Trippe the Light Fantastic
What "The Aviator" got wrong.
SJ.com OpinionJournal
BY HAROLD EVANS
Saturday, February 26, 2005 12:01 a.m.
Everyone who sees the Oscar runaway nominee "The Aviator" will come away with a dark impression of the man Howard Hughes sees as his enemy--a plump Alec Baldwin playing Juan Trippe as the suavely conspiratorial head of Pan Am. The film deserves its acclaim because it captures the romantic and visionary spirit of risk-takers like Hughes who propelled America to new heights--but the image of Trippe as the bad guy has to be retrieved before it congeals in the popular imagination.
If you are one of the 3.6 billion who have flown on a 747, it's Trippe, not Hughes, who merits the raising of a turbulence-free glass. Mass international jet travel was Trippe's achievement. He deserves a movie of his own. Of course, the film is right that Trippe worked the Washington lobby to try and retain his prewar monopoly of international air services. Hughes, having acquired Trans World Airlines in May 1939, won that one, gaining permission to operate overseas in December 1945. But even before he went mad, Hughes never had the early vision that Trippe did. Even when LaGuardia was an amusement park, Trippe was more prescient than anyone, including his new best friend, Charles Lindbergh. Trippe was indeed a political operator, but was also the greatest creative force through four adventurous decades.
Here's a kid just two years out of Yale in 1924 who gives up an easy life on Wall Street to risk his neck and savings as an air-taxi pilot. He buys seven junked navy training planes for $500 each, and with six pals runs $5-a-time rides to the Long Island beaches from Coney Island. His baby business drowns in red ink, but Trippe is two jumps ahead of everyone when the U.S. invites bids to carry airmail--then the only viable form of commercial aviation. To bid for the Key West-Havana route, he flies secretly to Cuba and secures exclusive landing rights from its dictator. That is the trump card that enables him and his friends to acquire a little Caribbean puddle-jumper nobody has heard of: Pan American Airways. Only three years later, Trippe's airline is the world's largest with a monopoly through North, Central and South America.
Trippe was in perpetual quest of power not just in politics but engineering. He understood the purpose of technologies even before the men who developed them. His firsts are legion. His airline was the first to buy aircraft built to its own specifications, the first to operate four-engine flying boats to develop long-range weather forecasts, operate scheduled transatlantic services and international all-cargo aircraft; and Pan Am led the way with safety measures.
In his most spectacular prewar coup, he said Pan Am would fly mail and passengers across the Pacific--8,700 miles of ocean. His colleagues protested the absurdity: their Martin flying boat had a range of only 3,200 miles. Trippe always had an answer. He had quietly exhumed the charts of the old Clipper sailing ships in New York Public Library and spotted a dot barely visible on the biggest maps, an uninhabited bit of coral called Wake Island. Few knew it existed, seven years before it became the scene of American valor. Trippe built bases and hotels on Wake, Midway and Guam, and the brilliant Clipper services to Asia began on Nov. 2, 1935.
Postwar, Trippe fought for low fares against the cartel of operators in IATA. Britain actually stopped Pan Am flying into London with "tourist class" passengers. It took Trippe four years to batter down the cartel--but that was only the start of his postwar revolution. Lindbergh had come back from Europe in 1945 and alerted him to the jet engine. All the airlines were sure there was no future for the jet; they ordered turbo-props. But Trippe risked leapfrogging the turbos. He set his heart on building a jet capable of carrying 180 passengers non-stop across the Atlantic. None of the airframe makers was ready to attempt such a plane. Boeing expected gratitude from Trippe when they finally said they'd build a jet with a J-57 engine that could fly the Atlantic with one-stop. Trippe smiled and said No. Non-stop or nothing.
Trippe thus risked being shut out of the airline business by the late '50s, but through a summer of 1955, he kept hearing the sound of a Pratt and Whitney monster engine, the J-75, being secretly tested for the military in East Hartford, Conn. Pratt and Whitney refused to sell him the J-75. We're not sure how good it is, they told him. Come back in two years. He was back the next month, and the next. The climax of his campaign was the lunch where he put down a check for $40 million--and got the promise of 25 engines by 1959. But he had no airframes. He got them only by a cat-and-mouse game with Boeing and Douglas. In 1959, Trippe's jets flew New York to Paris in six hours 35 minutes, carrying twice as many people as the Stratocruiser in half the time and more smoothly at 32,000 feet.
At 65, Trippe could have rested on his laurels as the father of the jet age. Instead he campaigned for a wide-body airliner to carry at least 400. Boeing's Bill Allen and he did a deal fishing in Alaska. Trippe told Allen: "If you build it, I'll buy it." Allen replied, "If you buy it, I'll build it."
The advertisement for American technology flew in January 1970. In less than one year Pan Am safely introduced an entire fleet in a network linking the U.S. with 85 countries.
What drove Trippe? A fury that the future was always being hijacked by people with smaller ideas--by his first partners who did not want to expand airmail routes; by nations that protected flag carriers with subsidies; by the elitists who regarded flight, like luxury liners, as a privilege that could be enjoyed only by the few; by the cartel operators who rigged prices. The democratization he effected was as real as Henry Ford's. Any day, 900 Boeing 747s are in the air, carrying close to 500,000 people and 300,000 tons of cargo. It would not be happening without the "plotter" in "The Aviator."
Mr. Evans is the author of "They Made America," just out from Little, Brown.
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