Flying the Line Flying the Line The First Half Century of the Air Line Pilots Association By George E. Hopkins The Air Line Pilots Association Washington, DC International Standard Book Number: 0-9609708-1-9 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 82-073051 © 1982 by The Air Line Pilots Association, Int’l., Washington, DC 20036 All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First Printing 1982 Second Printing 1986 Third Printing 1991 Fourth Printing 1996 Fifth Printing 2000 Sixth Printing 2007 Seventh Printing 2010 CONTENTS Chapter 1: What’s a Pilot Worth? ............................................................... 1 Chapter 2: Stepping on Toes ...................................................................... 9 Chapter 3: Pilot Pushing .......................................................................... 17 Chapter 4: The Airmail Pilots’ Strike of 1919 ........................................... 23 Chapter 5: The Livermore Affair .............................................................. 30 Chapter 6: The Trouble with E. L. Cord .................................................. 42 Chapter 7: The Perils of Washington ........................................................ 53 Chapter 8: Flying for a Rogue Airline ....................................................... 67 Chapter 9: The Rise and Fall of the TWA Pilots Association .................... 78 Chapter 10: Dave Behncke—An American Success Story ......................... 92 Chapter 11: Wartime.............................................................................. 100 Chapter 12: The TWA Strike of 1946 .................................................... 115 Chapter 13: The National Airlines Strike of 1948 .................................. 125 Chapter 14: The Ordeal of E. P. McDonald ........................................... 138 Chapter 15: The Fall of Dave Behncke ................................................... 148 Chapter 16: The Sayen Style .................................................................. 163 Chapter 17: Safety and Crew Complement in the 1950s ........................ 174 Chapter 18: The Southern Airways Strike of 1960 ................................. 186 Chapter 19: Internal Politicking, 1960–1962 ......................................... 200 Chapter 20: Charley Ruby’s Hour .......................................................... 212 Chapter 21: Origins of the American Airlines Split ................................ 225 Chapter 22: American Airlines Goes It Alone ......................................... 234 Chapter 23: Jets and Thin Ice ................................................................. 248 Chapter 24: Skyjacking .......................................................................... 259 Chapter 25: The Rise of J.J. O’Donnell .................................................. 276 Index ...................................................................................................... 292 Illustrations: “Beginnings” following page 54; “The Behncke Era” following page 118; “The Sayen andRuby Eras” following page 184; “ALPA’s Fifth De- cade” following page 246. (Credits: page 310.) FOREWORD I have this recurring Walter Mitty dream. I’m a passenger on a 747 and all three pilots get food poisoning. Just be­ fore the captain passes out, he gasps to a flight attendant, “Find someone who can land this plane.” She runs frantically through the cabin and, in true Wal­ ter Mitty–Arthur Hailey fashion, she finds me—the world’s most frustrated would­be airline pilot. A man who got most of his flight training from watch­ ing The High and the Mighty 27 times. An aviation writer who in the course of research managed to set a world’s record for crashing flight simulators. I land the 747 without anyone getting a scratch. I’ve never been psychoanalyzed, but I strongly suspect that this Mittyish dream simply reflects my long­standing hero worship of airline pilots. The truth is, I not only envy them but respect and admire them. Many have been close friends for years. I have not always agreed with them or the pol icies of their union, but I yield to no one in my defense of their profession alism and dedication. Pilots have taught me much about aviation and in doing so have made me a fairer, more balanced observer of the airline industry over the past 35 years. This is why I consider George Hopkins’s history of the Air Line Pilots As­ sociation a long­overdue addition to the annals of commercial aviation. For ALPA, like so many of its members, is a vastly misunderstood organization. Traditionally, it has worn two hats—that of a militant union and that of an underrated professional group that has contributed more to the advancement of civil aviation than many people realize or care to admit. What the public, the news media, and government and industry see too often is the ALPA with the union hat—“the only union in the world whose members ride to the picket line in Cadillacs,” as some cynic once wrote. Quite literally, the union’s long struggle in behalf of safety, better working conditions, and pay consis­ tent with a professional’s training and skill has been obscured by judging the end results. We look at today’s $100,000 annual salaries for senior captains and forget too easily what it was like in the airlines’ infant years. Hopkins doesn’t let us forget. Here is the story of ALPA’s humble begin­ nings, by necessity a union so secret that its existence on one airline was not revealed until an ALPA membership card was found on the body of a pilot killed in a crash. Here, in prose whose objectivity never dilutes the basic drama, are the gallant pilot pioneers who formed the world’s first real broth­ erhood of airmen. Here are the fascinating stories of the family feuds, the in­ traunion battles and bickering, the crippling strikes, the dogged steps toward safer air travel. Here are the finely etched portraits of ALPA’s leaders through the years—controversial Dave Behncke, erudite Clancy Sayen, stolid Charley Ruby, and the inheritor of both history and headaches, J.J. O’Donnell. vii It’s all in these pages, from the dramatic deposing of Behncke to the de fection of American Airlines pilots, a move that almost wrecked ALPA. As a fellow writer and aviation historian, I salute Professor Hopkins for his in credibly detailed research; there will be some who disagree with his con­ clusions and interpretations of certain events, but history has always been seen through the eyes of the beholder, and time can distort memory, par­ ticularly memory of controversy. I began covering civil aviation in 1947 when I was assigned to report on the crash of a Pennsylvania Central Airlines DC­4 in the Virginia moun tains. That was when I was first exposed to the sensitivity of airmen toward that damning phrase “pilot error.” That was when I first became associated with airline crews, and I sensed the comradeship and unity of a fraternity with wings. They became my teachers as well as my friends, the innocent instiga­ tors of my Walter Mitty fantasy. They made a near­sighted, 5­foot, 6­inch writer feel like part of every cockpit crew who ever flew the line. So I welcome this book as a long­delayed tribute to the union of U.S. air line pilots—each and every one of them sworn to uphold ALPA’s motto: Schedule with Safety. Robert J. Serling Tucson, Ariz. viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS It is always difficult for an author to acknowledge his indebtedness to those who have helped him, largely because limitation of space means he must omit many names. In an oral history such as this, those who submitted to tape­recorded interviews can see in the pages of the book the fruit of their patience, but many others who sat for equally lengthy interviews will see no trace of their participation. These omissions do not mean, however, that the many dozens of sources for this book whose specific recollections do not ap­ pear herein have wasted their time. I have been helped greatly by all of them, and were it not for their kindness, my understanding of the history of ALPA would be poorer, as would the story which follows. That said, I must begin by paying tribute to Colonel Carroll V. Glines (USAF, Ret.), ALPA’s director of communications, who first suggested in 1979 that I might like to undertake a commemorative history to mark the fiftieth anniversary of ALPA’s founding. I was initially skeptical about the project, largely because I didn’t want to jeopardize my scholarly indepen­ dence by writing a captive history subject to narrow censorship. C. V. Glines put those fears to rest, and I can honestly say that in the three years I worked on Flying the Line not once did an ALPA officer or staff member interfere in any way with my interpretation of ALPA’s history. More fundamental to my skepticism about undertaking a history of ALPA was my doubt about completing the project in a mere three years. My first book on ALPA, The Airline Pilots: A Study in Elite Unionization (Harvard University Press, 1971), took four years to write, and it covered only the for­ mative years through 1938! How, I wondered, could anyone do justice to the long sweep of years since then and still have a manuscript ready by 1981, the half­centennial of ALPA’s founding? After much discussion with C. V. Glines and a review of ALPA’s archival material at Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University in Detroit, I agreed to undertake the project. Professor Phil Mason, director of the Ar­ chives of Labor and Urban Affairs at Wayne State, had the foresight to collect ALPA’s historical