CHAPTER 8
HANK DUFFY’S DESTINY
The Making of an ALPA President

Henry A. “Hank” Duffy, a 20-year Delta Air Lines pilot, became the fifth president of ALPA at a time when a man with the gift of prophecy might have passed it up. Trouble of unimagined intensity, unlike anything ALPA had ever experienced, was lurking just over the horizon. By January 1983, when Duffy took office, the full impact of this trouble, the stepchild of deregulation, was about to descend on the profession with sledgehammer force.

The 1982 bankruptcy of Braniff, the first failure of a “major” carrier since the passage of the landmark Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938, was the first blow. But perceptive rank-and-file ALPA members were realizing that Braniff’s demise would not be the last. The cold reality of free market economics, which had spurred ALPA’s creation in 1931, was about to play a return engagement. However belatedly, ordinary rank-and-file ALPA members were beginning to realize that their leaders were not just crying “wolf.” As we have seen, Hank Duffy’s election stemmed, in large part, from the feeling that he would deal more effectively with the transition to an unregulated system than had J.J. O’Donnell.

The task confronting Duffy was daunting, but with the optimism and self-confidence that were the natural by-products of his long and productive career as an ALPA leader at Delta, he eagerly accepted the mantle of Behncke, Sayen, Ruby, and the vanquished J.J. O’Donnell. The fissures that Duffy’s quest for the presidency, the first successful challenge to an incumbent in ALPA’s history, had opened would have to be healed, and harmony would have to be restored in relationships with O’Donnell’s wounded supporters. But Duffy, displaying the aplomb that was so typical of Delta pilots, was confident of his ability to repair the breach.

Being with Delta contributed to Duffy’s trademark optimism. Owing to the airline’s traditional labor harmony, Delta pilots who were active in ALPA affairs were accustomed to success. Being a Delta pilot and being confident were almost two sides of the same coin.

“ALPA’s leaders expected to bring home good things to the membership,” Duffy remembers of the general tone of labor/management relations during the years since Delta hired him in 1962. “Delta’s management wasn’t hard to bargain with, but for people to think they just slide the money across the table is a misunderstanding. But management always dealt with an integrity level you never questioned.”

Whether the kind of consensus-building, cooperative approach that characterized the Delta pilots’ experience with management could be extended to the industry at large was an open question. For the long term, “Delta-izing” ALPA’s national structure would obviously be Hank Duffy’s goal. But for the short term, Duffy’s job was to become familiar with ALPA’s Washington, D.C., operation, while the rest of ALPA got to know him.

Who was Hank Duffy, anyway?

Born in Norfolk, Va., on Sept. 27, 1934, the youngest son of garage owner who specialized in automotive body repairs, Duffy grew up in a world of machinery, fascinated more with cars than airplanes. An older brother had tried to become a military pilot during World War II but had washed out of flight training. Perhaps his brother’s failure discouraged young Hank from pursuing aviation with the intensity that so often characterizes little boys who grow up to be airline pilots. In any case, he was much more interested in a purely military career than one in aviation.

“I grew up on the seaplane lane in Norfolk,” Duffy says, “and I was a great airplane watcher. But there wasn’t any fascination. I was fascinated with cars and mechanical things because of the garage, but not flying.”

Duffy did not fly until after beginning what he thought would be a career in the U.S. Army. An accomplished horn player who attended the University of Miami (Florida) on a music scholarship, Duffy majored in business and earned an Army commission through the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) program. Upon graduating in 1956, he wound up in an artillery unit on active duty and entered upon his aviation career almost by accident.

In the aftermath of World War II, military aviation became the object of a fierce intraservice tug-of-war. Initially, the newly independent Air Force was supposed to have control of all flying activities. For a time, there was even discussion of abolishing the Navy’s air arm—the admirals would still run the carriers, but an Air Force general would be on the bridge, commanding flight operations. The celebrated “Revolt of the Admirals” saved Naval and Marine aviation, but the Army found itself with virtually no aviation after 1948.

The Korean War proved this concept unworkable. The Air Force preferred to concentrate on serious flying—Strategic Air Command (SAC), North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), glamorous high-frontier stuff—not the kind of mud-on-the-wings flying that the Army needed for close air support. Tactical aviation directly connected with field operations (a stepchild even before the creation of an independent Air Force—winged artillery, if you will) was never a priority, even during the old Air Corps days. As for logistical and support aviation, the new independent Air Force made no secret of its disdain for this kind of flying, although the parochial need to protect its “turf” meant that it would grudgingly serve the Army’s needs.

Where helicopters were concerned, the Air Force was so doubtful of this emerging technology that it voluntarily surrendered it to the Army. After a few years of half-hearted haggling over the helicopter question, the two services agreed that fixed-wing flying would generally remain the Air Force’s prerogative, while the Army would be free without hindrance to develop rotary-winged aviation. Owing to the needs of the service and the Air Force’s indifference, however, over time the Army regained a fixed-wing capability, which was mostly single-engine.

What these shifting military priorities meant for young Second Lieutenant Duffy was personal opportunity. Eager to succeed as a career Army officer, Duffy volunteered for flight training in the newly reconstituted Army aviation branch, which appeared (as the new “air mobile” concept took shape) to be in line for a tremendous spurt of growth. The artillery units to which Duffy was assigned had a few L-19 spotter aircraft, in which he hitched backseat rides, but he never touched the controls of an airplane until he actually got to primary flight training.

“They made you do a year of ground duty before they let you go to flight school, just like the Marines,” Duffy remembers. So he spent a year as a “grunt” and then entered Army flight training at Camp Gary, San Marcos, Texas, in 1957.

Duffy won his Army aviator’s wings in 1958 and shortly thereafter became qualified in both helicopters and conventional aircraft. Having married his college sweetheart, Cordelia Ann Brockway, Duffy was already a settled family man well positioned to begin climbing the Army’s career ladder. The potential of Army aviation promised benefits to young officers who caught the first flush of growth, Duffy had all the right educational qualifications, and his prospects were bright. He won routine promotion to first lieutenant and captain and, upon completion of his three-year tour of duty as a reserve officer in 1959, accepted a regular commission, obligating himself for additional years of service. At the time, Duffy fully expected to remain in the Army until retirement.

But many twists and turns lie on the road to any man’s final career choice. In the military, these twists and turns are sometimes bizarre. The military calling has a certain distortion of reality, and lengthy periods of schooling only exacerbate this problem. For example, while a young officer undergoes training in a technical specialty, he gets all the excitement of growth and newness, with developing skills providing a sense of limitless self-confidence and potential. Then, when the period of schooling ends and the hard reality of the military life sets in, the young officer invariably feels a letdown. In short, “becoming” is always more exciting than “being.” Becoming an Army aviator was an exciting experience for young Hank Duffy—being an Army aviator was something else entirely.

The undisguised reality of Army life hit Duffy very soon after he launched upon his tour of duty as a regular commissioned officer. It involved a good deal of personal hardship, dreary routine, and uninspiring duty, coupled with a long series of absences from his family, which now consisted not only of his wife, but three small daughters as well.

“About the first year after getting out of flight training,” Duffy declares, “we had a long separation. I went to Greenland, then down to Panama and into the jungle. I decided that this is the life for somebody else.”

Like many other young potential career officers, Hank Duffy discovered that the promise of military life did not measure up to its reality. So how did he come to the profession of airline piloting?

“I had done all the South American flying in the Army, and I had always ridden down there and back on Braniff, and I thought I would really like to do that,” Duffy remembers. “I had a romance with Braniff, and because of my southern upbringing, I also applied to Delta—those were my one-two choices. Of course, I applied to everybody, like everybody else did, but nobody was hiring at the time.”

So firm was Duffy’s decision to leave the military in 1962 that he dusted off his college business degree and secured a job with the Internal Revenue Service as an accountant. That would have to await his formal release from active duty, but owing to the IRS’s needs for people with his kind of college background, Duffy’s prospective employer was willing to hold the position open for him. In short, Duffy’s future held no unemployment.

“You don’t want to have any gaps in there,” Duffy laughs, citing the responsibility of supporting a family.

By a quirk of fate, Duffy got what he wanted—he would become an airline pilot instead of a government bureaucrat. It wasn’t easy, because as a regular instead of a reserve officer, the timing of his departure from the Army was beyond his control.

An officer who accepts a regular commission technically serves “at the pleasure of the President,” with no guaranteed date of release from active duty. Reserve officers, on the other hand, serve for specified periods of time, like enlisted men. Once young Hank Duffy had applied for and accepted a regular commission, the Army could take its own sweet time releasing him to civilian life—there was no warranted release from active duty date (or “RAD” date, as it was known colloquially). In fact, a regular officer did have a right to resign, but the timetable for this process was strictly dependent upon “needs of the service.” More than one young military flier, anxious to become an airline pilot, has had trouble with this peculiarity of military service. How does one commit to an airline’s training date with the threat of involuntary retention on active duty hanging over the process? Under normal circumstances, a young regular officer can put in his papers to leave the service, and a specified amount of time later (as defined by regulations—not statutory law), get out—depending upon the needs of the service.

None of this was bothering young Hank Duffy in early 1962, when he decided leave the Army. Despite rising Cold War tensions, things were still generally routine, and a peacetime mentality pervaded the military establishment. Vietnam was just a distant echo then, a billet only a few really “gung-ho” careerists sought to enhance their promotion potential. With that distant-jungle guerrilla war still a sideshow (which professionals wryly referred to as “the only war we’ve got”), the Army was actually encouraging young regular officers to get out, owing to an overstaffing problem. The simmering potential for conflict with the Russians in Europe was like a long-running serial at the old Saturday morning movies, as were recurrent crises over Berlin, which usually dissipated when the newspapers tired of it as a headline story and buried it in the back pages. Nothing here to delay young Hank’s release from active duty and return to civilian life.

The IRS job was secure and waiting for him. The soon-to-be ex-Army pilot had pretty well given up on hearing from either Braniff or Delta, his preferred airlines. Then, at the last minute, Delta came through. The first great wave of mass expansion, brought on by the increasing popularity of jet travel among ordinary Americans, was upon the airline industry. Delta’s managers were among the first to see this new boom as more than a temporary phenomenon, so they started culling through their pilot application file, looking for likely prospects. Hank Duffy’s name popped up—he had all the qualifications Delta liked for its new hires: a college education, southern background, military training—though Air Force or Navy wings would have made him more desirable, in Delta’s opinion. But offsetting this, young Hank Duffy had already secured his release from active duty—a “date certain” commitment from the Army to let him go—and thus could be assigned to a class. So, Delta hired Hank Duffy in the early fall of 1962, and he joyfully informed the IRS that they could find somebody else to audit tax returns—he was going flying!

But fate is a tricky master, often dependent upon great events not easily foreseen—as young Captain Duffy was about to discover. Hank Duffy and his career as an airline pilot were about to be caught in the web of the Cold War’s greatest crisis. The “Missiles of October” brought the world to the brink of nuclear war in the fall of 1962, just as Hank Duffy was packing away his Army gear. For 13 days, the United States and Russia came “eyeball to eyeball” (in Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s phrase) over nuclear-capable medium-range missiles the Russians had deployed in Fidel Castro’s Cuba—just 90 miles from Florida. The career preferences of a young, soon-to-be ex-Army aviator clearly took lower priority than dealing with the prospect of nuclear annihilation. Hank Duffy’s career at Delta was in jeopardy.

“I was supposed to get out a month and a half before I was hired,” Duffy remembers of the careful plans he had laid for his transition to civilian life. “The Cuban missile crisis came along, and the military extended everybody.”

Before Duffy could don Delta’s uniform and begin flying the line, he would have to do his part in the big buildup of forces in the southeastern United States. His commercial aviation future now on hold, Hank Duffy became a small cog in what was the largest peacetime domestic mobilization in U.S. history—a massive invasion machine pointed directly at Cuba. Duffy, along with literally millions of others in the military, found himself preparing for combat—flying the line would have to wait.

A class date to begin training in an airline’s program is a perishable commodity and comes with no guarantee that it will be honored once it has passed—national security and reasons of state notwithstanding. An airline’s personnel needs are specific to a time and set of circumstances, and Hank Duffy could not be sure that the U.S.-Soviet duel of nerves that fall of 1962 did not spell the end of his career as an airline pilot—before it even began!

But almost as quickly as it erupted, the crisis ended—to all humanity’s collective sigh of relief. One small story among millions in this giant drama was Hank Duffy’s, which might seem insignificant by comparison, but of such small episodes are the lives of mice and men made up.

“I finally had to fly to the Pentagon, hand-carry my papers through, and fly back,” Duffy remembers of the mad dash to make his Atlanta training class date in December 1962. “I got there the day before we started school. It was tight.”

After making his class date, Hank Duffy faced the serious problem of competing with other young pilots who had far more experience in complex aircraft than he did. Delta, like most companies during that time, hired ex-military pilots whenever possible, and among those with military backgrounds, heavy-multiengine experience (preferably on piston-engine equipment—which the airlines still flew more of in 1962 than turbine aircraft) was important.

“The guys who came out of multiengine programs had an advantage,” Duffy recalls. “Practically everything was propellers at the time, and everything we were going into was props.”

Lacking the technical background of his peers, Duffy’s success as an airline pilot was by no means assured. Almost all of his contemporaries in school had flown in either the Navy or the Air Force—Army pilots were comparatively rare, and most airlines viewed them strictly as rotary-wing pilots whose experience was unsuitable for airline purposes. Indeed, some old-fashioned chief pilots, who in those days had the final word on hiring a pilot, were known to scoff that helicopters were not really airplanes at all. The fact that some Army pilots (like Hank Duffy) were primarily fixed-wing pilots didn’t impress them very much.

But Delta’s hiring philosophy, which stressed potential and background, meant that a few Army pilots, despite their lack of experience in heavy multiengine aircraft, would be given a chance to compete. Offered the opportunity, Duffy made the most of it. Although he was apprehensive about what awaited him in Delta’s training program, Hank Duffy soon found that he could more than hold his own.

“I was better than a lot of the people around me, guys that came out of multiengine programs,” he recalls. “In the Army, we had no hydraulic systems or variable pitch props or any of that stuff. I had to work quite hard.”

His diligence in training landed young Hank Duffy a second officer’s slot on DC-6 equipment, thus beginning a rapid rise through various equipment that would culminate in an extraordinarily early captaincy, by traditional airline standards. Just five years after hiring on with Delta, Hank Duffy was a Convair 440 captain, and a year later he was commanding DC-9s. Like certain military academy classes, which happen to come along in just the right zone to benefit from a wave of war-induced promotions (those fabled “classes the stars fell on”), Duffy’s training class caught the first wave of Delta’s explosive growth. Assigned seniority number 860 when he began flying the line, Duffy remained a flight engineer for only a year.

“Delta advancement was very fast,” Duffy recalls, “but we did multiple things. At one point, I was DC-6 and -7 engineer qualified, Convair 880 qualified, and Convair 440 copilot qualified, moving back and forth between all those airplanes, which is unbelievable in today’s environment.”

Just this predicament was what turned Hank Duffy into an ALPA militant—at least by Delta’s standards. As Delta’s rapid growth and Duffy’s relatively low seniority elevated him out of the ranks of “plumbers,” he found himself in a dispute with management over interpretation of the contract. The way Hank Duffy read the standard employment agreement between ALPA and Delta, his upgrading to first officer on smaller equipment (in this case the Convair 440), entitled him to first officer pay rates when the company assigned him to second officer duties on larger equipment.

“They needed to assign you downward because they didn’t have enough Convair 880 second officers,” Duffy recalls. “The contract said if you were a copilot and you were assigned to fly another airplane, you got copilot rates.”

But management didn’t see it that way, and when Hank Duffy, who was barely out of his probationary period, complained about the company’s interpretation of the contract, ALPA’s local officers in Atlanta refused to back him up. In short, what should have been a routine grievance at any other airline was looked upon as improper, even “uppity,” behavior at Delta.

To understand why labor relations at Delta were so different from other airlines, we must delve a little deeper into the corporate culture and psychology of the airline and its pilots.

Duffy’s election to the presidency of ALPA in 1982, at the age of 48, was in some respects a tribute to the corporate success of Delta Air Lines. Like the companies for which they fly, the various pilot groups that make up ALPA tend to exhibit a character that often reflects the corporate culture in which they live. Eastern Airlines pilots, for example, during the era of Captain Edward V. Rickenbacker, tended to be close-lipped “company men.” Years later, as Eastern’s corporate culture changed, the airline’s pilots became equally close-lipped advocates of union solidarity. Some airline pilot groups have traditionally been more militant in their unionism than others. Northwest Airlines pilots, for example, have had more than their share of difficulty with management; consequently, they have more “bomb-throwers” than other airlines. Historically, United’s pilots have occupied a kind of traditional middle ground, willing to fight management when provoked, but on the whole rather amenable to company policies. Each pilot group at each airline in ALPA is unique: Each group has been subject to discrete historical circumstances, peer group pressures, and the influences of strong individual leaders who were able to stamp their personalities on an MEC or LEC. Thus, generalizations about the nature of each pilot group are difficult to make.

But few ALPA members would dispute that Delta’s pilots were traditionally the least militant and most company-oriented pilot group in ALPA. They had never had a strike, never suffered from seasonal layoffs, and had benefited from what was generally regarded, historically, as the most enlightened and efficient management in the industry. Thus, their almost apologetic approach to unionism was understandable. Delta’s pilots had the only significant union on Delta’s property. (The dispatchers, who direct company flight operations on a daily basis, are also unionized, but they are a very small group.)

In short, the conservative, “family” atmosphere at Delta made unionism weak, and of all the pilot groups that made up ALPA, the commitment of Delta pilots to the concept of union had always been regarded, rightly or wrongly, as the most suspect. The company’s view of collective bargaining was a source of envy throughout ALPA—Delta’s pilots got what all the other pilot groups got (and usually more), but without any of the messy disagreements. In fact, ALPA leadership had often been a stepping stone to management at Delta, a tradition dating back to the legendary Charles H. Dolson1, the Delta captain who founded ALPA on the airline and later rose through the ranks of management to replace the equally legendary C.E. Woolman as president.

Dolson, who represented ALPA in the first contract negotiations with Delta, declared later: “I don’t think Woolman ever forgave me for getting ALPA started on Delta.” But regardless, relations were so typically smooth between Delta and its pilots that old Dave Behncke, who liked protracted negotiations because they enhanced his own sense of importance, was known to express irritation—if negotiations were that easy, Behncke figured, the company must be cheating the pilots. The “Old Man” was inveterately suspicious.

In fact, the generally enviable working conditions at Delta were purchased at a price, as young Hank Duffy, miffed at the company’s refusal to grant him first officer pay, was about to discover. Both the company and ALPA’s “Old Hands” at Delta expected young pilots to accept their superiors’ decisions quietly, without complaining.

Pilots didn’t file “many grievances at Delta,” Duffy recalls wryly. “They usually intimidated you out of it. They didn’t hassle you very much, but they expected you to do what they said.”

But Duffy, displaying a steely determination that his genial exterior masked, refused to let the prevailing “go along to get along” culture of Delta deter him. Feeling thoroughly abused by both management and the local ALPA officers who were supposedly representing him, Hank Duffy not only pressed his own grievance, but he also talked several other junior second-officer/first-officer switch-hitters into joining him.

“Eventually there was a compromise settlement, and we got sold down the river,” Duffy recalls sourly. “But a group of us stood up and said, ‘This isn’t right,’ and I learned a lesson—the company wasn’t to be trusted in all respects.”

Of such things are union activists and professional pilots made. An old pilots’ adage holds that a pilot has become a professional when he asks, “Who pays me?” By this definition, Duffy was well on his way to becoming a real professional. Similarly, most union activists are made—not born. Management at Delta seems to have understood this principle. Historically, the benign atmosphere that had so generally characterized relations between pilots and management at Delta, had probably deterred many young pilots from becoming hard-core union activists.

“I thought I needed to get involved in ALPA,” Duffy declares of his early days at Delta. “I was doing outside stuff—Kiwanis Club and Republican politics—and I thought I ought to be doing something that is applicable to my profession. I ought to know the contract. So I got involved in grievance work.”

Thus, Hank Duffy, unlike most young Delta pilots, was an active unionist almost from his first days with the airline.

Council 44 at Atlanta was, in 1963, like most LECs everywhere, chronically short of volunteers willing to do committee work. When Hank Duffy volunteered his services to the LEC, he set in motion a series of events that would eventually bring him to ALPA’s presidency.

So while Hank Duffy was going through the experiences typical of any airline pilot during his first few years with Delta, he was also gaining a thorough grounding in ALPA work. The ancient prejudice in favor of captains in ALPA meant that his rapid promotion to that rank made him just that much more appealing as an ALPA “mover and shaker.”

“It was fun, it was great!” Duffy remembers of his first few years of rapid advancement, both in the cockpit and doing ALPA work. “Flying the 440, and quickly the DC-9, and going back and forth between the two—I think that’s always the most exhilarating time, when you are a new captain, flying all around the system, up in New England or down the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. Just a fun time.”

During his 20 years as a line pilot, Duffy held several significant ALPA jobs, including the MEC chairmanship at Delta. But his most important early work was as Delta’s Retirement and Insurance (R&I) Committee chairman. His performance in this technical “nuts and bolts” area (as opposed to the purely “political” side of ALPA activities) brought him favorable notice from the pilots of several other airlines.

Atlanta, Delta’s home base, was at one time claimed by Eastern as a principal territory. The city’s rapid growth since the 1950s, from comfortable regional center to world-class metropolis, paralleled Duffy’s years with Delta. So desirable did the city’s location become as an airline hub that ever-increasing numbers of airlines, large and small, sought a place in the Atlanta sun. By the late 1960s, Atlanta began to rival places like Chicago and New York as a pilot domicile. With the pilots of several airlines often in direct contact with each other, and a major ALPA Field Office as a focal point for that interaction, Hank Duffy’s reputation among the pilots of other airlines in Atlanta began to spread.

Duffy, who was developing a keen sense of the problems of other airlines during this period, saw the airline community in Atlanta as a microcosm of the larger ALPA community.

“Everybody is a product of what they experience from their own management,” Duffy believes. “It’s not the people who fly for an airline, because if you exchange the total pilot population on the airline for another, they would be just the same.”

The insights Duffy gained into the history and specific conditions of the various pilot groups domiciled in Atlanta has permitted him to view the old issue of intra-airline rivalry, which has dogged ALPA for generations, from a long perspective.

“If I had gone to work for Northwest,” Duffy notes, “I would have been a militant, too. I understand the selfishness that crops up. It’s frustrating, because I came to see that we have a lot more uniting us than separating us.”

In addition, the fact that Duffy was active in Republican Party politics in Georgia as a county chairman was helpful. The political mood of the country was swinging decidedly toward conservatism by the 1970s, and Duffy’s political inclinations indicated that he fit the image that most pilots had of themselves as reluctant unionists with conservative sympathies.

So, beginning with that first assignment as a member of the LEC Grievance Committee, Duffy took on an ever-increasing load of ALPA work and began to attract notice among ALPA movers-and-shakers. Duffy’s most important characteristic was his ability to focus his attention and master a technical subject while exhaustively serving the needs of fellow pilots who came to him for help. While grievance work was relatively undemanding at Delta, it nevertheless required close reading of the contract, which most pilots were not inclined to do—until they got into some specific difficulty.

“Most pilots don’t read their contracts, so they need somebody to tell them what’s in it, which I enjoyed doing,” Duffy laughs, echoing the lament of many other ALPA leaders over the years. “I enjoyed understanding the contracts—it really fostered my own understanding of the job.”

In 1970, still just a junior captain, Hank Duffy served on the crucial bargaining committee, where he played a major role in negotiating a new retirement plan. Ironically, this interest in retirement and insurance was precisely the route to power that J.J. O’Donnell had followed in the 1960s. In fact, a preview of the 1982 election contest, which saw Duffy unseat O’Donnell, occurred at the 1973 Executive Board meeting over R&I matters.

“There were a lot of holes in the company’s funding,” Duffy remembers, “and we insisted on much stricter standards. For instance, loss of license was always a major problem for us, and we got the first company-paid guaranteed 50 percent average of the final five years’ earnings. O’Donnell was vehemently opposed to it. He came from this retirement background and was so proud of the retirement plan that he had built, and he saw this as a threat to it. But it was really short-sighted, because we escalated the retirement benefit tremendously.”

Despite O’Donnell’s opposition, Duffy’s plan carried. On this matter, the Delta pilots were independent of ALPA national’s control; and by setting a higher standard in the R&I area, they led the industry toward more generous benefits for all ALPA groups. But these R&I activities nevertheless stirred up “a lot of tension, back and forth,” as Duffy remembers of his first dealings with O’Donnell. Duffy attracted favorable notice from others, however, and it was apparent that he would soon play a leading role on the Delta MEC.

“I’m sure these guys were grooming me to be the next MEC chairman,” Duffy says of George Berg, Nick Gentile, and Al Bonner, who preceded him as MEC chairmen.

Duffy’s next challenge came in 1973, during the celebrated Arab oil embargo of that year. Delta pilot group leaders, notably Al Bonner and George Berg, suspecting management of using the embargo as an excuse to cut the number of flights and thereby reduce pilot employment, assigned Duffy as the ALPA watchdog, or “fuel czar.”

“We were suspicious, probably wrongly so,” Duffy remembers, “that it was just a downturn economically, and they were using the fuel allocation as a reason not to be flying everything the company could be flying.”

By 1974, Hank Duffy was Delta’s MEC chairman and a presence at the ALPA Board of Directors meeting in Kansas City that year, where the twin issues of crew complement and suspension of service (SOS) were paramount. ALPA’s policy was to require three pilots on all new turbine-powered or jet equipment. As we have seen, this nettlesome issue was causing ALPA severe internal stress, because some pilot groups disagreed vehemently with the three-pilot crew complement for some aircraft. Hank Duffy, speaking for the Delta pilots, argued that the two-pilot cockpit was a technological inevitability and that ALPA would have to bow to it. The United pilots, led by John LeRoy (chairman of ALPA’s national crew complement study committee), championed the three-pilot cockpit. The only way ALPA could maintain even a facade of internal unity on the crew complement issue was by papering it over. Although this parallel might seem overdrawn, the crew complement issue was to ALPA what slavery was to the pre-Civil War union.

“We got drawn into the crew complement debate,” Duffy recalls, “because we were the main two-pilot operator. LeRoy, to make his argument work, had to attack the whole two-pilot operation. So we rose to the defense.”

Hank Duffy was a burr under the saddle at the 1974 BOD meeting, because he would not submit to the verbal subterfuges that dogged the crew complement issue. The specific issue that year was the “stretched” version of the McDonnell-Douglas DC-9-50 model, which ALPA insisted was a new aircraft and therefore could not be flown with two pilots. Long-standing ALPA policy called for drawing a line in the sand somewhere on the crew complement issue, but each time it came up on a specific aircraft, the issue was so divisive that the only sensible way to handle it was to duck. The Delta pilot group favored flying the DC-9-50 the same way they flew the earlier models of the DC-9, the “dash 10” and “dash 30”—as a two-pilot airplane.

“It was bizarre,” Duffy remembers of the crew complement debate at the 1974 BOD meeting. “This was the first time I had ever seen the operation. The USAir guys were getting the DC-9-50. We were the largest DC-9 operator, and United was bound and determined that they were going to draw the line at the nose of the DC-9-50. You couldn’t tell the difference in the cockpit.”

Complicating the cloudy crew-complement issue was the fact that two Delta pilots, Al Bonner and George Berg, were among the seven candidates challenging J.J. O’Donnell for the ALPA presidency. As we have seen, neither succeeded, and the press of other issues, such as improper handling of hazardous materials, the misuse of cockpit voice recorders, and the continuing mischief of the airlines’ Mutual Aid Pact, detracted attention from the crew complement matter.

But one thing was certain—Hank Duffy had emerged as a major player in ALPA. Throughout the remainder of the 1970s, Duffy was an often-mentioned potential successor to J.J. O’Donnell. He had the experience, he had the solid backing of his own airline, and he was just the right age—10 years younger than O’Donnell—to provide the kind of gradualist succession that has been traditional in ALPA politics. But all that might not have been enough. The central thing that would catapult Duffy toward his destiny was the changing national political climate.

The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 accelerated the pattern of ominous changes that airline pilots had been experiencing since the passage of the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978. While the conservative Republican revival of the Reagan years probably won support from most airline pilots owing to their economic status and social attitudes, Reagan’s antiunion tendencies were nevertheless worrisome. Despite their ideological Republicanism, most pilots realized that they benefited from government regulation. Although airline deregulation was a product of the Carter Administration, Republicans strongly supported it. As we have seen, J.J. O’Donnell had aligned ALPA solidly against deregulation—with minimal results. Hence, when O’Donnell’s term expired in 1982, the pilots logically sought a leader like Duffy, whose Republican credentials and background in Delta’s successful corporate culture promised compatibility with the Reagan “revolution.”

Duffy’s qualification for ALPA’s presidency was thus based upon long years of work in the union’s technical infrastructure and the widely shared perception among airline pilots that he was likely to be effective in dealing with the Republican administration. O’Donnell’s announcement that he would not stand for reelection prompted Duffy to announce his candidacy. Shortly after Duffy launched his campaign, however, O’Donnell changed his mind and entered the race, seeking a fourth four-year term. Planning an open campaign with no incumbent, Duffy readily admits that if O’Donnell had not hesitated in announcing for reelection, Duffy would not have run.

“A lot of people wanted to support me,” Duffy declared in a 1990 interview, “but we couldn’t convince them that anybody had a chance against a twelve-year incumbent.”

But O’Donnell’s temporary noncandidacy opened the door to Duffy, whose support snowballed. By the time O’Donnell entered the race, another candidate, John Gratz, the leader of TWA’s pilots, had also announced for the presidency. Gratz, a Boeing 747 captain flying international routes out of New York, spearheaded the attack against O’Donnell, allowing Duffy to occupy the middle ground. In a close and bitterly contested election at the 1982 BOD, Duffy outpolled his two opponents and became the next ALPA president.

ALPA’s destiny and Hank Duffy’s were now intertwined.

NOTES
1  Charles Dolson died in 1992 at the age of 87.

To Chapter 9

Back to Contents