Hard Landing (41 page)

CHAPTER 10

BREAKING RANKS

A
s employees, pilots are a difficult lot. By convention and necessity they are the masters of their vessels, answerable to no one for as long as the engines are running. Airline presidents have the power to control entire fleets, to decide where and when every plane shall fly. But once those decisions are made, no one tells the pilot how, or even whether, to fly.

From its origins flying was touted as a libidinal experience for men, or at the very least something that intensified their masculinity, in the manner of sports and soldiering. A 1920s-era ad for a flying school appeared under the headline “The Aviator—The
Superman of Now,” to which it added, “Flying is the greatest sport of red-blooded, virile manhood.” The
official history of the pilots’ union notes that men had always been drawn to piloting in part for “the looks they got from attractive young women.”

To the extent that flying was deemed a masculine endeavor, it was all but forbidden for women. The writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who spent years flying for a predecessor company of Air France, once declared, “Flying is
a man’s job and its worries are a man’s worries.” Amelia Earhart
had to be accompanied by her father on her first flight because of the pilot’s conviction that women might become hysterical when flying. Earhart’s fame was attributable in no
small measure to the uncanny physical resemblance she bore to a notable, male aviator: “Isn’t she like Lindbergh!” one newsreel announcer proclaimed.

For most of airline history, and never more so than in the 1970s, the military served as the
airlines’ farm club, turning out three quarters of the pilots who entered commercial aviation each year. These men were selected, both by the military and the airlines, in part according to whether they fit a paradoxical psychological profile: capable of operating well within a rigorous, rule-bound system, but also given to extreme independence and self-assuredness of judgment when the situation demanded. It was precisely this combination of attributes that also made pilots prone to unionism.

The founder of their union, David Behncke, had been
a barnstormer, rising to prominence by campaigning for the installation of hoods over cockpits in commercial airplanes; up to that point the cockpit was usually exposed to the wind and the elements, the better to give pilots the feel of the slipstream. Behncke got the Air Line Pilots Association off the ground by shrewdly ingratiating himself with Franklin Roosevelt, becoming the only prominent figure in the industry to defend Roosevelt’s seizure of the airmail routes in the wake of the spoils conference. Roosevelt made a point of including the following language in the legislation that ultimately restored the routes to private contractors: “
Public safety calls for pilots of high character and great skill.… Therefore the law should provide for a method to fix maximum hours and minimum pay.” In other words, in order to get an airmail contract, an airline would have to allow ALPA on the premises.

It is safe to say that the power
went to Behncke’s head. He treated his own employees so abusively that they formed a union themselves, which he refused to recognize. In the late 1940s Behncke presided over the construction of a new union headquarters near Chicago’s Midway Airport, demanding alignment of the screws and bolts along a precise north-south axis. Behncke was ultimately thrown out of ALPA after the entire organization had defected to a rival union and he had changed the locks to prevent any of the old members from sneaking into the building. He was dead of a heart attack six months later, at age 55, in 1953.

But his creation of ALPA was an enduring legacy, and a vital one
as the industry underwent its rapid evolution. Paying pilots was a simple matter when they spent an entire shift flying at 175 miles an hour or less. But the advent of new technology—four-engine airplanes that nearly doubled the speed of flight, followed by jets that doubled it again—made the issue of pilot pay vastly more complex. Flight times were often shorter than the time spent waiting for the next leg of a journey or waiting to leave the gate in the first place. From the pilots’ point of view, getting paid simply to fly was insufficient; they also wanted to be paid to wait. At the same time, while bigger and faster planes enabled the airlines to carry more passengers on a single flight, pilots demanded premium rates of pay according to the size and speed of the planes they flew. Over the years these demands created many rigorously formalized rules governing pilot pay.

The most precious asset of any pilot was his seniority. Seniority determined not only the size and speed of the aircraft a pilot could fly but also whether he flew with the stripes of a second officer, first officer, or captain. Dr. Ludwig Lederer, the corporate physician at American Airlines in the 1970s, remarked that “
the pilot’s life is founded on three things: sex, seniority, and salary, in that order.”

If it is fair to stereotype people according to the profession they have chosen, doing so with pilots is easy. They are macho, chesty, often full of themselves, and sometimes downright overbearing; theirs, as Lindbergh once remarked, was an activity in which “man is more than man.” At the same time pilots as a group top the scales in pure intelligence. They are decisive and usually passionately committed to an outcome.

Among them, no one displayed these traits more plainly than Dick Ferris.

Ferris’s wife, Kelsey, worked hard to keep their three sons from knowing how important their father was becoming in the hierarchy of United Airlines. But after Ferris was named the president of United in 1974, their subdivision in suburban Northbrook, north of Chicago, was buzzing with gossip. Was it true, eight-year-old Andrew Ferris wanted to know, that his father had gotten a big promotion?

Kelsey Ferris decided it was time the boys knew. “Yes,” she said.

“Oh! Is he finally
getting to be a pilot?”

Andrew’s question was entirely apt. A United 747 captain named Jack Starr told Ferris that the president of United Airlines ought to know
how to fly and offered to make a pupil of Ferris. Ferris initially demurred, saying he was too busy. Then, on a flight from the West Coast with his boss Eddie Carlson, Ferris reached into his travel bag and pulled out some flying manuals that Starr had left in his office to whet his interest.

“What are you doing?” Carlson demanded.

Carlson was horrified that Ferris would even consider taking up flying. The presidency of United was too demanding, and there were risks in learning to fly. But the chairman’s disapproval was like a
starting flag waving in Ferris’s face.

Ferris was a natural pilot, Starr would later comment. “
He listens, cooperates, thinks, responds quickly, and is basically an aggressive personality.” When
Fortune
magazine found out that the new president of United was learning to fly, it crowned him “
fearless Dick Ferris.” After only six hours of instruction Ferris was flying solo. Later he flew Learjets. Ultimately, when placing one of the biggest aircraft orders in history, Ferris made a side deal in which the head of Boeing agreed to schedule Ferris at the controls for one of the first test runs ever conducted for the big new
Boeing 767 jet.

In addition to personal gratification there was practical virtue in Dick Ferris’s new hobby. Ever since the bitter battle over the three-man cockpit, the pilots’ union had been estranged from management at United. Even Eddie Carlson had
failed to gain the full trust of the pilot workforce. Dick Ferris’s becoming a pilot would begin to break the cycle of suspicion at United. Here at last, in the pilots’ view, was a president who cared, who took such an interest in their work that he went to the extraordinary time and trouble to learn the job himself (even if doing so was as much fun as a fellow could have). Ferris, the pilots realized, would understand, even if he didn’t fully agree with, the arcana of work rules. He would acquire a more profound appreciation than the average CEO for the delicacy of safety, for the infinitesimal tolerances of flying, for the skill necessary to save an airplane in a vulnerable position. Indeed Ferris in later years would experience firsthand the shock of
losing an engine past the point of no return on a takeoff roll. He would once watch his instruments
flicker into darkness due to an electrical malfunction. Ferris would know piloting and he would know pilots. The leadership of the pilots’ union embraced Ferris and his management so totally that they awarded him a union seniority number. He was literally one of them.

When the pilots’ contract was up for renewal in 1981, Ferris, in a radical departure from industry practice, personally involved himself in the nitty-gritty of the talks. His goals were to get the pilots to fly more hours per month and to break at last the three-man cockpit.
Ferris gave money to the union to finance a series of weekly informational newsletters that reflected his point of view. He opened the company’s books to union representatives. He schmoozed the rank and file at every opportunity. And grasping the power of the new, high-cost communications technology becoming available, he sent video messages by satellite and distributed videocassettes to the company’s pilot “domiciles” around the country. Gathered around the big screen, the United pilots witnessed an act of male genius. “Some of
your golf games are getting too good,” Ferris scolded them. “I’ll see you get 15 days off [a month] and that you are the best paid in the business. But the rest of the time your heart and your body and your soul are mine.”

With Ferris’s charismatic coaxing, the United pilots overwhelmingly assented. The new work agreement, with more flying per month and the abolition of the three-man cockpit on small jets, was such a departure from past practice that it became known as the “
blue skies” contract, a name taken from the blue books in which contracts were published. Ferris, to be sure, made some concessions of his own. He promised never to establish a nonunion runaway shop, as Frank Lorenzo had with New York Air. He vowed to furlough no pilots. And he agreed to major increases in pay; a 747 captain in the early 1980s would pull down $161,000 a year, about twice what most of Ferris’s middle managers earned.

“We just entered
a new era of labor management relationships here,” John F. Ferg, the union’s chief negotiator, proclaimed.

Ferris was riding high. Before long, in April 1982, Eddie Carlson retired from his chairman’s position with the parent company, UAL, Inc., leaving Ferris alone at the top—and more indomitable than ever. “
Eighty to 90 percent of my time is spent working with people: getting them to do what I want them to do, when I want them to do
it, and, most importantly, getting them to do it willingly,” Ferris explained to a group of business school students at Purdue, without acknowledging a trace of irony. “That’s my job.”

He could not be still. Like an adolescent boy unconsciously bouncing his knee under his desk in algebra class, Ferris
squirmed and fidgeted behind his massive desk, custom-built from granite, at United headquarters in Elk Grove Village. No matter how hard he was working, sitting at a desk made Ferris feel sedentary, so he outfitted his office with
a podium so that he could work standing up.

He called together his station managers from around the country and sternly forced them to defend every dollar in their budgets (much as Bob Crandall did at American). One by one they gave their reports, in alphabetical order according to the cities they managed (except for the poor soul from Hawaii, who had to go first because his flight home left so early). Ferris listened intently, glowering at anything that displeased him. The sessions grew so confrontational that the managers awaited their turns with sweat running down their backs, nervously making face and finger gestures at each other while the boss was concentrating on somebody else.

In much the way that a pilot feels toward his aircraft, Ferris by 1984 was feeling proprietary toward United Airlines. The company at last was making real money. Meanwhile, however, the takeover mania sweeping the oil industry was showing signs that it might metastasize to commercial aviation. Ferris was panicked at the thought that his great airline—the airline that he was at last turning around—might fall prey to some raider.

In August 1984 Ferris convened an emergency meeting of his board of directors. Board meetings simply did not occur in August. “
What the hell is this about?” the directors asked one another as they arrived.

Ferris told the directors of his takeover fears. “I’ve
worked too hard and given too much of my life to this company to let that happen,” he said.

Thus, he explained, he had taken steps to conduct a leveraged buyout of United in which he and a few other top members of management, and possibly the employees as well, would become the owners of the company. Ferris said he had already spoken to Goldman,
Sachs, the Tiffany of investment banks, which had expressed a willingness to arrange the billions of dollars in financing.

Ferris could see that he had stunned his board. “Our mouths were open,” director Charles Luce would later recall.