CHAPTER 4
DODGING BULLETS
Crew Complement, Politics, and the Wien Strike
Charles J. “Chuck” Huttinger nursed a long-standing political grudge against
J.J. O’Donnell. Slightly built with a pronounced limp (from a backyard fall that ended his aviation career), Huttinger had flown for a variety of small carriers during his 26 years as an airline pilot. He finally ended up as a BAC-111 captain with TACA, the Central American airline based in El Salvador. In 1967, Huttinger successfully organized his fellow pilots for ALPA, overcoming the fierce opposition of TACA’s management, which had a well-deserved reputation for parsimony. In 1971, Huttinger became something of a legend when he masterminded the “kidnapping” of several TACA airplanes until his pilots got an industry-standard contract!
“When they can’t find their airplanes, they’ve pretty much got to talk to you,” Huttinger says wryly.
Huttinger’s success as TACA’s organizer and long-time MEC chairman made him a natural leader of the “Group V” airlines. Historically, pilots from small airlines have made few ripples in ALPA’s political pond. Huttinger, well aware that he stood no chance of challenging J.J. O’Donnell for the presidency of ALPA himself, was dedicated to finding a candidate who could.
From Huttinger’s vantage point as an MEC chairman of one of ALPA’s smallest pilot groups, he was ideally situated to act as a political catalyst. Had he been a pilot from one of the large airlines (the so-called “elephants”), Huttinger’s motives might have been suspect. But as a leader of the “ants” (the Group V airlines), Huttinger (who was based in New Orleans) bore no taint of personal ambition. In ALPA politics, pilots from small airlines have historically had to content themselves with fringe roles—the exception to this rule being genial Jack Magee of Ozark, who served as ALPA’s treasurer for what seemed forever, from 1975 to 1991, beating back every attempt by pilots of larger airlines to unseat him during that 16-year period.
In 1974, the BOD changed the vice-presidencies from “regional” to the new “executive” status. In a technical sense, the new executive vice-presidency (EVP) was designed to accomplish two things: first, the BOD wanted to curb the power of the regional vice-presidents (RVPs); and second, the BOD wanted to guarantee that pilots like Chuck Huttinger, who flew for small airlines, would have more voice in national affairs. The tendency toward tribalism, which characterized the voting behavior of airline pilots, gravely hampered the pilots of small airlines seeking election to a major ALPA office. Many of these pilots were men of exceptional ability whose voice in ALPA’s national affairs was needed.
But primarily, the BOD adopted the 1974 changes to put an end to the independent power bases some RVPs had built. From their regional bases, these RVPs often challenged the purely administrative prerogatives of BOD-elected national officers.
Before 1974, the RVPs won office independently of the BOD, and many of them viewed their mandate to advise and monitor the president as a power derived directly from the membership of their region and thus theoretically co-equal (collectively) to the president’s. Operating from this perspective, several RVPs (notably Rich Flournoy of TWA during the Ruby era and Bob Rubens of North Central—later of Northwest via its merger with Republic) exercised more power and influence than some BOD-elected officers.
Before 1974, the popular vote of all pilots living within a designated region directly elected each RVP. RVPs “campaigned” primarily by direct mail to the membership, which often meant that money, rather than merit, dictated victory. This system also meant that the individual with a flair for “dramatic rhetoric” (or demagoguery) had an unfair advantage over more-responsible candidates. After 1974, the BOD elected the new EVPs, and hence they were technically a subcommittee of the BOD. This was a far more rational (if somewhat less “democratic”) system, and it eliminated much confusion about the vice-presidency’s mandate, role, and function.
The new office of EVP effectively laid to rest another troubling aspect of the old system. Before 1974, the “ants” seldom had a representative on ALPA’s Executive Committee. Although the MEC chairmen of the “ants” attended Executive Board meetings every six months, many thoughtful observers believed that their exclusion from the Executive Committee, which met at least every three months (and usually more often) was potentially dangerous.
Henceforth under the new EVP system, all ALPA’s airlines would be subdivided into five groups, and each group would be represented on the Executive Committee. Ideally, each group should also have been roughly co-equal in total voting strength, but that presupposed an aviation industry stability, which deregulation would destroy. Initially, the “elephants” segmented in the top groups would far outweigh the “ants” (like Chuck Huttinger’s TACA) in total voting strength. But the latter at least had hope that someday the elephants and the ants would find some balance in ALPA’s politics.
Owing to the discrepancy in pay scales and consequent disparity in the amount of money the elephants contributed to ALPA’s treasury in dues, however, the idea of real equality between large and small pilot groups was hopelessly visionary. The elephants paid money in; the ants took it out. So when crucial matters arose, ALPA’s presidents necessarily paid heed to the elephants and ignored the ants, formal structures like the Executive Committee notwithstanding.1
“I was frankly against the EVP concept,” says Robert A. Holden of Eastern, who was elected Group I EVP at the 1974 BOD, a time when Eastern and United were paired elephants. “I didn’t see the necessity for it. J.J. wanted it for political reasons. I went along with it because I liked the guy. He was a little too political for me, always responding to the power groups with the most votes. But that was his job.”
Indeed, O’Donnell’s mastery of ALPA’s politics through 1978 owed much to his skill at counting votes. What this meant, in practice, was that O’Donnell always kept the elephants happy. Then, if he could, he would tend to the needs of the ants.
Or at least that’s the way Chuck Huttinger saw it.
“John never listened to anybody but the big MEC chairmen,” Huttinger says. “If you were from a small airline and you voted against him, you didn’t get any money for your projects. That’s the way he kept us in his pocket politically.”
John Erikson of Delta (by way of merger with Western), who served until January 1985 as Hank Duffy’s first executive administrator, echoes Huttinger’s complaint.
“O’Donnell quite explicitly used money in a very political way,” Erickson says. “The MECs of the big airlines, like United, could spend money like drunken sailors, and O’Donnell would accept it. But those of us on small airlines were very dependent upon money from ALPA national to run our operation, and O’Donnell used this leverage ruthlessly. It backfired on him at the 1982 BOD, when he warned us that if we voted for Duffy, he would cut us off if he won. We went for Duffy anyway.”
In early 1982, Huttinger wrote to a select group of ALPA activists he knew were hostile to O’Donnell, suggesting that they begin coordinating their strategy for the 1982 BOD meeting. He reminded them of their failure to come up with a suitable challenger to O’Donnell in 1978 and suggested that they meet for discussions in New Orleans to begin advance planning. Huttinger included in his anti-O’Donnell circular a lengthy bill of indictment, detailing what he saw as failures of the O’Donnell years. Huttinger delved deeply into the past, dredging up the failed 1972 skyjacking SOS (“one of the most embarrassing disasters in ALPA history”) and ranged forward into recent events. He described O’Donnell’s handling of the 1980 BOD meeting in Los Angeles (at which the United pilots under MEC Chairman John Ferg had walked out, threatening to secede from ALPA in protest over the crew complement issue), as “chaotic and disgraceful.”2 Huttinger described the O’Donnell years in language that was far from temperate, repeated charges of doubtful substance, and detailed the abortive move to recall O’Donnell in 1981.3 Huttinger finished by accusing O’Donnell of violating the most sacred of ALPA’s covenants.
“Over the past twelve years,” Huttinger wrote, “the most basic concept of ALPA—strength through unity—has been ignored.”
Strong words from an “ant.” But they served the purposes of some “elephants” who wanted very much to get rid of O’Donnell.
Huttinger’s New Orleans meeting drew a gallery of ALPA political activists. Skip Eglet of Northwest, who had unsuccessfully tried to recruit Gerry Pryde of United to run against O’Donnell in 1978, although invited, did not attend. But Hank Duffy, the MEC chairman of Delta was there, quietly observing. So was Nick Gentile, the former Delta MEC chairman whom many people regarded as the driving force behind Duffy’s recently announced presidential candidacy.
“We called ourselves the dragon slayers,” Huttinger laughs. “Nobody could believe that with my little 35 votes I could get all those guys to come down to New Orleans, John Gratz of TWA, Tom Beedem of Northwest, Augie Gorse of Eastern, Hank. I chaired the meeting because it came down on my nickel, I paid for the rooms. My pitch was that in 1974 at Kansas City we had 65 percent of the vote against J.J. and we lost. I said we’re going to do it again if we’re not careful.”
Huttinger came away from the New Orleans meeting discouraged. He had hoped that they would unite behind a presidential candidate, but neither Hank Duffy nor John Gratz, the two announced candidates, would defer to the other. Although various ideas and strategies for cooperation at the BOD meeting surfaced, the only concrete development was that Tom Beedem agreed to forego his presidential ambitions in the interest of narrowing the field. Beedem, the widely respected MEC chairman of Northwest, thus secured the support of the New Orleans group for his candidacy for first vice-president (which he would lose, coincidentally, to Tom Ashwood of TWA). Huttinger won no promises from anybody else beyond an agreement that they would sponsor debates for all announced presidential candidates.
“It was a basis, we all talked,” Huttinger says. “But I could not put the rest of it together. My guesstimate was that we could not defeat J.J.”
“Huttinger was just a front,” said O’Donnell later. He had found out about the meeting in New Orleans after it was held. The cast of characters, many of whom were previous candidates like John Gratz of TWA, caused him little worry.
“I liked John Gratz, but he would screw up a one-car funeral,” O’Donnell laughed in 1991. “He looked, acted, and talked like a gorilla; but he was a decent guy. He didn’t want people to know it, and he was offended if you found out.”
J.J. O’Donnell’s political enemies were gathering for the kill in 1982, but they were by no means assured of toppling him. Since the last BOD meeting in 1980, things had gotten very dicey for O’Donnell politically. The aborted 1981 SOS over crew complement, the PATCO strike, the onslaught of deregulation, the terrible economic downturn in late 1981, Braniff’s bankruptcy, and widespread pilot furloughs all combined to erode O’Donnell’s political base. But he was a resilient and resourceful practitioner of the political arts, and he had turned defeat into victory before. His handling of the divisive crew complement issue, which had a long and troubled history, provides an object lesson in the perils of taking J.J. O’Donnell lightly.
The crew complement issue, in its first incarnation, dealt with the nature of the third crewmember’s qualifications and who should do the job—a pilot or a mechanic.4 This battle roiled ALPA’s waters for years, finally culminating in a victory that was almost as bad as defeat. It led to terrible difficulties with the rest of organized labor and exacerbated the preexisting cancer that would later take the American Airlines pilot group out of ALPA in 1963.
In the mid-1950s, ALPA came within an eyelash of getting expelled from the American Federation of Labor (AFL), over the qualifications aspect of the first crew complement dispute. A motion by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (this was before they were kicked out of the AFL-CIO for corruption), calling for ALPA’s expulsion for “raiding” the jobs of fellow workers, reached the floor for action during the 1955 convention. The Teamsters acted on behalf of the professional nonpilot flight engineers represented by the Flight Engineers International Association (FEIA).
“Matters looked very bad in terms of probable expulsion, or at least suspension, of ALPA,” recalled ALPA General Counsel Henry Weiss during a 1990 interview. “We were called upon to make a formal floor response the next day. Clancy Sayen and the entire Executive Committee were there, and we caucused by walking around the streets of New York City at midnight. They decided to show their scorn for the whole thing by not responding. I was very much opposed to that, but I didn’t have very much luck persuading them until I got hold of Dave Cole, who was a man of great stature in the AFL who also had great standing with the pilots. I called him in the middle of the night, and Dave said, ‘I’ll be there in the morning.’”
Cole, the arbitrator who had formed warm relationships with many pilots dating
back to the Behncke era, arrived in
“We were given to understand that the committee would take no action,” Weiss recalls of ALPA’s persistent troubles. “Our relationship with the AFL was not an active one for many years. Then, with the incumbency of J.J. O’Donnell, it took a more viable tone, as he actively participated in AFL-CIO affairs. J.J. had an instinctive sense of the meaning of trade unions, and he was quite concerned that ALPA not fall into more trouble over Article Twenty.”
Article XX of the ALPA Constitution and By-Laws, as revised through several BOD meetings, was the intractable burr under the saddle of the crew complement issue. Once ALPA had won the war with the FEIA over the qualifications of the third crewmember, the issue of whether a cockpit should have a third crewmember still remained.
Article XX explicitly mandated the three-pilot cockpit for certain categories of large aircraft. This policy dated from the days when the Douglas DC-6 originally emerged from the factory as a two-pilot aircraft.
ALPA won the first round of this struggle in the 1950s because it had allies. Lockheed, maker of the famed “Constellations,” favored the three-crewmember configuration because its aircraft could not be flown without a third crewmember. The “Connie” had an elaborate flight engineer’s panel, and the crewmember who sat there had real duties. If Douglas was allowed to take advantage of improved technology and build a two-pilot aircraft (such as the DC-6) equal to the Constellation in capacity, it would obtain a decisive competitive advantage in the marketplace. So Lockheed, for purely economic reasons, sided with ALPA. This aspect of the dispute eerily foreshadowed the B-737/DC-9 crew complement problem in the 1970s.
The government, for reasons specific to the piston era, had mandated a three-pilot crew in “overwater” operations and when the gross weight of an aircraft exceeded 80,000 pounds. Largely owing to ALPA’s political connections and skill at equating the three-pilot crew with safety, the government would continue this policy into the turbojet era. So the government also wound up as an ally of Article XX policy during the first round, and ALPA won jobs for a whole generation of pilots in the 1960s because of it.
The three-crewmember era lasted until the emergence of the first significant jet airliners designed for two pilots, the B-737 and the DC-9, both of which exceeded the old 80,000-pound gross takeoff weight limit. By then, the government had dropped the requirement for a third crewmember at that weight anyway, adding a curious twist to the weight-limit/third-crewmember history. The first DC-9, the “dash 10” model, was deliberately kept under the 80,000-pound limit specifically to avoid exceeding the limit. A contemporary Douglas Company newsletter, designed to circulate only among employees, listed the “ramp weight” of the aircraft at 78,500 pounds. By the time Delta received its first production model DC-9-10, however, the “ramp weight” had soared well over 80,000 pounds. The truth of Douglas’s motivation will probably never be known for sure, but the initial design weight of the prototype DC-9-10 appears to have been a sham designed to circumvent both government and ALPA policy. In any case, all this deception, if that’s what it was, proved unnecessary, because the government discarded the 80,000-pound policy shortly before the prototype DC-9 received certification. Thus the modern crew complement problem began with a confusing struggle over the DC-9, sharpened into a bitter squabble over the B-737, and left ALPA with serious internal divisions. By the time it was over, ALPA would have no allies in either government or industry.
The first DC-9, the “Dash 10” series, entered service with Delta in February 1965. Because the DC-9 was a turbojet, it fell under ALPA’s three-pilot policy, and its crewing would set the precedent for the next generation of similar aircraft. Braniff had already ordered a comparable aircraft, the BAC 1-11, and would begin operating it in April 1965, shortly after Delta’s DC-9-10 went on the line. American Airlines, whose pilots had recently left ALPA, had also ordered the BAC 1-11. Whether ALPA made any sub rosa attempt to coordinate its crew complement bargaining with the newly formed Allied Pilots Association, the ALPA clone, is unclear. In any case, the breakup was so rancorous that even if coordination had been attempted, it probably would have failed. So the initial contract to fly the DC-9-10 was a pivotal event.
In 1964, after Delta had already ordered the DC-9-10, the Delta MEC appointed a special committee to evaluate the aircraft, with special emphasis on its crewing, and sent it to the West Coast. This committee, composed of Roy Ferguson, Joe Meek, and Bud Watson (who would later die in a DC-8 crash in New Orleans), enjoyed great respect among the Delta pilots. Whatever they decided on crew complement for the DC-9 would have enormous implications for ALPA’s crew complement policy. Should they find in favor of a two-pilot operation, the camel would have its nose under the tent.
We must remember that this pivotal event occurred at a time of enormous stress for ALPA, barely a year after the American pilots’ defection and while Charley Ruby, who never wanted the job, was still feeling his way as ALPA’s president. One would think that somebody at ALPA national would have lobbied the Delta Evaluation Committee in favor of the three-pilot cockpit—nobody did! Nor is there evidence that Charley Ruby contacted Delta’s MEC chairman at the time, Curtis L. Kennedy, and the question is unanswerable now, since both men are dead.
“Charley Ruby exerted no pressure on us at all on the DC-9-10,” says C.A. “Snake” Smith, who served on the Delta pilots’ Negotiating Committee at the time and would later become MEC chairman.
The Delta pilots’ Evaluation Committee, which had a heavy background in aviation safety matters, recommended the two-pilot cockpit for the DC-9-10, and the MEC went along. They signed a basic agreement (not a “side letter,” so no one can accuse the Delta pilots of not being “up front” on this issue), with the company on April 16, 1964. The language was specific: “It is hereby agreed that the pilots of Delta…will fly the DC-9 with a two-man crew.”
Charley Ruby approved Delta’s two-pilot operation without argument. Perhaps he was repaying a political debt to the Delta pilots, whose support had been crucial in getting him elected in 1962. Chuck Woods, the United MEC chairman, was furious at Ruby for signing the Delta two-pilot agreement.
“We later had a knock-down, drag-out fight with Woods over the issue,” Smith remembers. “But we thought we were fat as far as ALPA policy went, and our experience with the aircraft was that it was a totally safe operation.”
United’s MEC would historically stress the safety aspects of the crew complement issue, but the Delta pilots were prepared for that.
“Joe Meek, who chaired the DC-9 Evaluation Committee, personally polled every pilot flying the DC-9 after the first year of line operations,” Smith remembers. “Two out of 75 pilots said they thought it should be three pilots. So when we went up to Chicago for this meeting with Charley and Chuck Woods, we just hauled out these letters. Charley looked at them and said ‘You can’t argue with the pilots actually flying the line.’ That was it.”
In 1966,
When Piedmont Airlines’ pilot group signed a “side letter” in its 1967 contract to fly the B-737 with a two-pilot crew, the crisis had arrived. Charley Ruby at first refused to approve the Piedmont contract. United had flown the B-737 as a three-pilot airplane since it had come on their property. Beset with other troubles, Ruby could not buck the powerful United pilot group. But how could he force the Piedmont pilots to fly with a third crewmember? ALPA’s Article XX policy, now without any external allies and facing internal rejection by several pilot groups, clearly needed re-thinking.
“The practical reality was that the pilots were going to fly that airplane with two crewmembers, or management was going to be in a position to force them to fly it,” says Hank Duffy, who as cochair of ALPA’s National Crew Complement Committee in 1980 (along with Dick Cosgrave of United) made a careful study of the issue’s history.
Management could entice pilots to fly these new aircraft with blandishments that were almost irresistible, and they weren’t always just money. At Wien, for example, management tried unsuccessfully to lure its pilots into giving up the third crewmember on the B-737 by offering to buy a local service carrier and make the B-737 second officers into captains on Twin Otters. This offer was attractive because, while sitting on the jumpseat of one of these new aircraft was a job, it was a lousy one. The third crewmember had nothing to do, and ALPA would find itself waging a long struggle, contractually, to get management to give these pilots “meaningful duties.” But all this aside, if ALPA could not tie the third crewmember concept to something concrete (and the safety aspect would eventually emerge as the most viable), then the whole thing would smack of “featherbedding.”
The 1968 BOD attempted a fix. The United pilots, under pressure from their management to operate with two pilots to meet the challenge of the airline’s competitors, wanted a strong Article XX that would force all B-737 operators to use three pilots. Bill Davis, United MEC chairman, knew that junior pilots who were then flying the B-727 would undergo massive furloughs once the B-737 replaced it on many routes. But he wanted somebody else to propose the new Article XX so that it would not appear to be just a United power play. Capt. Gerald Goss of Frontier agreed to draft the new crew complement policy. Ironically, the new Article XX would, a decade later, get Goss’s Frontier pilots placed into ALPA trusteeship when they broke ranks and agreed to fly the B-737 with two pilots.
“Bill Davis and the United pilots really didn’t have the courage to go it alone on the B-737,” Goss recalls. “Management was stonewalling them, and he wanted ALPA’s help. But he couldn’t get the vote from ALPA the way he was drafting the resolution, so I rewrote it. The way I worded the new Article Twenty was that ‘all new aircraft must be considered for three pilots.’ The policy wasn’t set in stone.”
The Ruby era ended with gaping holes in ALPA’s crew complement policy. Officially, no ALPA pilot group was supposed to be flying with fewer than three pilots on any “new” aircraft, like the B-737. But what about the new DC-9-50? Was it “new,” or just “stretched?”
When J.J. O’Donnell became ALPA’s fourth president in January 1971, he tried to
defuse the issue through diplomacy. He personally went to the
Two major aircraft corporations were now involved, and if ALPA could not force them into crewing two essentially similar aircraft with three pilots, its crew complement policy would clearly damage the commercial prospects of one of them. Having an external enemy like Boeing was bad enough, but now serious internal divisions among pilot groups over the policy arose.
With management offering lucrative new contracts to the pilots of several airlines if they would agree to fly the B-737 or the DC-9-50 with two crewmembers, something had to give. To appreciate the ramifications of this dispute, we must remember that a pilot already flying the “Nine” could not tell from the cockpit whether it was a “dash 30” or a “dash 50!”
The BOD meeting held at Kansas City in 1974 lasted an interminable 10 days. The closely contested presidential election that O’Donnell won accounted for part of its length, but the bitter internal struggle over crew complement accounted for the rest. For two full days, the delegates fought over it. Finally, they approved what appeared, at first glance, to be a policy set in stone. But was it?
The reaffirmed and reworded Article XX required three crewmembers for all “new turbine-powered or jet aircraft certificated after January 1, 1975” (other than short-haul aircraft certificated for commuter and air taxi operations). It then listed the aircraft likely to fit the three-crewmember category, including such speculative ventures as the “swing panel” B-727. The policy included the B-737; but on the DC-9-50, the policy waffled. Aware that Delta’s pilots were unalterably opposed to the third crewmember on their DC-9-50s, the BOD permitted that model to fall under an imprecise definition. Essentially, the language required that O’Donnell fight hard for its inclusion in the same category as all other “new” aircraft but, in effect, recognized that he would fail.
“There was no doubt that we were drawing the line at the tail of the DC-9-50,” Hank Duffy recalls of the 1974 BOD. “To require otherwise would have forced several pilot groups out of ALPA.”
On all other aircraft, including the B-737, ALPA would nail the flag to the mast and go down with guns firing. Proof of this intention lay in the BOD’s approval of drastic measures should any airline try to fly the B-737 as a two-pilot aircraft. ALPA would pay full strike benefits to any pilot group that walked out over crewing the B-737. The Association would consider the possibility of a nationwide SOS (ALPA’s “nuke”) should any airline force its pilots to fly the B-737 with two pilots. And ALPA explicitly threatened to impose a trusteeship on any pilot group that broke the policy, either through a direct contract or a “side letter” of agreement.
As we know, ALPA would eventually lose this war, when the Presidential Emergency “Fact Finding” Board appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1981 ruled in favor of two-pilot crews for any aircraft designed that way. But did ALPA have a realistic chance of winning this struggle, and did J.J. O’Donnell do everything he could to salvage the third crewmember?
An answer, of sorts, to these questions might be found in the experience of the pilots of Texas International (TXI). We will meet them later in their capacity as the first pilot group to face Frank Lorenzo, but for now, let us consider their response to the crew complement issue. How did it play out at the “grass roots”?
“When Frank Lorenzo arrived on the property in 1973,” recalls former TXI MEC chairman Dennis Higgins, “he wanted a commitment from the pilots that we would fly any new-generation airplane with two pilots, not three. We already had the DC-9, he was looking at the DC-9-50, but they weren’t even cutting tin on that airplane yet. We had never flown anything but two-man airplanes, we knew that our pilots absolutely would not fight him on that issue, and even our MEC was divided. As leaders, we wanted to uphold ALPA policy, but we also wanted to do what was good for TXI.”
While they sought to resolve this dilemma, TXI’s pilot leaders, consisting of four local council officers plus the MEC chairman, stalled Lorenzo for several months. But when the first DC-9-50 rolled off the assembly line, the issue came to a head. Seeking to break the deadlock, Lorenzo arranged for the entire TXI MEC to travel to California for a look at the new jetliner.
“We had to keep it from becoming a public issue with our pilots as long as we possibly could,” Higgins remembers. “But then the company, to put pressure on the MEC, invited us—Floyd Carpenter, Buddy Benedict, Gordon Darnell, and me—out to look at the first -50 being fabricated. Buddy was saying, ‘What a gorgeous airplane, I sure would like to fly it, I bet I could make a lot of money on that airplane.’”
With his MEC eroding, Higgins and Carpenter, who had been an ALPA stalwart on TXI since the early 1950s, tried to hold the line.
“I remember Floyd arguing, ‘The very last thing we need to do in facing Lorenzo is to piss off ALPA,’” Higgins says. “But the other guys on the MEC were saying, ‘Well, ALPA’s constitution doesn’t really apply’—stuff like that.”
Higgins called O’Donnell from California, asking for help. O’Donnell invited Higgins to fly with the entire MEC directly to Washington, D.C., instead of going back to Texas.
“We had been out there for two days, but we changed planes, got on TWA, and flew nonstop to Washington,” Higgins says. “O’Donnell had a car and driver pick us up and take us to Congressional Country Club, where we met him for dinner. He did three hours, nonstop, telling us we were ‘on point,’ what the crew complement issue was about. Buddy Benedict was just dazzled by O’Donnell. He went back to Texas and says, ‘I’ll never fly that goddamn plane unless it has three seats on it!’”
So it is foolish to think that J.J. O’Donnell didn’t give ALPA’s crew complement policy his full support and best effort. Had he been president in 1964 at the time the Delta pilots were evaluating the DC-9, he would have insisted on upholding ALPA policy. O’Donnell, as we have seen, was adamant about that. But evidence shows that he did not think the issue was winnable. Two of his closest associates in ALPA, Executive Administrator Jack Bavis and Secretary Tom Ashwood, corroborate this.
“The funny part is that O’Donnell didn’t really believe the DC-9 should have a third crewman on it,” Jack Bavis asserts. “But since it was in the Constitution and By-Laws, he would move hell and high water to make sure that it either didn’t get certificated or that each pilot group would live up to the policy. As long as the big airlines were holding the lines on crew complement, management couldn’t afford to take them on in a strike. But when it got to the smaller groups whose pilots could be replaced in a strike, and if the rest of ALPA refused to call a strike in support of them, there was just no way to sustain it. The third crewman was just a thorn in our side, eroding us through pilot groups electing not to join ALPA and through internal dissension.”
Tom Ashwood faults O’Donnell for not showing more resolve, and he views the loss of the third crewmember as “the biggest mistake we made.” Ashwood believed the crew complement issue was winnable on its merits.
“Crew complement was an issue I wasn’t really concerned with until I began to realize its industrial implications,” says Ashwood, a dapper, articulate man. “As a result, I became an ardent three-pilot–crew supporter. I recognized what it was doing to ALPA, because people had strong beliefs both ways. Delta was making threats about pulling out, United was muscling everybody. United was the 300-pound gorilla, but right behind them was Delta at about 230, and of course O’Donnell’s between a rock and a hard place. I argued vigorously with O’Donnell that we could win it, that Delta would not leave ALPA and would toe the line. I never went public with our disagreement out of a sense of loyalty toward him. He took a way out that I didn’t approve. Frankly, it was a set-up with his friend Drew Lewis [Reagan’s Secretary of Transportation]. I mean, the results of that Emergency Board on crew complement were known beforehand. But I recognized the dilemma O’Donnell faced. Opportunists were using crew complement against him for political purposes.”
In fact, O’Donnell remains convinced that the entire crew complement issue was a political ploy from the beginning. We must remember that in 1974, when the BOD’s actions sharpened the dispute and severely limited O’Donnell’s flexibility, his arch-rival Bill Arsenault of United orchestrated the dispute. Clearly, Arsenault had to worry about massive furloughs on United if the B-737 reverted to a two-pilot aircraft. O’Donnell thinks Arsenault not only had a secret crew complement agenda, but that he also outsmarted himself.
“Arsenault may deny it, but I have it on good authority that he said to his MEC, ‘We’re going to milk this crew complement thing for everything it’s worth,’” O’Donnell declared in 1991. “He was going to sell the third man off the B-737. But it got away from him! He convinced the United pilots that the third man was necessary for safety, and the safety people weren’t about to give him up.”
John LeRoy of United in the late 1970s chaired a specially appointed national committee on crew complement for O’Donnell. The focus of LeRoy’s committee was safety. By studying the whole range of FAA incident and accident reports, his committee found that the three-crewmember cockpit was safer than the two.
“This report incensed the Delta pilots,” LeRoy recalls. “Because the DC-9-50 was coming on the line, we argued that it was a new airplane. Douglas executives were so worried about it that they came to the 1974 BOD meeting and assured us that they had absolutely no intention of trying to stretch the DC-9 beyond the -50. We put on a seminar for the pilots of airlines that had antipathy for the safety argument, and we convinced those guys.”
Which leaves us with the question of O’Donnell’s commitment to the third crewmember. Answers to this question can be found in the history of the Wien strike, the first practical test of ALPA’s post-1974 crew complement policy.
The Wien Air Alaska strike of 1977 lasted 22 months. J.J. O’Donnell would fight the good fight over crew complement at Wien, whatever his private doubts. As has so often happened in ALPA’s history, developments on small airlines would have large consequences. It happened on little Long & Harmon Airlines in 1934, which Dave Behncke used as a test case for enforcing the pilot pay scales and working conditions dictated by “Decision 83” of the National Labor Board.5 It would now happen on Wien, where a long strike on a small airline with fewer than 200 pilots would not only be the first step in laying the crew complement issue to rest, it would also provide a powerful example of O’Donnell’s ability to handle a political dilemma.
The pilots of Wien Air Alaska prided themselves on being the best foul-weather fliers in the world. Many of them had come up as bush pilots under the nearly legendary Noel Wien, the airline’s founder. Until Wien lost control of his airline in the 1960s, it was, by all accounts, a good place to work—a real pilots’ airline. ALPA made Noel Wien an honorary member in 1974, shortly before his death. Two of his sons and a grandson flew the line for Wien and were ALPA members. They would walk out with their fellow pilots when the strike occurred on May 8, 1977.
The strike followed a brief period of ownership by a conglomerate called Household Finance and a leveraged buyout engineered by an entrepreneur named Jim Flood. Flood then became Wien’s CEO and confronted the enormous problem all such financial manipulators must solve—how to pay off the debt incurred by acquiring the company. Flood proceeded to give ALPA its first taste of what deregulation would be like. The Wien strike, which lasted for 653 days before ending on March 1, 1979, was thus only partially about ALPA’s crew complement policy. Certainly Wien’s management wanted to get rid of the third crewmember on the B-737, but the device employed to do it was almost more of an issue than the substance of the crew complement issue itself.
“It was like a throwback to the 1930s,” says F.C. “Chip” Mull of US Airways, who flew helicopters in Vietnam before hiring on with Wien in 1974. “We had a constant problem with out-of-seniority flying, which the company would not negotiate with us. They were just union-busters.”
The aspect of Wien’s operation that directly provoked the strike was the so-called “hire/fire” system. A pilot assigned to the second officer position on B-737s simply could not survive his probationary year. Wien routinely fired and then rehired each pilot on the anniversary of his hiring!
“The only way you could get off probation was to get on the Sky Van or the F-27,” says Mull. “Until you could, you were forever at the bottom of the seniority list, because they’d issue you a new number each time they fired and rehired you. Some people stayed five years and never got off probation.”
Adding to the problem of rotating pilots at the bottom of the seniority list (which meant that only luck got you off the B-737 jumpseat), Flood used a technique that would later be identified with corporate raiders like Carl Icahn and Frank Lorenzo—he began selling off assets to service the airline’s debt. Confronted with an intractable labor situation and strong fears that management was jeopardizing their jobs by selling off vital infrastructure (an early form of what Eastern pilots would later call “upstreaming”), the Wien pilots, under the leadership of MEC chairman Ron Wood, walked out.
Flood promptly advertised for permanent replacements. Eventually, he managed a feat familiar to the Old Guys who lived through the National Airlines strike of 1948. Using a dozen Wien pilots who crossed the picket line (the “in-house scabs”) and another 69 hired off the street (the “out-house scabs”), Flood completely “scabbed out” the Wien pilots and maintained a reduced schedule.
But this did not mean that the Wien strikers failed. They managed a good strike. Using the financial support of ALPA, the 132 Wien strikers maintained picket lines, traveled to New Zealand and Ireland to shut down (by appealing to sympathetic socialist and labor government officials) training operations that Wien was using, and won support from organized labor. But as the strike dragged on and no settlement appeared in sight, once again, like the Southern Airways strike of 1960, the Wien pilots obviously could not win without some form of overt political intervention.6
“That was the most difficult strike I dealt with,” said O’Donnell in 1991. “I won’t say the Wien pilots were sacrificial lambs to our crew complement policy, because we got them all back to work. But Jim Flood had hired a couple of ex-scabs in management who were just union-breakers who wanted to destroy ALPA. Ron Wood provided super leadership and kept his pilots together. He was dedicated to ALPA, and he believed in the third crewmember; and let me tell you, if I ever get into a war, I’d want those Wien pilots with me. They hung tough.”
The Wien pilots, whose strike benefits were hardly lavish (B-737 second officers, for example, received a flat $1,000 per month, about a third of their prestrike pay), uniformly praise O’Donnell’s support, emotional and otherwise. He made four separate trips to Anchorage, and Jack Bavis made more. But as the strike dragged on, the Wien strikers came to know all the highs and lows that only people who have been through such an ordeal can appreciate. J.J. O’Donnell was the focal point of all their hopes.
“There was a real question as to whether the Wien pilots would ever get back on the job,” says ALPA General Counsel Henry Weiss. “My sense was that the issue of crew complement was no longer a live one for ALPA.”
The Wien strike would ultimately be settled by a Presidential Emergency Board (PEB) appointed by Jimmy Carter. As a condition for their support of the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, Democrats in Congress required the PEB. While the PEB ruled against Flood’s “permanent replacement” scabs and assigned them to the bottom of the seniority list (which effectively ended their careers at Wien), it also “found” that the Wien pilots should fly the B-737 with only two pilots. While specifically disavowing that its finding was in any way a statement on either side of the safety argument, the PEB nevertheless dealt ALPA’s crew complement policy a serious blow.
“O’Donnell’s words said he was committed to the three-crewmember concept,” John LeRoy believes. “But he was beginning to see political weaknesses in his own position; and the real arguments aside, I believe he came to the conclusion that this was going to be so divisive that ALPA couldn’t survive it.”
Nor would the Wien story have a happy ending. Flood’s operation gave the illusion of health almost until the end, and the pilot group even expanded slightly. But in November 1984, Wien “temporarily suspended” service and went bankrupt shortly thereafter. The long, proud history of Wien Air Alaska, which dated back to the era of wooden wings, was over.
ALPA would remain publicly committed to the third crewmember, but the long Wien strike eroded support inside ALPA. The Frontier pilots, their carrier stressed by the adverse effect of deregulation and wary of the fate that the Wien pilots had suffered, had agreed, before the Wien strike, to give up the third crewmember on their B-737s. Their open defiance of Article XX was something O’Donnell would could not tolerate. On Feb. 19, 1976, O’Donnell took an unprecedented action—he placed the Frontier MEC in “trusteeship.” The practical effect of ALPA’s imposition of trusteeship on the Frontier pilots was nil—they flew as a two-pilot operation right through the Wien strike and went on as if nothing had happened. At the conclusion of the Wien strike, O’Donnell quietly withdrew the trusteeship, and he would never move to impose it again on any other pilot group because of an Article XX violation.
With a whole new generation of two-pilot aircraft, such as the Airbus A3l0 and the Boeing 757/767, arriving on the scene, ALPA was outgunned. By 1980, ALPA’s crew complement policy had virtually no support aside from the International Federation of Air Line Pilots Associations, which promised to boycott all two-pilot airliners. Nobody took IFALPA’s threat seriously.
The safety argument appeared to wane, as the public grew tired of hearing about it. Even the death by heart attack of Capt. Lloyd Wilcox at the controls of his Braniff B-747 enroute from Honolulu to Dallas in March 1979, which seemed tailor-made to prove ALPA’s point, evoked only yawns. As luck would have it, First Officer Jim Cunningham had previously captained B-727s, and an FAA check airman who was fully qualified to fly the B-747 was aboard riding as a passenger. One can only imagine the new life ALPA’s safety argument would have acquired had this incident played out like the American Flyers crash. In April 1966, after the captain of a Lockheed Electra died of a heart attack at the controls during a military charter flight, the first officer could not handle the emergency. All 72 people aboard died near Ardmore, Okla. Braniff’s Jim Cunningham saved the day in 1979, but his feat of airmanship stirred no widespread demand from the public in favor of the third crewmember as a safety factor.
J.J. O’Donnell, whose handling of ALPA’s politics had reached a plateau in 1978, found himself increasingly on the defensive. His supple handling of the Wien strike indicated he was far from finished politically, but he was damaged by it nevertheless. The Wien strikers won nothing except self-respect and their jobs back—as a two-pilot operation.
Perhaps the Braniff pilot’s death was an omen.