CHAPTER 9
DUFFY TAKES CHARGE
A Troubled Transition
By the rules of “Woods’ Law,” named for Chuck Woods, the veteran
United pilot leader during the 1950s and 1960s, J.J. O’Donnell
should have known that he couldn’t beat the odds in 1982.
“Working for a bunch of pilots and keeping them happy is
impossible,” Woods always advised newly elected ALPA officers.
“You’ll lose 20 percent of your support per year, so after five
years, you’ll have zero support.”
Woods was only half joking. O’Donnell had worked a minor political
miracle by surviving in office for so long. His 12 years were
exceeded only by founder Dave Behncke’s 21 years at the helm.
O’Donnell, bitterly disappointed at his rejection by the
organization he had served since 1971, was understandably sulky as
he shelved his plans for molding the future. The Washington Post
headlined the story of his defeat by saying that ALPA had rejected a
“Reagan adviser” and that it was a “surprise move.”
Pleased as Duffy’s supporters were about his win, they nevertheless
had cause to worry. Aside from the presidency, the elections of
other national officers at the BOD meeting had not gone well. The
“Delta Machine” seemed to lose a wheel in the other races. It
recovered to score some victories in the executive vice-president
races, but it lost important races for first vice-president and
secretary. So Duffy’s supporters had substantial reason to worry
about the political balance in the new Executive Committee. Put
simply, Duffy’s supporters were worried that an obstructionist
majority in the Executive Committee might wreck his presidency
before it ever got started.
“There was a lot of anger and bitterness during the period between
the election in November and when I took over,” Duffy recalls,
citing the peculiar political dance following his own election,
which resulted in Tom Ashwood of TWA becoming first vice-president.
“Tom was really disappointed because he thought he should have been
running for president.”
Ashwood’s crushing victory over Tom Beedem of Northwest illustrates
the chancy nature of “slate making” in ALPA politics. At Chuck
Huttinger’s
Ashwood’s ability as a campaigner, acknowledged by friend and foe
alike, partially explains it. But playing a more important role was
the feeling among many BOD members that, in the interests of
internal unity, appeasing O’Donnell’s vanquished supporters,
particularly the large United Airlines pilot group, would be wise.
Despite all the symbolic expressions of support for internal unity
across company lines that followed Duffy’s razor-thin victory, many
BOD members were uneasy about the United pilots. Rumors that they
were contemplating leaving ALPA had been circulating ever since John
Ferg led the three-day walkout at the 1980 BOD meeting in Los
Angeles.1 Unconfirmed
but believable reports were circulating that Ferg had been talking
to the Allied Pilots Association (APA), the company union American
Airlines’ pilots had cloned after leaving ALPA in 1963. Was there a
chance that Hank Duffy would face the defection of the United pilot
group from ALPA? Old Guys remembered the circumstances of Charley
Ruby’s accession to ALPA’s presidency in 1962 and shuddered—the
American pilots’ defection began during his transition.
John Ferg, United’s MEC chairman, was becoming a loose cannon on
ALPA’s deck. He had harbored presidential ambitions before 1982, but
two things destroyed them—the Ferg-led boycott during the 1980 BOD
meeting, which irritated almost everybody, and his role in
masterminding the celebrated “Blue Skies” contract United’s pilots
agreed to in 1981.2
In some respects, the “Blue Skies” contract was the opening shot in
the “B-Scale” furor that would ravage ALPA in the mid-1980s. It
actually preceded the first formal, nonexpiring “B-scale” that
American’s pilots, who were no longer ALPA-represented, signed in
1983. Because the “Blue Skies” contract handed United’s management
broad concessions, particularly in work rules, it undercut the
existing contracts of other ALPA carriers. The pilots of many of
United’s competitors saw the “Blue Skies” contract as an open
invitation for United’s management to take on their carriers in the
deregulated marketplace. United was big and powerful, but its
pilots’ tough collective bargaining and Civil Aeronautics Board
regulation had always held the airline’s competitive advantages in
check. The United pilots’ contract, because it was so superior to
all others, had historically provided a measure of protection to
lesser airlines. When John Ferg took the wraps off these contractual
restraints, it frightened and angered many smaller pilot groups who
lived in the giant’s shadow.
So to some extent, the pro-Duffy vote in 1982 had been an
anti-United vote. But this sort of thing could be pushed too far,
wiser heads warned. Perhaps that’s why a consensus emerged in the
BOD, hard on the heels of Duffy’s victory, that the United pilot
group had to be mollified. United was dangerous enough inside ALPA’s
tent—it would be even worse outside. The historically close
relationship between TWA and United pilots, which rested on the fact
that their airlines did not compete significantly with each other,
also caused concern. But by electing Ashwood first vice-president
and United’s Chuck Pierce secretary, the BOD could appease both
and thus balance the scales internally. Northwest’s Tom Beedem
became the sacrificial offering to internal unity.
In the election for first vice-president, Ashwood got more than
15,000 votes, double Beedem’s total and 2,000 more
than Duffy got in winning the presidency. This lopsided victory was
even more impressive when one considers that Ashwood was running
against three opponents—Beedem, Dan Affourtit of Pan Am, and Gil
Chase of Frontier. Ashwood’s impressive showing was an ill omen for
Hank Duffy, because it meant that he would have as his
second-in-command somebody who could argue persuasively that he had
shown more political strength than Duffy had.
The suspicion Duffy’s supporters directed at Ashwood thus had a
logical basis. Ashwood, an articulate Briton who had served in the
Australian Air Force before wangling a job with TWA in 1966,3 had
risen rapidly in the ALPA hierarchy owing to the patronage of
O’Donnell, who always referred to him as “that Limey.” Ashwood won a
national reputation with the public in the early 1970s through his
role as ALPA’s principal spokesman on the subject of terrorism and
skyjacking. Ashwood also developed a considerable following
internationally through his IFALPA service.
Following his election as first vice-president in 1982, Ashwood was
clearly in a position to build an independent power base. With his
extensive background as a national officer, and ALPA’s history of
electing leaders with a certain degree of continuity, Ashwood was a
major player. The only mitigating factor, as the Duffy team saw it,
was that Ashwood was miffed at O’Donnell for misleading him about
his intentions before the 1982 election and therefore might be
amenable to a truce. Ashwood insists that he was willing to work
with Duffy, to defer his own political ambitions in the interests of
harmony.
“My election was a devastating blow to Hank,” Ashwood recalls. “As
Duffy began his transition, I took him to dinner, which I figured
was proper because I’d been in Washington for six years and was an old hand.
I told him frankly that neither of us was sitting there with the
person we wanted. I said, ’I won’t play political games, I won’t
stab you in the back.’ We looked deeply into each others’ eyes,
manfully shook hands, and it went downhill from there.”
Ashwood’s closest supporter on the Executive Committee, reflecting
the strong alliance between TWA and United, was Charles J. “Chuck”
Pierce (known to his friends as “C.J.”), the new secretary. Pierce
came to his office with a strong reputation as an administrator
owing to his service as secretary/treasurer of the United MEC,
ALPA’s largest. He was also a moderate whose standing with other
pilot groups had survived the Ferg blemish. Figuring that Ashwood’s
election might not be enough to appease the sullen United pilot
group, the BOD also rolled over the Delta Machine and elected
Pierce. Duffy’s supporters, putting the best face on a bad
situation, agreed to make it unanimous when Pierce’s victory became
inevitable, although they supported Larry West of Republic against
him in the formal balloting. Duffy’s supporters were under no
illusions about Pierce, however. They knew he was Ashwood’s friend,
something Pierce never denied.
“I had done some national work for J.J., but Tom Ashwood was who
raised the subject with me of running for national office,” Pierce
recalls. “I’m not so naive as not to understand that part of the
motivation was to curry the vote of the United MEC. I decided to
run, the idea being that it would be J.J., Ashwood, myself, and
whoever got elected treasurer.”
So the Delta Machine, although it had won the top spot, could not
prevent the election of the remainder of the O’Donnell slate. This
outcome called into question Duffy’s basic political appeal, for it
seemed to many observers that Duffy’s victory was really a rejection
of O’Donnell personally—not his policies.
About the remaining national officer, John J. “Jack” Magee, a quiet,
genial Ozark pilot who had held the treasurer’s post since 1974, the
Duffy people had less reason to worry. Jack Magee’s loyalty to ALPA
always took precedence over his loyalty to any individual leader.
Even the inveterately suspicious O’Donnell finally came to accept
Magee at face value, although Magee admits it took several years:
“O’Donnell to this day doesn’t know how to take me. I could win
office, although he did not understand how.”
Magee’s repeated reelections to the job of treasurer had survived
O’Donnell’s active opposition throughout the 1970s. At one point
O’Donnell encouraged Tom Ashwood to run against Magee. So the Duffy
transition team saw Magee as a potential ally, an assessment with
which Magee would later agree.
“I am much closer to Hank than I ever was to J.J.,” Magee declared
in 1989. “Hank and I go back to 1974, when we became friends. The
first time I broached the idea of running for national office to
anybody was to Hank Duffy on St. Patrick’s Day, 1974. I remember it
was cold, we were both in
Washington, and we went walking for about
two hours that night, and Hank Duffy promised to support me. He
said,
‘We probably won’t win, but you’re not going to be a
laughingstock.’”
In races for EVPs in 1982, the Delta Machine regrouped and did
better, with favorable results for Hank Duffy. O’Donnell’s nemesis,
Augie Gorse of Eastern, won the Group II race. In consort with John
Ellington, a Delta pilot who won the Group I EVP, and Chuck
Huttinger, who won Group V, Duffy would have a strong nucleus of
support. Dennis Duffy of Continental and Don Jefferson of Pan Am
[later United, owing to the Pacific route acquisition] rounded out
the EVP roster. Dennis Duffy would eventually become Hank Duffy’s
ally, but Jefferson more often
sided with Ashwood. Thus Duffy had only a narrow and uncertain
working majority on the Executive Committee.
The climate at ALPA national headquarters was uncertain as Hank
Duffy and his transition team arrived in Washington, D.C.
The potential harm an Ashwood–Pierce alliance could do was
worrisome, as was the recent tendency of Delta and United pilot
groups to square off on opposite sides of every issue.
“Ashwood came in not a friend,” Duffy admitted, with
uncharacteristic circumlocution in his 1989 interview. “Chuck Pierce
quickly formed an alliance with Ashwood that was very difficult to
break down. I never broke it down with Ashwood. Pierce, toward the
end, changed considerably, and I felt like I had a good relationship
with him. But Ashwood was building a case to run in 1986.”
O’Donnell’s role in the bad feelings that erupted between Ashwood
and Duffy was indirect but substantial. He had done his best to
persuade Duffy not to run, insisting that the social “cocktail
circuit” in Washington
would, among other things, not be to Duffy’s wife’s liking.
O’Donnell’s puzzling behavior continued into the transition period,
manifesting itself in a kind of eerie detachment.
Duffy needed help from O’Donnell to become comfortable with ALPA’s
existing operation, to sort it out, to discard what would hamper his
program to make ALPA more effective, and to preserve those aspects
of ALPA operations that could further the “Duffy New Beginning.”
O’Donnell was an unenthusiastic onlooker.
“J.J. left me in a kind of a hole,” Duffy confirmed later. “I was up
here with a transition team, and he just stonewalled us. He did not
introduce me to one person. No making of the way, no passing of the
torch. None of that.”
Shortly after his victory at the 1982 BOD meeting, Duffy telephoned
O’Donnell to set up the transition process. Because of the strained
situation, Duffy thought it best to commit to writing, in a formal
memorandum, the points he believed O’Donnell had agreed to. Duffy
appointed a transition team of five pilots. Three of them were from
Delta—Les Hale, Cam Foster, and Nick Gentile (who had managed the
just-completed campaign) as chairman of the group. Bob Tully of
Eastern and John Erickson of Western (who would be Duffy’s executive
administrator) rounded out Duffy’s transition team.
Duffy hoped that by formalizing the transition process he would
eliminate ambiguities and possible misunderstandings. He outlined
three broad areas his transition team would be looking into: first,
chain of command “so that [the team] can make recommendations to me
on changes that suit my style of operation”; second, national
officers and the executive administrator, so that he would have
their “recommendations as to the most efficient and practical use of
the new national officer team”; and third, “to begin the planning
for the first round of membership meetings (regional receptions) to
be held in early spring, 1983. This task will require the use of an
independent [emphasis added] public relations firm.”
Although Duffy tried to inject a note of collegiality into the
letter announcing the goals of his transition team, using phrases
such as “with your concurrence,” nothing could hide the fact that
the transition team would be questioning every aspect of O’Donnell’s
stewardship.
O’Donnell took the letter badly, as a rebuke and a not-so-subtle
insinuation that he might try to sabotage Duffy’s transition.
From Duffy’s viewpoint, it made sense to have independent experts
examine areas that he had made key targets during his campaign. As
we have seen, allegations of public relations and management
failures struck a resonant chord among the many ALPA members who
believed that O’Donnell was too remote from the membership. Duffy
wondered how else could he fairly assess ALPA’s performance in these
areas.
But to O’Donnell, this insistence on outside experts intruding into
what had formerly been his private preserve, seemed a brazen
announcement that his chosen ALPA staffers were incompetent
and possibly disloyal! The effect on the staff of Duffy’s sweeping
investigation of their performance was disquieting.
So O’Donnell, still smarting from his defeat, declined to smooth a
path for Duffy’s transition team during the remaining two months of
his presidency, as he himself would later admit.
“What the hell, I never had a transition with Charley Ruby,”
O’Donnell said in his 1991 interview. “I got in there and met all
the departments, by myself, and found out what was going on. When
Hank came in, he tried to do everything in an organized way. They
had this ’transition team,’ which was BS to me. Hank thought I
cold-shouldered him. I didn’t, but there was nothing I could do with
his transition team.”
Even more irritating to O’Donnell and frightening to the staff,
Duffy’s transition team seemed to threaten the principles of
“Project Acceleration.” Put simply, this operating concept was meant
to insulate the professional staff from direct contact with, and
hence interference by, pilots.
“The eighth floor was almost funereal during the transition because
the staff were devastated,” says Tom Ashwood, who as secretary had
come to know them well. “They had been with O’Donnell for 12 years,
and here’s this stranger coming in. It wasn’t Duffy’s fault really,
just the fear of the unknown. But rumors of a slash in staff were
circulating, so to say the atmosphere during the transition was
strained would be an understatement.”
Skip Eglet, who had served as EVP during the latter part of
O’Donnell’s administration, agrees with Tom Ashwood that the ALPA
professional staff was “scared stiff.” As a Duffy ally, Eglet tried
to mitigate these fears.
“I had reason to be in contact with several national staffers,”
Eglet recalls. “These people were absolutely petrified that Hank was
going to come in like Attila the Hun. I understood their concerns; I
mean after all, they had worked with John for so long, most of them
had been hired by him, in fact. I think I helped put a lot of their
fears to rest. Hank was much too decent a guy to do something like
that.”
Ashwood confirms Eglet’s judgment: “Despite all my difficulties with
Duffy, I know he was absolutely incapable of vindictive
action like that against the staff. It just wasn’t in his nature.”
O’Donnell’s strained relationship with Duffy probably lay at the
root of the national staff’s apprehension. Perhaps by “body
language,” inference, or inadvertence, O’Donnell frightened them
about their future with Duffy.
“Project Acceleration meant that the departments ran themselves,
which they should do,” says O’Donnell. “These were professional
people, and some of them felt that Hank’s people were know-it-alls,
that they were going to straighten the home office out.”
Aside from directing Jack Bavis to cooperate with Duffy’s transition
team, O’Donnell did little to accommodate them. As a result, the
transition team saw itself as entering unfriendly territory upon
arriving in Washington,
and consequently it harbored deep suspicions about several members
of the ALPA staff, whom they believed capable of pursuing a separate
agenda that might damage Duffy.
Because of the strained relations that the election campaign had
generated, the new ALPA president came to office with an immediate
need to repair the internal schism. But he also needed to hit the
ground running. A number of serious difficulties, all directly
connected to the growing adverse effect of deregulation of the
airline industry, demanded attention. Duffy’s education in the
intricacies of ALPA’s ways would have to proceed simultaneously with
his attack on these problems. Furthermore, Duffy would have to
educate the ALPA rank-and-file membership as to the seriousness of
these problems.
“The Association was ready for change,” Duffy said in 1989 of his
ouster of O’Donnell, “but the typical pilot really did not
understand deregulation at that point.”
Things were moving very fast in early 1983, and Duffy realized he
had a narrow envelope of time in which to demonstrate his
effectiveness to the membership. With the wounds of the Braniff
debacle still fresh, and more potential disasters looming, Duffy
knew time was short, and he was under no illusions about a prolonged
“honeymoon” with ALPA’s membership should things turn sour.
In January 1983, shortly after his election, Duffy launched his
campaign to educate ALPA rank-and-file members about the threats
they faced. To shake the complacency that still characterized most
line pilots (despite the Braniff debacle), Duffy chose as his forum
the widely read publication Aviation Daily. Declaring that
the gravest threat facing ALPA was the use that unscrupulous
employers could make of the bankruptcy laws, Duffy anticipated Frank
Lorenzo’s favorite union-busting tactic months before it became a
reality. Braniff had already shown the way by asking the courts to
eliminate almost all the bankrupt airline’s existing labor
contracts, among them ALPA’s. But all this seemed terribly remote to
most ALPA members. After all, Braniff was a special case,
most line pilots believed. Their end of the Titanic was doing
fine—those guys on the other end were the ones in the water!
In the aftermath of the rigorous campaign that had brought him the
presidency and unseated O’Donnell, Duffy necessarily had to ration
his cries of alarm, lest he exhaust his credibility. Rank-and-file
opinion among ALPA members would have to be educated so that it
could withstand the assaults that Duffy knew were in the offing. And
Hank Duffy would have to buy some time for himself as well—time to
seize control of the instrumentalities of ALPA and bend them to his
will. Transitions of power between hostile and opposed political
factions are notoriously difficult under the best of circumstances.
Unfortunately for ALPA, the transition between O’Donnell and Duffy
would take place during the worst of times.
“It was probably after the first half of 1983 before I really
started feeling comfortable in the office,” Duffy remembered in
1989. “Then Frontier hit us that summer, and Continental in
September.”
Historically, ALPA members have been subject to long periods of
complacency, interspersed with periods of intense alarm about
developments at their airline or in the industry. But the pace of
change and the shocking rapidity of the events in Duffy’s first year
in office were without precedent. The startling fact of Braniff’s
bankruptcy, Frontier’s clumsy attempt to void its ALPA contract by
creating a nonunion subsidiary modeled upon Frank Lorenzo’s
“alter-ego” airline, New York Air, and Lorenzo’s multiple
machinations elsewhere would shortly engage Duffy’s attention to the
exclusion of all other issues. Lorenzo’s use of bankruptcy laws to
break his ALPA contract at Continental4 meant
that, in the future, pilots would feel more continuously threatened
than they ever had before. Worried and apprehensive, ordinary
rank-and-file ALPA members, who had historically been so uninvolved,
would now anxiously and hypercritically survey every action of their
national leadership.
Duffy, because he had run against O’Donnell by accusing him of not
being sufficiently available to the rank-and-file membership,
planned to make communicating with himself easier for ordinary
members. Accordingly, Duffy and his transition team bubbled with
ideas—Hank would begin writing a monthly column in Air Line Pilot;
the team would introduce new methods of communicating, perhaps a
postcard that a member could clip out of the magazine and mail in
with various opinions on the state of the industry, or the world for
that matter; plans for extensive use of computer “networking” among
typically gadget-crazy pilots were afoot.
All this talk of change and “getting back to the grass roots” was a
clear source of irritation to O’Donnell during the transition. Until
Jan. 1, 1983, O’Donnell was still ALPA’s president, and the
enthusiasm and energy of the Duffy supporters who descended on
ALPA’s Washington, D.C., office as a preliminary to their takeover struck him as pushy and
premature. Furthermore, they reminded him of his galling defeat.
Among the problems Duffy faced, the need to prevent any more
Braniff-type debacles loomed high, and political baggage lingering
from the election campaign troubled this issue even more. This was
particularly true of the situation at Western Airlines.
Following Braniff’s failure, the Western pilots worried that their
airline would be next. Western’s troubles were almost a carbon copy
of Braniff’s, the pilot group had supported Duffy over O’Donnell,
and Duffy owed them a political debt.
“The Western people were really scared,” Duffy says.“One of the
things I had to overcome was O’Donnell’s going to them and saying,
‘I’ve got twelve years of connections in Washington, I know people I can go to while
Duffy is learning.’”
But the Western pilots had rejected O’Donnell. They knew that the
best they could hope for was salvation through merger with a
stronger carrier, and they liked their chances with Duffy at the
helm better than they liked the prospect of O’Donnell managing their
probable merger. The eventual merger of Western and Delta in 1986
played no role in these considerations, because at the time nobody
had any idea which airline would absorb Western.
The Western pilots weren’t the only group preparing for merger.
Mergers among airlines, among the most difficult of all ALPA
internal problems, crowded in on Duffy. He would have no honeymoon
in this area; and owing to the deep recession of 1982–83, other
dangers loomed. Thus, the need to restructure ALPA’s
intelligence-gathering apparatus was obvious, an imperative if ALPA
was to serve its membership effectively and weather the industrywide
near-collapse. If events outran ALPA’s ability to deal with them,
pilots would inevitably blame their own union, not the industry
itself.
“This is Frank Mayne’s axiom,” Frank Mayne of Delta (executive
vice-president elected in 1986) observes sardonically: “Whatever
goes wrong, ALPA will get the blame. Whatever goes right, the
company will get the credit.”
From ALPA’s earliest days, since its founding in 1931, “Frank
Mayne’s axiom" could have borne the name of several hundred ALPA
activists, all of whom understood its fundamental truth. Hank Duffy
understood it, too, and he was aware that the way his membership
perceived his first actions as ALPA’s president would weigh
heavily on their assessment of his effectiveness. But because of the
difficult transition, Duffy would begin his term as ALPA president
laboring under multiple liabilities.
The underlying tension between Ashwood and Duffy was always there,
palpable to close observers, particularly the other national
officers. Duffy ruefully admitted in his 1989 interview that the
lack of smooth transition between O’Donnell and himself meant that
ALPA’s membership was poorly served until he got acclimated to the Washington environment.
“The office itself is entrée to a lot of things, but I could have
gotten off to a faster start,” Duffy said later. “I was dependent
upon the staff giving me instruction, and that probably set me back
about six months.”
Although the problems in the industry were not of Duffy’s making,
they were now his responsibility. Some problems were general,
affecting the industry as a whole. For example, the escalating
tendency of management to claim economic hardship and then approach
each MEC for “givebacks” begged for a suitable national policy in
response.
Some problems were specific to an airline. For example, the
overriding issue so far as the Braniff pilots were concerned was
getting their airline back in the air, an outcome ALPA was
essentially powerless to assist, aside from cheerleading. During
Duffy’s first few months in office, the most promising merger
partner for the bankrupt airline was Pacific Southwest Airlines
(PSA), which had been negotiating for terms since the original
bankruptcy. Although the matter rested entirely with the courts
because of Braniff’s legal status under Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy
code, Duffy necessarily had to involve himself in it, owing to the
expectation of rank-and-file members that he would adopt a
high profile.
“The bottom line is that ALPA didn’t serve the Braniff pilots well,”
Duffy said in his 1989 interview. “As a union, we didn’t know how to
deal with bankruptcies, and internally our failure to transfer
pilots with a bankrupt carrier’s routes was a mistake. Had we
involved ourselves more at the corporate level of the transaction, I
think we could have influenced it so that the Eastern pilots would
have accepted some of the Braniff pilots. They were unwilling to do
that, but if it had just come down to them that to get these routes,
they had to take a hundred Braniff pilots, I think they would have
accepted it. Of course, this is good old hindsight.”
As we have seen, Augie Gorse, Eastern’s MEC chairman at the time,
was the focus of the Braniff pilots’ anger over Eastern’s purchase
of Braniff’s Latin American routes. Because Gorse was also an EVP
and one of Duffy’s strongest supporters, it is logical to suppose
that had the Braniff pilots been allowed to vote during the 1982 BOD
meeting, they almost certainly would have gone with O’Donnell—not
the candidate Augie Gorse supported. But owing to a ruling from ALPA
General Counsel Henry Weiss in his capacity as parliamentarian, the
Braniff pilots were denied the vote and granted only “observer”
status at the BOD. Weiss’s decision was critical, but then again, in
an election won by a mere 129 votes, all decisions are
critical.
Augie Gorse, when questioned about his opposition to taking any
Braniff pilots with the Braniff routes, is obviously discomfited. He
pauses before answering, choosing his words carefully. “My MEC told
me “no aircraft, no pilots,’” he says. “We got no Braniff aircraft,
only Braniff routes. Borman intimated strongly to me that if ALPA
insisted on taking Braniff pilots, he would furlough. We had already
taken wage cuts during PATCO so that we wouldn’t have to furlough.
We tried to get preferential hiring for Braniff pilots after the
bankruptcy.”
Clearly, Augie Gorse
wants these words to be his last on the subject of Eastern’s failure
to save the jobs of Braniff pilots. For Hank Duffy, the issue would
remain troubling, and as we shall see, a substantial number of
Braniff pilots would complicate his life by acting as strikebreakers
in the upcoming trouble at Continental. Had Gorse and the Eastern
pilots had a crystal ball, they surely would have made another
decision—one like the United pilot group made when their airline
acquired Pan Am’s Pacific routes.
The United pilot group’s decision to take all the Pan Am
Pacific pilots, while not exactly comparable to the Eastern–Braniff
case, worked to ALPA’s benefit, not its detriment. Learning as he
went, Hank Duffy worked well with the United pilot group in
structuring the deal that rescued the Pan Am pilots’ jobs. In
mitigation, O’Donnell, as we have seen, for complex reasons lacked
Duffy’s access to the Eastern pilot group.
In a show of concern for their fellow pilots on Pan Am, which
contrasted sharply with the Eastern pilots’ rejection of Braniff’s
pilots, United integrated the Pan Am pilots directly into their
seniority list. Of course, the United pilots were economically well
off, while the Eastern pilots had endured years of economic stress;
but the fundamental fact was that one group distinguished itself by
its unselfish devotion to principle, while the other failed the
test. By the time of the United–Pan Am Pacific route acquisition,
the lessons learned at Braniff caused the corporate agreement
between United and Pan Am to specify the job security rights of the
Pan Am pilots.
The process by which lessons are learned is invariably costly. As
Hank Duffy settled into office in 1983, burdened with external
threats and harried by internal dissension, he would have to start
learning the lessons of history on a crash basis. A crisis of
unsettling proportions was about to burst upon ALPA and his
fledgling presidency. The roots of this crisis lay deep in the
tangled history of deregulation and the man who would be the first
to use it ruthlessly.
ALPA was about to find out about Frank Lorenzo—just like the world
found out about Adolph Hitler.
1 See “Blue Skies and MEC Wars,” Ch. 15.