Donnell, fit and tanned from his retirement-developed passion for tennis, scowled when asked this question during a 1990 interview.
“Braniff got sold down the river by the Eastern MEC, not by ALPA, and certainly not by the Eastern pilots,” O’Donnell says hotly. “In all fairness, it was really only a portion of the MEC, about four guys who dominated the other twenty-four and took them right off the cliff. God knows I tried to get Eastern to take some Braniff pilots, even if it was only a token number, but they wouldn’t budge. They didn’t want me down there. My relationship with Augie Gorse [Eastern’s MEC chairman] was so bad I had to send Jack Bavis [ALPA’s executive administrator] down to protect ALPA’s policies. He couldn’t get in the meeting! Some solid citizens were on that MEC, and I asked them, ‘How could you let that happen? If ALPA’s merger policy is ignored by one airline, what’s to prevent every other airline from ignoring it also?’”
Although rank-and-file Braniff pilots might have been unaware of the strained relations between O’Donnell and his former mates on Eastern, Braniff’s MEC understood the problem. Throughout the 1970s, some of O’Donnell’s most vociferous critics within ALPA had been his own former colleagues on Eastern. When Hank Duffy defeated O’Donnell in 1982, the Eastern councils would provide an important part of Duffy’s winning margin. O’Donnell maintains that Braniff’s MEC understood that his personal intervention with the Eastern MEC would have been counterproductive, and he speaks favorably of Braniff’s pilot leaders, particularly Joe Baranowski, Howard Cole, and Mike Ferraro.
“The Braniff MEC was a good one; they depended upon us for leadership; they wanted our assistance,” O’Donnell said in his 1990 interview. “We had two lawyers down there in Miami working with the Braniff and Eastern MECs. But the opportunities for promotion washed out the Eastern pilots’ loyalty to ALPA. There’s no question that their behavior was a mistake.”
Hank Duffy, who would not come to ALPA’s presidency until after the Braniff tragedy played out, remembers O’Donnell’s trials sympathetically.
“O’Donnell had two problems at that time,” Duffy remembers. “First, some companies don’t want to take on any of the cultural problems that come with another company’s pilot group, particularly if they’re grouped together. Then you have the pilot problem. I think the pilot problem really depends on if the airline’s doing well or not.”
If Duffy’s analysis is correct, the first problem was that Eastern’s management did not want the Braniff pilots as a cohesive group and coerced its pilots into supporting this policy. Good evidence exists that Frank Borman, Eastern’s CEO, told MEC Chairman Augie Gorse that he would not proceed with the Latin American acquisition if the Eastern MEC did not agree to exclude the Braniff pilots. Given the sad fate of Eastern today, it is easy to see that the second of Duffy’s conditions applied as well—the Eastern pilots had not done well recently, lagging behind their contemporaries on other airlines in almost every category.
While these factors do not excuse the behavior of Eastern’s MEC, they do make it understandable. Eastern’s purchase of Braniff’s Latin American routes was, arguably, outside the technical scope of ALPA merger policy, but the issue clearly had a moral dimension. J. J. O’Donnell argued vehemently with the leaders of Eastern’s MEC that ALPA merger policy applied to their airline’s acquisition of Braniff’s routes in Latin America. The Eastern MEC’s reading of the policy, obviously affected by naked self-interest, differed.
“We didn’t even know the meetings were going on between Frank Borman and Augie Gorse,” O’Donnell declared in his 1990 interview. “When it became known that Eastern was purchasing Braniff’s South American routes, Eastern and Braniff were put on notice that we were implementing the merger policy.”
So, further complicating O’Donnell’s problem, at a time when he might have been able to influence the “solid citizens” on the Eastern MEC, the MEC leadership kept him completely out of the loop. Because the MEC leadership and Eastern’s management colluded to keep him uninformed, O’Donnell insists that he was almost helpless to affect events. By the time O’Donnell became aware of just how far off the ALPA reservation Eastern’s MEC had roamed, his only alternative would have been to refuse to sign the necessary contract amendments that the new Eastern routes would require. If he had done so, at a time when so many pilots were out of work, the Eastern pilots would probably have bolted ALPA, just like the American pilots had done in 1963. O’Donnell could have asserted the raw power of his office to remove Eastern’s MEC or to implement a trusteeship, something that no ALPA president had ever dared to do before to a major carrier. He had placed the Frontier MEC in trusteeship over the crew complement issue in the 1970s, but it was a small pilot group.3 Hank Duffy would impose trusteeship on a small-airline pilot group, the one at Air Wisconsin, after the airline merged with Mississippi Valley in 1985. But to impose trusteeship on one of ALPA’s “elephants,” O’Donnell believes, would have been catastrophic.
“I was on the Eastern MEC for six years and on the Negotiating Committee for fourteen years, and I know they would have said, ‘Screw you! Don’t tell us how to run our business,’” O’Donnell said flatly in his 1990 interview.
Which was cold comfort to Braniff’s pilots. Like hundreds of other Braniff pilots who came back to fly the line until “Bankruptcy II,” Dick Russell balked at paying the Eastern strike assessment during their hour of need and resigned from ALPA with an angry letter to Hank Duffy. Given the circumstances of his professional life since “Bankruptcy I,” few could have blamed him.
During the interval between the two Braniff bankruptcies, Russell dusted off his Naval Academy degree and sought work as a mechanical engineer. After a year of unsuccessful job hunting, he discovered two sad truths—his piloting skills were largely untransferable, and no other job he could get would pay him nearly as well as flying. Some aviation jobs he was not sure he wanted. Russell was not anxious to live out of a suitcase while chasing the dregs of aviation employment in undesirable and often dangerous parts of the world. Some new airlines like Air Florida shunned Russell because of the fear that he would leave them the minute Braniff resumed operations. That Air Florida could have used Russell seems obvious. The passengers aboard the Air Florida Boeing 737 that crashed into the 14th Street Bridge in Washington, D. C., might be alive today had their captain been Dick Russell, with his vast flying experience, instead of a 34-year-old captain who had never flown in winter conditions before.
But the truth is that the new post-deregulation airlines were not eager to hire pilots accustomed to ALPA pay scales and working conditions. The industry’s traditional age discrimination also worked against Russell. Although recent court decisions have changed this state of affairs, at the time Dick Russell most needed a job, age discrimination was a fact of life. In 1983, Aviation Week & Space Technology reported that the major airlines had hired only one pilot over the age of 38 since 1976!
For a while, many former Braniff pilots looked with hope toward the labor protective provisions (LPPs) of the Airline Deregulation Act. Democratic politicians with their traditional pro-labor bias had supported deregulation only on condition that workers of any airline bankrupted by it would have first call on available job openings on surviving carriers. Dick Russell and his fellow Braniff pilots needed the LPPs desperately, and therein lies a supreme irony.
In one of his first actions as U. S. President, Ronald Reagan fulfilled his campaign promise to “get the government off the backs of the American people” by canceling the LPPs that the outgoing Carter Administration had implemented. Although Congress had written in the LPPs for a situation exactly like Braniff’s, and President Carter had signed the LPP regulations, Reagan used the administrative power of his office to rescind them. Calling the LPPs “unnecessary” and an “unwarranted government interference” in private industry, Reagan left Braniff’s pilots naked just when they needed one final dash of government regulation most.
“We had an immediate need for first-right-of-hire in 1983 when I became ALPA’s president,” Hank Duffy recalls. “We needed a Department of Transportation [DOT] determination that deregulation was the cause of Braniff’s bankruptcy. We weren’t able to move that on the DOT side. So we got Ray Donovan [Secretary of Labor] to publish the regulations; and as soon as he did, the companies challenged it in court. We eventually took it to the Supreme Court and won on a 9-0 decision in a Reagan Court, which was amazing, and got first-right-of-hire put in. But they fought the damn thing until 1988, and it was just a frustration that we couldn’t get it out when we needed it in 1983 through 1985, when we had a big surplus of pilots.”
“I voted for Reagan,” Dick Russell admits. “I’m a political conservative, I believe in free enterprise. I’m just like most airline pilots. But unemployment sure does change your perspective.”
Working for something called Carnival Airlines after “Bankruptcy II” also changed Russell’s perspective on ALPA. The gambling junkets Russell flew on Boeing 727s out of Ft. Lauderdale to the Caribbean were poorly paid and had no benefits, just flat hourly pay—block to block. Russell confesses that he and his fellow Carnival pilots needed an ALPA contract badly. Working conditions were so bad on Carnival that Russell eventually quit in 1990.
Deregulation of the airline industry, while it lies at the vital center of every airline pilots’ career concerns, is by no means the only problem complicating the lives of the people who fly the line professionally. The traditional problems—pay, working conditions, safety—haven’t gone away. ALPA still must deal with these meat-and-potatoes issues. But deregulation made the job that much harder, and J. J. O’Donnell would find his leadership tested repeatedly by events that his predecessors never experienced.
The O’Donnell years would see no shortage of tribulation and trial.