Hard Landing (30 page)

At issue between the men was the control of the company that carried more passengers than any other airline in America.

Like United, which began life as an affiliate of Boeing, Eastern
came into the world as the progeny of an aircraft manufacturer. With eight open-cockpit biplanes called Mailwings, the company won one of the earliest postal contracts, in 1928. By the early 1930s it was conducting the first passenger service between New York and Washington, as well as a vacation flight to Florida. (“From frost to flowers in 14 hours!” Eastern promised.) Flying to Florida via Atlanta broadened Eastern’s reach into the interior of the Southeast.

Eastern before long came under the control of General Motors Corporation, which installed a new take-charge potentate. He was Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker, a race car driver who had once owned the Indianapolis Speedway but who was best known as the greatest of America’s flying aces in the dogfights of World War I. When General Motors put Eastern on the block a few years later, in 1938, Rickenbacker
stopped at nothing to get control, once even getting GM chairman Alfred P Sloan, Jr., out of bed for a late-night bargaining session.

Rickenbacker won and handily raised the $3.5 million in necessary capital. Rickenbacker was held in awe by the generation of boys who had grown up in the years following World War I to become stockbrokers and investment bankers. One of Rickenbacker’s idolaters was the young Laurance Rockefeller, grandson of the Standard
Oil magnate.
Laurance became Rickenbacker’s principal financial backer, playing a vital though largely unseen role in Eastern’s affairs for more than 50 years, practically to the bitter end.

In keeping the company of Wall Street’s leading financiers, Rickenbacker became determined to extract the maximum amount of revenue possible from every airplane in Eastern’s fleet. The airline business was a matter of “putting
bums on seats,” as Rickenbacker described it, and he saw it as his mission to keep as many of those backsides in the air for the greatest number of hours feasible per day. Restricted by the CAB largely (though not entirely) to the East Coast, Eastern connected the nation’s densest population areas with short-haul flights, principally to Boston, New York, and Washington, along with the Atlanta and Florida routes. It was these populous markets, combined with Rickenbacker’s commitment to his bum count, that distinguished Eastern for much of its history not as the airline that flew the most miles or made the most money, but as the one that carried the greatest number of people.

Keeping planes in the air demanded quick turnarounds and many flights per day. In the late 1930s these principles moved Rickenbacker to establish a service called the Merry-Go-Round, with 20 round trips a day between New York and Washington. (It was aboard the Merry-Go-Round that regular passengers qualified for the Eighty Minute Man Club, a precursor of the frequent-flier programs of the 1980s.) The Merry-Go-Round operated successfully for years, but by the early 1960s Eastern needed something extra, a new gimmick. There was a recession on, and while benefiting from the constant use of its planes, Eastern also paid dearly in fuel, airport fees, and maintenance for its high proportion of takeoffs and landings. Eastern needed a higher load factor—a higher ratio of backsides to seats—to remain viable.

An Eastern executive named Frank Sharpe, newly hired from American, proposed
a
no-reservation
Merry-Go-Round service with a guaranteed seat for anyone who showed up. Any passenger could race to LaGuardia and step on a plane bound for Boston or Washington, any hour on the hour. The trick was that Eastern would have to keep planes standing by at all times to make certain that everyone showing up for a flight got a seat. In exchange for the freedom to fly so spontaneously, the customer, it was reckoned, would gladly save
Eastern money by sacrificing his cocktails, his chicken divan, and his “
social calls by the stewardess,” as noted in one account.

The idea was a winner, and on April 30, 1961, the Eastern Air-Shuttle was born.
The New York Times
, rarely so prone to overstatement, hailed the shuttle’s birth as “
the greatest advance in aviation since the Wright brothers.” On the few occasions that Eastern actually had to put a backup plane into service, such as when the entire Boston Symphony showed up for a shuttle flight one evening after a performance in New York, the resulting goodwill and publicity more than compensated for the cost. As the fastest link between the nation’s political and financial capitals, the shuttle became the highway of the highbrow, a fabled
celebrity-spotting venue: Henry Kissinger! Felix Rohatyn! It became a storied enabler of intercity romance; Carl Bernstein of
Washington Post
Watergate fame and his wife, writer Nora Ephron, developed a script concept called
Eastern Shuttle
.

Notwithstanding the shuttle’s instant success, Rickenbacker in his time was no genius of passenger marketing, as became painfully obvious during the transition to jets. Mistrustful of jets and resentful of their tremendous expense, Rickenbacker was
hopelessly late in ordering them. His procrastination enabled the up-and-coming Delta Air Lines, which competed in much of Eastern’s territory around Atlanta, to seize the moment. Delta ordered some of the same jets of which Rickenbacker had declined to take delivery, making inroads that Eastern would never reclaim. Rickenbacker also dismissed Jetways as frills. Worse still, he was notoriously cheap with the spare parts inventory, which meant that Eastern experienced an exceptional number of mechanical delays. Service aboard the East Coast shuttle, never luxurious, became downright obnoxious. A club called
W.H.E.A.L. We Hate Eastern Air Lines—began to flourish, a kind of frequent-flier support group that thousands of Eastern customers actually took the trouble to join. Eastern’s motto, “The Great Silver Fleet,” was twisted by many into “
The Great Stingy Fleet.”

The forced retirement of the 73-year-old Rickenbacker from active management in 1963 was no panacea, however. Like the hapless George Spater, who followed C. R. Smith into the chairman’s suite at American, the second generation of management at Eastern fell short, in no small measure because the first generation of management couldn’t resist meddling. Rickenbacker’s immediate successor,
a former air force undersecretary named Malcolm MacIntyre, was driven to
drowning himself in martinis at lunch by the indomitable Rickenbacker, who remained a company director and who mercilessly second-guessed all of MacIntyre’s moves. MacIntyre finally departed, and Rickenbacker,
nipping quite a bit himself in his later years, was at long last pushed out of the boardroom altogether. He died a few years later at age 82.

In came another new chief executive, Floyd Hall, a man whose look and style embodied the era of the Organization Man. He had been a pilot over at TWA—a captain, ultimately—who had earned an M.B.A. in his free time. An intensely intellectual man with a dashing thin mustache, he arrived at Eastern at the apogee of the postwar obsession with industrialism, committed as no airline chief executive before him to the principles of what was then called “
scientific management.”

Hall crowded Eastern’s offices at Rockefeller Center with a small army of whiz kid executives. Within a few years Eastern’s executive ranks swelled to include 43 officers at the vice presidential level alone. Nervously watching passenger defections to Delta, Hall with abandon ordered the jets that Rickenbacker had eschewed. He devoted himself to repairing Eastern’s soiled image with passengers, ordering
Rosenthal china and Reed & Barton silverware to coax business travelers back into first class and paying a big licensing fee to become the official airline of a new family vacation destination, called Walt Disney World, that was under construction in Orlando in the late 1960s.

Hall’s actions pulled Eastern from the edge, but his management practices began to cause more problems than they solved. Eastern’s legion of vice presidents began fighting among themselves, and its marketing began to assume the pretensions of its management style when, with the race to the moon in full swing, Hall added a stripe to the color scheme of Eastern’s aircraft in a hue he called “ionosphere blue.” Eastern adopted “The Wings of Man” as its new motto. It was only natural that Hall would try to extend the outer space theme by hiring the best-known orbital adventurer of the day.

Within a few weeks of Eastern’s first flight and within a few months of Lindbergh’s Atlantic crossing, Frank Frederick Borman II was
born in Gary, Indiana, on March 14, 1928. Lindbergh’s triumph defined Borman’s childhood. As a five-year-old he traveled with his family to Dayton, the home of the Wright brothers, where he got a ride with a barnstormer, an experience he was thrilled to recall for the rest of his life. He read and reread
The Red Eagle
, a children’s novel about airplanes. He developed a passion for building model airplanes from balsa, silk span, and dope on a card table unfolded in the living room. The
happiest moments of his life, he would recall 50 years later, involved working with his hands—not just building models but hunting in the deserts around Tucson, where his family had moved to help him escape his boyhood allergies. As a youth there Borman financed his ammunition purchases by catching Gila monsters, which he sold for experimental use to the University of Arizona. His mother was once told by a teacher that Frank, a lonely boy, had trouble getting along with classmates because he was so bossy.

He began flying at age 15, financing his lessons with money he earned by pumping gasoline and sweeping out Steinfeld’s Department Store (“Tucson’s best,” he would proudly note). Flying was everything. An airplane responded so beautifully, so precisely, to one’s hands. One day as a teenager Borman was caught in a violent thunderstorm, the plane knocked in all directions by turbulence. When he finally came in for a landing, a powerful crosswind nearly swept his plane off the runway. It was then that Borman realized that he operated at his best in a crisis.

Achievement winning—was also vital to Borman. Though small in stature, Borman became the first-string quarterback of his high school football team as an underclassman, leading it to the Arizona state championship in 1945. He had an unusually large head for his size, and his friends called him Squarehead.

Destined for a career in the military, Borman won an appointment to West Point through the
sponsorship of a judge with whose son Borman built model airplanes. As a cadet Borman distinguished himself with his bullheaded pride. When an upperclassman once ground his heel into the toe of Borman’s shoe, West Point hazing tradition demanded that Borman, a lowly plebe, bear the torture silently. Instead he called the upperclassman a son of a bitch and
threatened to kill him. Borman graduated in 1950, eighth in a class
of 670, marched in Harry Truman’s inaugural parade, and launched into fighter pilot training as a true believer in the unofficial air force motto, “Every man a tiger.” At one point he ruptured an eardrum practicing dive-bombing with a head cold. He was dismayed to receive orders back to West Point as an aeronautical instructor, but made the most of the assignment. Any unlucky cadets who happened to nod off in Professor Borman’s class got erasers thrown at their heads.

Borman’s combination of fighter pilot flying and scientific training (not to mention his proven ability to withstand physical torment) won him an appointment as an astronaut in the Gemini program. In two weeks aboard Gemini 7 in 1965 Borman established an endurance record for space flight and helped to conduct the first docking in space. Borman would later describe the “magic feeling” he experienced from the responsiveness of the Gemini spacecraft to his controls. It was the same glorious sensation Borman always felt piloting the swept-wing F-86 Sabre, one of the principal weapons in America’s Cold War arsenal—a jet fighter whose builders happened to include an aircraft mechanic in Columbus, Ohio, named Charles E. Bryan.

Bryan’s father was
an alcoholic, a seldom-seen figure as young Charlie was growing up in the coal-mining hollows of West Virginia. From the time of his earliest memory Charlie Bryan had to work. As a first grader he sold newspapers on a street corner in a grimy coal-dust town, shouting “Extra!” on the day Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.

The postwar years were a time of great northerly migration, not just among blacks but among Appalachian whites. For many the promised land—the first big city to the north—was Columbus, Ohio, a city just beginning a Cold War boom in the aerospace and technology industries. At the same time that Frank Borman was immersed in the duty-honor-country culture of West Point, Charlie Bryan was a tenth grader working at a drive-in theater in the Whitehall section of Columbus, a few miles east of Ohio State University. When his mother moved to a different part of town, Charlie could not bear to leave his job and his paycheck, so, barely old enough to hold a driver’s license, he began living alone in a shack beneath the
movie screen,
sleeping on an army cot and showering at a nearby trailer park.

Charlie Bryan had an intense manner and a stubbornness that always seemed to get him what he wanted, and his classmates recognized it. He was forever being recruited to run for elected positions in his church groups and other organizations, and he never seemed to lose. But despite his rising to a variety of leadership positions, Charlie Bryan was not social. He did not mingle easily. He felt close to groups but distant from individuals. Though later married (and divorced) twice, Bryan would spend much of the rest of his life living alone, which was how he preferred it.

By the time he was graduated from high school, Bryan realized that he cared deeply about money and in particular the possessions money bought. His years of working as a teenager gave him the savings to buy a Buick Riviera with a blue body and a white hardtop, a car that people couldn’t help noticing in 1952, particularly when the driver was barely shaving. On the same day he wore his cap and gown he began a mechanic’s job at North American Aviation (later part of Rockwell International) and was soon working side jobs as well—night jobs doing freelance aircraft maintenance and working in a grocery store, all to make extra money. Charlie Bryan wanted a house with two bathrooms where everyone else of his economic station had a single bath—and maybe even a little extra to wager in the stock market.