CHAPTER 20
AFTERMATH
The Disputed Election of 1990 and ALPA’s Future

Sir Walter Raleigh, writing his History of the World while imprisoned in the Tower London, put it this way: “Whosoever, in writing history, shall follow too near upon its heels, it may haply strike out his teeth.”

Contemporary history is never easy, as Raleigh would find out on the headsman’s block. Those who walk on history’s edge, who actually make it happen, are often so busy keeping their balance that they have little time for reflection on “what it all means.” That’s fine for participants, but a trap for historians, who ideally should wait until the dust settles.

Oliver Cromwell, rebuking the bloodlust of his “Witchfinder General,” issued a stern warning equally applicable to religious zealots and historians: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think you, you might be wrong!”

Sometimes, historians must wait decades to make certain they’re not wrong. The sinking of the British ocean liner Lusitania in 1915 provides a classic example. At the time, the Lusitania affair seemed to confirm British propaganda that Kaiser Wilhelm was the reincarnation of Attila the Hun, the vicious Asiatic marauder whose 5th century A.D. invasion of Europe still haunts our collective memory. But with the passage of time another story emerged. Not only was the Lusitania a “semiwarship” (it carried some light munitions, mostly rifles), but many decades later declassified British cables revealed a hint of conspiracy as well. The Lusitania’s captain had orders not to “zigzag,” thus making the ship an easier target for German U-boats. They made short work of the Lusitania, with predictable results—a profound shift in American public opinion in favor of the Allies. Getting the United States into the war meant national salvation for the British—well worth the lives of a few innocents.

How long does passion take to cool and “the truth” to emerge? Talk to any former Eastern pilot, and you know their fires are still burning. Former Braniff pilots still seethe with anger over the failure of their airline. What did Hank Duffy or J.J. O’Donnell either do or not do during their tenure that their critics still denounce? Talk to anybody who was ever disappointed by some decision they made, and you know the heat of contention persists. What really happened during the fiercely contested presidential election of 1990 between Roger Hall of United and J. Randolph “Randy” Babbitt of Eastern? How long will the anger of Hall’s supporters persist?

And what about ALPA a century from now? Will it persist?

If ALPA does survive to see the opening of another time capsule a century from now, it will almost certainly be because of the holding action Hank Duffy fought for eight years. Not that progress was lacking during his era, but planning for the future necessarily had to take place in the lull between battles, any one of which could have spelled ALPA’s doom.

Hank Duffy’s successes were like his personality—careful, precise, controlled, and not much given to flamboyance. He favored long-range planning, and he was always distrustful of impatient short-range projects. Transient enthusiasms couldn’t move him to impolitic or hasty action. Hank Duffy preferred the long view, one that proceeded from thorough planning to achieve well-defined goals.

Nothing illustrates this better than the successful organization of 30 “new entrant” airlines during Hank Duffy’s administration. In February 1983, at the very beginning of his first term, the pilots of TWA began pressuring Duffy for an organizational campaign directed at these new-entrant airlines. While noting that new-entrants commanded only 7 percent of the market, TWA’s pilots worried that this share would grow, and they also feared that even if new-entrant carriers remained relatively small, the depressive effect of their low wages would inevitably have an adverse effect on the pilots of major airlines. The TWA MEC passed a resolution directing Duffy to “engage in a widespread and dynamic public relations campaign” to win the allegiance of new-entrant pilots, and it called for “support of a program that will organize these new-entrant carriers.”

Duffy seemed genuinely interested in the futures of new-entrant airlines and their pilots. But the debilitating effects of deregulation meant that the pilots of these “code sharing” airlines, who flew for the likes of American Eagle or United Express, often wearing remarkably similar uniforms and flying aircraft bearing the same corporate logos as their major airline partners, would find their relative share of ALPA’s pie diminishing in the late 1980s. A steady and inexorable concentration characterized the airline industry, a pattern of consolidation that caused the pilot groups of major airlines to grow in relative numbers and influence. In short, deregulation caused the “elephants” to get bigger and the “ants” to get smaller. Which didn’t mean that the pilots of smaller airlines played an insignificant role in ALPA’s history—far from it.

Randy Babbitt, whom Duffy had appointed as his executive administrator in January 1985, would probably not have won the election of 1990 had it not been for one particular pilot from one of these small airlines. Babbitt, almost from the moment he became Duffy’s executive administrator, acted as a roving troubleshooter and goodwill ambassador for the organizational effort directed at small airlines. Whenever ALPA had to “show the flag” of official concern, Randy Babbitt was Hank Duffy’s point man. As Duffy’s chief assistant, Babbitt’s involvement indicated to the pilots of small airlines that ALPA’s commitment to them originated at the top. Thus for many of these pilots, Babbitt became an almost totemic figure, the national officer who was there for them at times of crisis in their struggle to achieve decent working conditions and fair wages.

“Where Hank used me most was on the collective bargaining side,” Babbitt recalls of his five years as executive administrator. “He liked my background on ALPA’s Collective Bargaining Committee. The regional airline industry didn’t really get under way until 1982, and we didn’t get serious about organizing them until 1985. Then, when we got them organized, what do we do with them? It took some educating of these pilot groups. They’d say, ‘We’re part of ALPA, now where’s that Delta pay scale?’ We had to convince them that first you get a basic contract, then the company has to get used to the whole idea. The industry was filled with colorful entrepreneurs, such as Joe Murray of Simmons Airlines, who’d fuss and carry on and swear at their pilots before finally saying, ‘What do I have to pay to shut them up?’ When negotiations ran aground, I would get involved.”

The pilots of small airlines were actually living and working under conditions that ALPA’s founders, the Old Guys, would have recognized—long hours, dangerous operations, unsympathetic and often autocratic managements. In some strange, indefinable way, Babbitt seemed like an Old Guy himself. He first attracted national attention in 1976 through his service on a national ALPA committee studying a national seniority list, something the Old Guys had dreamed of almost from the moment of ALPA’s creation.

“John LeRoy and I worked very hard on that, but couldn’t get anywhere,” Babbitt recalls. “We advocated driving a stake in the ground and doing a national seniority list for the future. If we had been able to do it in 1977, 75 percent of ALPA would be under that list today. We couldn’t do it because of the practicalities of how it would work. Are you going to furlough somebody to make room on the list? Today, I would consider it a major victory if we could ensure that when people lost their jobs they could get priority to go to the next open job.”

Because Eastern’s Washington, D.C., domicile was small, Babbitt became increasingly active, graduating from LEC service to work on various national committees. He came to Duffy’s attention through his work as chairman of the national Collective Bargaining Committee, which J.J. O’Donnell established in 1982 to limit the spread of United’s “Blue Skies” contract to other airlines and also to combat the B-scale epidemic that was then spreading outward from its epicenter on American Airlines. Fred Kozak of Piedmont and Bill Daugherty of Delta rounded out the three-man committee. Daugherty, who was very close to Duffy, liked Babbitt’s work and told Duffy about this bright young DC-9 captain who bore a famous ALPA name. But the fact that Randy was the son of W.T. “Slim” Babbitt of Eastern, an authentic Old Guy whose service dated back to the Behncke era, benefited Randy Babbitt only indirectly. Slim Babbitt, who retired in 1970 and died in 1986 at the age of 76, always warned his son, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, to stay out of ALPA work. Young Randy Babbitt knew his father never meant him to take this advice seriously.

“Having grown up with it, I didn’t realize how active in ALPA my dad was,” Babbitt remembers. “I just assumed everybody’s father was always involved in union meetings and committee work. I knew a lot about ALPA just by things that went on at home. I would typically go with my dad to the ALPA office and see things that went on. The first matchbook cover I remember reading said, ‘Don’t Fly National,’ which is how I learned what a strike was. So I just kind of grew up with ALPA.”

Slim Babbitt’s prominence in ALPA had nothing to do with his son’s rise, however.

“Although my father held elective ALPA office without interruption from 1937 to 1967, I really was fairly anonymous,” Babbitt laughs. “You’d be amazed at how fast people forget.”

Born in 1946, Babbitt grew up in south Florida, learned to fly as an adolescent, then began instructing and flying charters. He attended both the Universities of Georgia and Miami, leaving in 1966 without a degree to catch the great hiring surge at Eastern. At the tender age of 20, he was wearing Eastern’s uniform, flying as a copilot on Lockheed Electras. By 1968 Babbitt had moved up to the B-727, becoming a “seat swapper,” qualified as both a flight engineer and a copilot. Then, when dual qualification was eliminated in 1970, he settled in for a short stint on the panel.

“That wasn’t a lot of fun, so I took the first copilot’s seat I could get, which turned out to be on the DC-9,” Babbitt remembers.

For 10 years, Babbitt slowly worked his way back to the right seat of the B-727 and then upgraded to the A300 Airbus. In 1983, 17 years into his Eastern career, but still only 37 years old, Babbitt achieved his captaincy on the DC-9. He would fly that position until Duffy tapped him as executive administrator to replace John Erickson of Western Airlines in January 1985.

Erikson’s position was frankly political, in that he had been a key player in Duffy’s 1982 victory over J.J. O’Donnell, and Duffy owed him. Historically, ALPA presidents have chosen executive administrators either for political balance or because of a long-term working relationship. Jack Bavis fit the latter mold—he had worked with O’Donnell for years on Eastern. Erikson illustrates the former case, and although neither he nor Duffy will speak ill of the other, Babbitt’s appointment clearly resulted from a simple failure of “chemistry” between Erikson and Duffy, with perhaps the improved career advancement opportunities available to Erikson as a line pilot (because of the Delta–Western merger) also a factor.

The original Collective Bargaining Committee was composed of Executive Board members. That didn’t work, largely because they were too busy. The restructured committee, with Babbitt as chairman, set in motion a series of steps that would eventually lead to the formation of the Association of Independent Airmen (AIA) at the height of the Eastern strike. The AIA was simply a better version of the Union of Professional Airmen (UPA), an O’Donnell-era effort. Created in July 1989, the AIA, with its low-cost benefits and positive identification with ALPA, was designed to give every pilot working under a non-ALPA contract good reason not to be a potential scab. The AIA was a good example of the kind of long-term project Duffy favored.

By 1989, Randy Babbitt’s organizational skills had won contracts for several small airlines, including little NPA, a United code-sharer, based in Pasco, Wash. The initials had, long ago, stood for “National Parks Airways,” a small airline serving the mountainous Northwest with single-engine Fokker “Super” Universals and Stearmans. During its 10-year existence, from 1927 to 1937, NPA became celebrated for the skill of its pioneer mountain fliers. Western Air Express, which eventually merged into TWA, bought NPA, and the famous initials by which the little airline was known lapsed into history. Years later, following deregulation, a group of entrepreneurs resurrected the initials, originally as Northern Pacific Airlines, a name they later dropped entirely for the historically significant initials, which the airline’s 200 pilots joked stood for “No Particular Airline.”

NPA would have little interest for this history except that in 1990 it sent, as its first officer representative, an ex-naval aviator named Dean Brouillette to the BOD meeting. As we shall see, Dean Brouillette’s tiny airline would determine the victor in the Hall–Babbitt contest.

Hank Duffy announced in the summer of 1989, more than a year before the election, that he would not be a candidate again. Aside from the technical problem that Duffy would be past the airline pilots’ mandatory retirement age of 60 by the end of another term, he also had a political calculation behind his decision. Although Duffy was certain he could win another term of office, he knew it would come only after another close and divisive election like that of 1986—exactly what ALPA didn’t need at this juncture. Allowing ALPA to start the 1990s fresh with new leadership was a selfless act on Duffy’s part, which is not to say that neither Hall nor Babbitt were untainted by association with him. As national officers, both carried some of the same baggage as Duffy.

The election of 1990 shaped up as a two-man contest almost from the beginning. Joe Kernan of USAir would wage a campaign, but more for the purpose of symbolically unifying his own airline than as a serious challenge for the presidency. Both Hall and Babbitt had extensive track records and instant name recognition. Hall had the advantage of having won ALPA’s most significant victory of the postderegulation period, the United strike of 1985, and he also seemed on the verge of achieving an ESOP that would make United the largest employee-owned corporation in the world. He had also won plaudits for having made globalization a central issue for the future.

Almost from the moment Hall won election as ALPA’s first vice-president in 1986, he had warned pilots of the dangers of globalization. If foreign airlines were allowed to penetrate the domestic market to carry passengers between two cities (cabotage), then the fate of airlines might be the same as that of the merchant marine—driven from the skies by putative “Air Slobbovias,” the kind of cheap foreign competition old Dave Behncke worried about in the 1940s.

“Pilots want to hang onto the past very much,” Hall declared in a postelection interview. “We don’t like the idea of change because it has worked very much to our detriment. Globalization of the airlines is the second wave of deregulation; and if we don’t act as a cohesive group, the same trauma we experienced in deregulation is going to revisit us.”

Hall openly warned of the political battles ALPA would have to fight to stop cabotage, and he made no secret of his belief that ALPA should work for a change from Republican to Democratic administrations in Washington as a first step. The ideological bias of the Republican Party in favor of free trade, even when confronted with clear evidence of protectionism by our trading partners, was such that Republicans simply could not be trusted to handle the transition to a global airline system, Hall believed.

“The fight against cabotage must be waged collectively; it can’t be done by just one pilot group,” Hall says. “Pilots everywhere have to understand the threat that the Reagan and Bush administrations’ policies pose to labor, and specifically labor in the airline industry.”

By the summer of 1990, as electioneering reached its peak, Roger Hall seemed the clear front runner. A remarkable political transformation had affected airline pilots. Although no hard proof confirms it, anecdotal evidence suggests that airline pilots had voted overwhelmingly Republican since 1980. By the beginning of the 1990s, however, the ideological antiunionism of the Reagan–Bush years had become so manifest that even die-hard Republicans among airline pilots could scarcely stomach it.

Sickened by George Bush’s support for Frank Lorenzo, rank-and-file ALPA members were primed and ready to abandon their traditional Republicanism. Roger Hall was out front, riding this political crest.

Hall’s only serious opposition, Randy Babbitt, bore major handicaps. First and most significantly, Babbitt stood likely to become an orphan—a pilot without an airline. Although Eastern was still alive in the summer of 1990, its vital signs were weak, and its pilots were almost all scabs. Even worse, true to its fractious heritage, what remained of the Eastern pilot group, now led by Skip Copeland, was cool to Babbitt’s candidacy. Many Eastern strikers denounced him as “just a guy who owns an Eastern uniform—not a real pilot,” a reference to the fact that Babbitt had flown very little since becoming executive administrator.

“When Jack Bavis was executive administrator, he didn’t fly anything for twelve years,” Babbitt recalls. “I really wanted to keep my hand in with the flying, not so much for the mechanical skills but for keeping in touch with what’s going on out on the line. The way our system worked, especially on the DC-9, you go in and out of Atlanta every other leg, hang out in the crew lounge and see everybody, all the different political factions, believe me, you know what’s going on. Every airline has a soapbox, a political wailing wall, a great exchange place. But after about a year, it became obvious that I couldn’t work in the office all week and fly on weekends. Hank would remind me of it every time I would go fly. To be able to leave Washington, go out and fly a trip for a couple of days, lay over in Mobile, was a nice break, a day off.

“But as time went on” Babbitt says,,”it became more difficult. Keeping my qualifications up became a pain. I went down and took a check ride right after the United strike ended. I hadn’t been in the airplane in 75 days! I passed the check ride, and I’m still happy to say that I’ve never busted a check in my life. But taking check rides when you’re flying only 20 hours a quarter is tough. I realized that if I kept this up, I would wind up embarrassing myself and ALPA.”

Roger Hall, on the other hand, continued to fly regularly as first vice-president. Admittedly, his duties were less bound to office routine than Babbitt’s, and most of Hall’s predecessors had also continued to fly their trips. But in politics, symbolic factors play a large role; and for line pilots, the fact that Hall stayed out there, braving weather and icy runways, added to his appeal.

Only two negative factors figured in Hall’s candidacy. The first, that he was from United, ALPA’s 800-pound gorilla, the legatee of more than a decade of extremely testy relationships with other ALPA pilot groups, Hall couldn’t do anything about. The second, that he had negotiated the infamous “Blue Skies” contract of 1981, could have been a problem—except that Randy Babbitt gave him a bye on it.

“I had an agreement with Roger early on to run as clean a campaign as we could,” Babbitt says. “I did not bring up Blue Skies, although I was well aware it could have hurt him politically.”

Had it not been for ALPA’s prederegulation system of allocating executive vice-presidencies, the election crisis of 1990 might never have happened. As we have seen previously, in 1974 the BOD eliminated regional vice-presidencies in favor of executive vice-presidencies to be elected by “groups” of airlines selected by size. While this system worked reasonably well before deregulation, afterward it invited trouble because it guaranteed a contest between the two largest airlines. Given the history of tribalism that had characterized ALPA’s politics, this system was a ticking time bomb. Airlines in each group tended to develop political animosities over “place,” if nothing else. Under the strains of deregulation, these animosities increased to the point that they threatened ALPA’s very existence. By 1990, the Delta and United pilot groups could almost be counted upon to oppose each other politically, no matter what the issue.

At the summer 1990 Delta MEC meeting in hicago, both Roger Hall and Randy Babbitt made full-fledged campaign speeches. Hall got a polite reception, but Randy Babbitt would clearly be the Delta MEC members’ choice, partly because they saw him as Hank Duffy’s favorite. Duffy remained popular with his fellow Delta pilots, most of whom resented the United pilot group’s sniping at him. Although Duffy maintained a strict outward neutrality, it was no secret that he preferred Babbitt.

“I was in the fortunate position of being able to live with either Roger or Randy, because both of them were committed generally to the direction I believed ALPA had to go,” Duffy said later. “Now if the BOD had elected somebody like Joe Kernan, who attacked me personally, that would have been different.”

Although Duffy meant to absent himself from any public role in the election of 1990, he privately encouraged the fabled “Delta Machine” to support Babbitt. As a pilot from a beleaguered, strike-torn airline, Babbitt would have had no chance at all had Duffy not engineered support for him early. Without Delta’s support, Babbitt would not have had the manpower to carry on the lobbying, personal contacts, and politicking in the corridors and hospitality suites at the Sheraton Hotel in Bal Harbour, Fla., when the BOD convened that October.

In Hank Duffy’s “farewell address” opening the meeting, he urged the delegates to control expenditures. He was particularly severe in his attacks upon putative “outside experts,” describing them as “anybody who’s guessed right twice.” But Duffy reserved his harshest words for merger attorneys, whom he accused of exploiting pilots’ fears to increase their own fees. “God must have placed merger attorneys on Earth to challenge the skunk as nature’s most offensive animal,” Duffy said. He begged the delegates to strive for internal unity, to “think we, not me.” He was clearly warning the delegates to remain cool during the election to come.

“As I have gone through a series of end-of-term interviews with the news media, most often they have asked, ‘What was the high point and the low point of your time in office?’” Duffy told the BOD. “The high point was easy. Lorenzo discredited—driven from the industry. The low point I’ve been reluctant to discuss because it’s internal to ourselves. My greatest source of discomfort was not Ferris or Icahn or Lorenzo. My most troublesome problems arose because of internal dissension between pilot groups, usually merger-related, that put them at each others’ throats and put ALPA in the middle—with one or both pilot groups threatening that if they were not declared the winner they might pull away and fend for themselves. I knew that such a rupture could result in the destruction of the entire organization. More time than I care to admit was spent in figuring out how to keep those groups with us. Every pilot group faced with that choice during my tenure opted to work within the system. I’d like to thank their leaders for working through the emotion of the moment and allowing logic to prevail. I believe unequivocally that anything less than a strong centralized national union in today’s environment is suicide for the profession and eventually for every pilot group.”

And so, with Duffy’s warning ringing in their ears, the delegates moved to elect their new leader. Hall jumped off to an immediate lead. With two of the “Big Four,” United and Northwest in his column, Hall seemed unbeatable. Delta went for Babbitt, of course, while USAir committed itself by unit rule to its favorite son, Joe Kernan. Although Kernan had no chance of winning, he brought the delegates to their feet with a rousing speech, given in full uniform. But USAir’s unit rule vote holds a hidden agenda, which requires some explanation.

USAir was the Oakland of airlines. Gertrude Stein once said of Oakland: “There is no ‘there’ there.” USAir had grown so fast and was such an amalgam of previous airlines that it had no discernible identity of its own. USAir pilots habitually thought of themselves as old Piedmont, or old Pacific Southwest (PSA), or old Allegheny. Its leaders—Roger Hall (not the Roger Hall, but a USAir pilot of the same name), Joe Kernan, John Kretsinger, Chip Mull, and Bob Hammarley—had agreed that to establish a sense of internal identity, they ought not to be seen as puppets. In the days preceding the election, they had agreed that as an airline made up entirely of refugees and former local service carriers, their best interests would be served by voting for Kernan through two full ballots. On the third ballot, USAir would add its votes to the total for either Hall or Babbitt and determine the victor. The BOD members assumed that USAir would not vote by unit rule on the third ballot and would spread its votes. In any case, USAir would become a player of the first rank.

But, as we have said, a secret agenda existed. Bob Hammarley, like so many other USAir pilots, was a deregulation refugee. As a former Frontier pilot, Hammarley could be reasonably expected to oppose Roger Hall. As we have seen, Frontier’s demise coincided with the end of the 1985 United strike. Dick Ferris had made what was almost certainly a spurious offer to absorb Frontier if he could do so with a B-scale. Having just taken a strike on this very issue, Roger Hall could not possibly accede to Ferris’s machinations, which amounted to a backdoor plot to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. So Frontier went bankrupt, and Bob Hammarley, like hundreds of pilots from other airlines, notably Braniff, found new homes at the bottom of the seniority list of rapidly expanding USAir. But USAir’s sizable former Frontier contingent always believed, perhaps unfairly, that United’s pilots should have saved them.

Hammarley’s position as USAir’s MEC chairman left him in an ideal position to influence his amorphous airline. He honestly believed Babbitt was the better choice, but he agreed that, at first, USAir pilots should park their votes with Joe Kernan. But if Babbitt could just stay alive through two ballots, Hammarley had a surprise up his sleeve. He had persuaded the USAir MEC to go for Babbitt by unit rule, which would certainly clinch his victory, on the third ballot.

But the USAir pilot group would never have been able to spring this surprise if it had not been for little NPA and First Officer Representative Dean Brouillette. With his measly 43 votes, Brouillette was an unlikely king maker, and nobody had paid him much attention during the intensive lobbying for the votes of Group 5 airlines—except for Patrick M. Broderick of Eastern. A 23-year Eastern veteran, Broderick acted as Babbitt’s campaign manager. In fact, Broderick was instrumental in persuading Babbitt to run in the first place.

“I believe I was the first person to approach Randy about running,” Broderick said in a postelection interview. “This was during the strike, and the airline was deteriorating badly. He said he had no constituency, but I thought Randy had the skills to be a fine ALPA president. I also thought he could mobilize ALPA to either get us back to work, or get us on with another airline so we could continue our careers.”

The fact that a “mover and shaker” like Pat Broderick would solicit his vote impressed Brouillette. Broderick had noticed the tiny “tailhook” tie tack Brouillette wore during a social hour at one of the hospitality suites. A former naval aviator himself, Broderick engaged Brouillette in conversation, lobbied hard for Randy Babbitt, and believed Brouillette had committed to his candidate. As a former admiral’s aide who had forsaken a fast-track military career for the airlines, Broderick could be quite persuasive. He had a winning personality and the dark good looks of somebody in show business. Imagine Broderick’s consternation when, toward the end of the first ballot, little NPA went for Roger Hall by unit rule!

At this point, history gives way to personal observation, and perhaps it ought to stop. As Hank Duffy’s guest, invited to observe the election of 1990, I had by the purest chance, met both Broderick and Brouillette socially in a hospitality suite earlier that week. Perhaps my miniature navy pilots’ wings, worn on my lapel, had linked the three of us together. When the first ballot ended, I watched Broderick dash toward Broillette, who sat at the very last delegate table, separated from the visitors’ section by only an aisle.

“I was for Babbitt all along,” Brouillette said in an interview just minutes after the election. “I knew him personally—he had flown out at a moment’s notice and helped us solve a merger crisis on NPA and WestAir. My captain and I got together with the WestAir pilots, with whom we are merging, and took a straw vote. It was split 50–50 at first, but then my captain, who had originally been for Babbitt, went over to Hall. We then agreed to go unit rule on the first ballot. I didn’t feel right about it, because I had been for Babbitt for a long, long time. But that was nothing against Roger Hall. He has been one heck of an individual, good for the Association across the board. I just felt Babbitt would get his hands dirty down with the small carriers. Babbitt had just been a tireless worker. Well, I was arguing with myself when one of Babbitt’s representatives [Broderick] asked me would I be willing to change my vote. I asked, ‘Can I do it?’ and he said, ‘Yes, just go to the microphone and make the announcement.’”

At the time Broderick spoke to Brouillette, the first ballot was being counted and a lengthy delay was in progress. At that point, Hall had a bare majority of 50.1 percent. Randy Babbitt, listening to the results on an open mike in his room, actually began making his way to the convention floor to make his concession speech. But by the ancient parliamentary practice to which ALPA had long adhered, until a vote was officially announced from the rostrum, any member could change his vote. Brouillette’s piddling 43 votes pulled Roger Hall infinitesimally below 50 percent, so a second ballot would be necessary. Babbitt had reached the door of the convention hall before being turned around and sent back to his room.

On the second ballot, Hall lost a few votes while the USAir pilots stayed firmly with Joe Kernan. Then, on the third ballot, Bob Hammarley sprang his surprise, and it was all over—Babbitt would be ALPA’s new President. Maybe.

Roger Hall’s furious supporters challenged Babbitt’s victory, alleging that the voting had had “substantial irregularities.” They carried a formal appeal all the way to a special hearing before arbitrator Lewis M. Gill, alleging that Broderick’s contact with Brouillette, among other things, was illegal and asking that he set aside Babbitt’s victory and declare Hall the winner. Gill rendered his verdict on Jan. 29, 1992. His reconstruction of events coincides exactly with what this historian witnessed personally.

Gill, noting that his investigation was a “novel proceeding more akin to fact-finding than arbitration,” expressed surprise that a union with ALPA’s “squeaky clean” reputation had come to this. While Gill’s investigation also looked into such things as the Babbitt campaign’s finances, and whether there had been a conspiracy to delay the vote count so that Babbitt’s partisans would have time to switch some votes, the key finding had to do with the propriety of Broderick’s contact with Brouillette.

“Under the agreed ALPA rules,” Gill wrote, “the official results are not announced until two separate official tallies are checked against each other; and until that announcement is made, any of the delegates are entitled to change their votes and lobbying among the delegates on the floor is permitted” [emphasis added].

Hall’s partisans noted correctly that Broderick was not a delegate and hence should not have had access to the floor. But Gill noted that with NPA’s delegate table situated adjacent to the aisle dividing it from the visitors’ section, Broderick stood in the aisle and was never technically on the floor. In any case, Gill found that even if Broderick had come onto the floor, it would not have been a “substantial irregularity” because the rule barring nondelegates from the floor had fallen into general disuse and was widely ignored.

As to a conspiracy to delay the vote count, Gill noted that with an “avowed Hall supporter” (Rick Miller of Northwest) chairing the voting process, that seemed unlikely. The clincher from Gill’s perspective was that the United pilot group did not challenge the delay at the time, so it did not constitute a “substantial irregularity” either.

When the 32nd ALPA BOD meeting adjourned, a pessimist could have been forgiven for thinking that ALPA’s future looked dim. The United pilot group had been completely frozen out of all national offices, and they had boycotted the remainder of the meeting—including Duffy’s retirement dinner and the closing banquet. Steady Chuck Pierce of United, widely respected for his long and sober service to ALPA, had lost his executive vice-president (EVP) race to Delta’s ebullient Jack Saux. Previously, after such a tough loss, the delegates had always tended to mend fences by electing an EVP from the airline that had lost the presidency. Northwest’s Skip Eglet, a man whose long and important service to ALPA had made his candidacy for first vice-president strictly “no contest” in 1986, had lost to Roger Hall for precisely this reason. But in 1990, the BOD, tired of the United pilot group’s truculence, was in no mood to balance the scales. The delegates openly speculated that a United walkout seemed likely.

But was it? While the mood was ugly in their hospitality suite, a solid cadre of United pilots indicated that despite their anger they had no intention of deserting ALPA. Of course, there were wild charges and air-clearing ventilations of anger among many United pilots attending the BOD meeting, but after calm returned, most of them seemed willing to hang on. As for rank-and-file United pilots, anecdotal evidence suggests that even if their leaders had tried leaving ALPA, they would in all likelihood have found nobody following. To their credit, there was never a hint of secessionist talk from United’s top leadership. Neither Rick Dubinsky nor Roger Hall, despite their disappointment, ever breathed a word about forming an American-style splinter union. The mere fact that they fought to overturn the election through channels proved their loyalty and showed they had no intention of abandoning ALPA.

Time would have to do its healing work—time and Randy Babbitt’s leadership.

Flash forward to the 1992 BOD meeting in Bal Harbour, Fla. The shoe is now on the other foot. United’s pilots would shortly win a string of victories, in a scab harassment lawsuit and in restoring the rightful seniority of “the 570.” Delta is now under pressure, its pilots threatened by a layoff of their most junior and vulnerable members as part of a management pressure campaign. Surely United’s powerful pilot group should now be gloating.

What’s wrong with this picture? Watch Delta’s Jack Saux and United’s Jamie Lindsay cooperating on a plan to prevent these layoffs. Two years earlier, they had nearly come to blows. See Delta’s MEC Chairman Bob Shelton and Roger Hall (once again United’s MEC Chairman) combining in cooperative actions, with Hall reading a resolution passed unanimously by the United pilots on the convention floor, demanding that their own company hire immediately all furloughed Delta pilots. What caused this turnaround?

The same thing that has turned ALPA around repeatedly during the first 60 years of its history. Somebody, some pilot group, some resolute individual, took it upon himself to mobilize his fellow pilots to do something! Somebody has always “sucked it up,” refused to admit defeat, resolutely held the center when the flanks were giving way—damn the consequences. How many times has ALPA been given up for dead?

Who would have given the proverbial plugged nickel for ALPA’s chances when, in December 1933, the affable, well-liked TWA pilot and former Dave Behncke intimate, Waldon “Swede” Golien lent his name and prestige to the “TWA Pilots Association” and thus betrayed Behncke. This company-sponsored attempt to destroy ALPA through a toothless, captive union was the direct result of Dave Behncke’s greatest gamble, the threatened 1933 nationwide strike to keep ALPA out of the new National Recovery Administration’s “wage guidelines” for the airline industry. When “Swede” Golien turned coat, unflappable Jimmy Roe put his career on the line to get TWA’s pilots back into ALPA’s ranks. Every pilot flying the line today owes Jimmy Roe a profound debt. Had it not been for Roe and dozens of pilots from other airlines like him who supported Behncke’s bluff, the United States would never have had a “Decision 83,” and ALPA in all probability would not exist today. Jimmy Roe and the other Old Guys had just as much to lose as any pilot flying the line today. Yet they held the center, just as in the crisis of 1990, somebody held it, too.1

Crises have dotted ALPA’s history. The pessimists have always been a little too quick to count ALPA out. In 1933 they were wrong, just as they would be wrong again after the disputed election of 1990. Lots of people sucked it up, built bridges of trust, worked for reconciliation and mutual understanding, and patiently went about the business of explaining, once again, that ALPA is us—not them. Despite all the trauma that has beset ALPA since deregulation, these ancient arguments carried the day once again, just as they had in 1933 when the Old Guys pulled down the brims of their hats and hung tough.

Randy Babbitt seemed ideal for the task. He had absorbed the values of the Old Guys in the most direct and effective way imaginable—literally on the knee of his own father. Furthermore, with his own airline dead after 1991, one of ALPA’s oldest problems—the necessity of separating its top leadership from the parochial concerns of their own airlines—had become moot. Randy Babbitt was ALPA’s—he had no airline to go home to or parent pilot group his critics could accuse him of favoring.

Duane Woerth of Northwest, elected first vice-president along with Babbitt in 1990, was a perfect counterpoint. As a refugee from Braniff, Woerth came to his office with a gut level understanding that ALPA is us—not them. Literally thousands of pilots, moving from dashed hopes and failed carriers along the path Woerth had followed, were changing the face of ALPA. Maybe that’s why ALPA surprised its enemies again. So many pilots had come to understand that nothing in life is certain, that no victory ever stays won. These pilots increasingly began to adopt the values and attitudes of the Old Guys, in ways that the intervening generations of pilots since the Old Guys had left the scene had abandoned. Duane Woerth understood.

On a frigid 15-degree Minneapolis day in 1989, Woerth (then a Northwest MEC officer) commuted in from Dallas, the city he would have been flying out of if Braniff were still alive. Away from home and family, disgusted with all the paperwork facing him, angry at the Bush Administration’s support for Frank Lorenzo, Woerth was depressed and fed up. The phone rang. It was Ken Watts, vice-chairman of Council 1, ALPA’s original LEC, the airline that Dave Behncke would have held seniority No. 1 on, had he not been fired for bucking management over safety in 1927.2 Watts informed Woerth that retired Northwest Captain R. Lee Smith had died.

R. Lee Smith. The last surviving member of the original group of Old Guys who had conspired with Dave Behncke in 1929 to found ALPA. Watts suggested to Woerth that flowers be sent and maybe a letter of condolence to his family.

Woerth, by now really depressed, picked up a copy of Flying the Line and read a few pages. He had never met old R. Lee Smith while he was alive. But suddenly, in a moment of accidental epiphany, there was the Old Guy himself staring up from the page at Woerth.

“What’s wrong, Duane?” Woerth imagined the Old Guy asking, his voice dripping with contempt. “Is it getting too tough out there for your generation of pilots? Do you think you’re the first ever to suffer adversity, to feel the effects of government policy working in conjunction with hostile managements to bust your union? Suck it up, mister! You’ve got a legacy to live up to.”

Old R. Lee seemed to be telling Woerth that leveraged buyouts, the threat of globalization, and Frank Lorenzo as the second coming of E.L. Cord were simply more of the same—the latest version of the battle pilots have been fighting ever since they first dared to lift up their heads and stare back at management defiantly—back in the days when pilots still sat in the slipstream to get the proper “feel” of their aircraft. And the Old Guy was telling Duane Woerth something else, too. He was saying that, without unity across company lines, they had no chance at all of preserving their profession.

“Every time I enter our Washington, D.C., office,” Woerth wrote in a moving tribute to R. Lee Smith published in Air Line Pilot, “I can’t help noticing the bronzed plaque that lists ALPA’s founders, pilots from all airlines banding together to protect all pilots. They had learned the hard way that going it alone just got them killed one at a time.”

Will professional airline pilots still be “sucking it up” in the 21st century? What will history have to say when the next generation of airline pilots inherits the cockpits of the current generation?

History is waiting for its answer—it always will be.

NOTES
1 See “The Rise and Fall of the TWA Pilots Association,” in Flying the Line, Ch. 9.
2 See “Dave Behncke—An American Success Story,” Flying the Line, Ch. 10, pp. 97-98.

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