Clipper Skipper

(See Cover)

In the bar of Lisbon's small and elegant Hotel Aviz, where most globe-trotters halt for a quick refresher, one wall is covered with the exploits of Diaz, Da Gama, Magellan and other great Portuguese explorers. On the opposite wall, a plaque pays tribute to the foremost explorer of the modern world of the air--Juan Terry Trippe. The plaque commemorates the rediscovery of the old world by the new: the first passenger flight of Trippe and his Pan American Airways Dixie Clipper from the U.S. to Lisbon on June 28, 1939.

Last week Juan Trippe was ready to guide his Pan American Airways in a great new adventure which would make the world every man's oyster. And like the old Portuguese captains, who held a last open house on their high-pooped ships before they sailed off, Juan Trippe was also showing off his newest ship of the air. The ship was a great, fat-bellied Boeing Stratocruiser, the first delivered to any airline. When it flew into Boston last week, it created the biggest stir since Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis landed there in 1927 on its triumphal tour.

Some 50,000 people ("a milling, surging, disorderly crowd," sniffed the surprised Boston Herald) broke through police lines to rubberneck at the world's newest and biggest (71 1/4 tons), fanciest and fastest (up to 375 m.p.h.) commercial airliner. When it paused at Hartford, 30,000 gawking sightseers eddied past its figure8 fuselage. At Chicago, crowds jostled for peeks at its spiral staircase and its underbelly cocktail lounge with fuchsia-colored seats. Then it headed for San Francisco, soon dropped down on the International Air Terminal.

Next week, wearing a crepe-paper lei on its shiny nose, it will take off for Honolulu, thus putting the first Stratocruiser into commercial service on the San Francisco-Honolulu eight-hour run. Next month a second plane will probably start on the New York-Bermuda run; by fall, Trippe's $30 million fleet of 20 Stratocruisers will be deployed over Pan American's global route pattern, boosting the airline's carrying capacity a huge 40%. They will further shrink a world which aviation long ago, for better or worse, made small.

Time & Money. With his new Boeings, Trippe hopes to revolutionize air travel, just as the Stratocruiser's older brother, the 6-29, rewrote the book on strategic bombing. Trippe wants to open the way to globe-trotting to millions.

It was the old luxury approach which limited travel by air. Trippe proclaims in his high and earnest voice: "The average man has been the prisoner of two keepers, time and money." Having conquered time, Trippe hopes to cut fares so that anybody with a two-week vacation --the Detroit auto mechanic and the Oak Park schoolmarm--can "spend it abroad. His eventual goal: a $200 round trip to London, with other foreign fares to match. He is ready to cut the present round trip London fare of $630 ($466.70 on a special winter rate) to $405, whenever his foreign and U.S. competitors will string along (they control fares on the North Atlantic through the International Air Transport Association). Such a cut would put it well under first-class steamer rates.*

In Trippe's world trading view, such mass tourism, besides being fun for the tourist and a source of profit for Pan American Airways, is also a painless means to a practical end. It is an ideal way of spreading U.S. dollars abroad, so that the world can pay for U.S. exports. Last year American tourists spent $850 million overseas. Trippe preaches that if such spending could be multiplied, it would take much of the cost of EGA and other world recovery programs off the taxpayer's back and strengthen the U.S. as a trading nation.

To lure his customers abroad with all the comforts of home, Trippe is promoting an $80 million chain of eleven tourist hotels. Local capital is financing them, but Pan Am's Intercontinental Hotels Corp., holding a token 1% interest, will run them. Costing $5 to $10 million each, they will dot South America, with more to be built later in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. One in Montevideo is almost finished; others are abuilding in Caracas and Bogota.

Fly Away. Even now, well-heeled nomads can outdo Phileas Fogg by taking a trip around the world in 6 1/2 days for only $1,700. Returning from such a jaunt, wiry Eddie Eagan, New York State boxing commissioner and a Yale classmate ('21) of Trippe's, assured the Circumnavigators Club that it was a cinch: all you needed was a toothbrush, a good book and a few sleeping pills.

Foreign air travel does not have to be that strenuous. Last week the thousands who flitted between the continents at high speed found plane riding at least as comfortable as a Greyhound bus, perhaps a little more confining, but with vastly more fun at the stopovers.

Trippers who island-hopped through the turquoise Caribbean were met at San Juan by a waiter with trays of Daiquiris. At Trinidad, they heard the calypso singers and the throbbing steel bands, and found everything up-to-date: the airport was an awkward 17 miles from Port of Spain. At musty Belem, they were met by the weird sounds & sights of the jungle and, in the air-conditioned bar of Pan Am's guest house, by a more startling sight--the statue of a single-breasted Amazon.

After flying down to Rio, and running a gantlet of unhurried customs men, they sprawled on curving Copacabana Beach, drank mild guarana in the cafes, and stared at the jungled hillsides, splashed with the purple bloom of the quaresma, the "tree of Lent."

They got used to new smells--including the acrid insecticides that were sprayed through the plane before tropical stops. On the 8 1/2-hour hop across the South Atlantic to Dakar, plane riders learned how uneventful a trip could be: in hours of staring out the window, a pair of rocks in mid-Atlantic called Peter & Paul was all there was to see below. They talked, drank cocktails, ate from trays, played gin rummy, and waited for the ocean to end at Dakar. Some flew the new air trade route south to "Jo'burg" (Johannesburg). Others went north to Lisbon where they found the almond trees blooming by day and the mournful fado echoing in the cafes at night.

The New Ocean. "The air," wrote Sir George Cayley, an 18th Century plane designer (who never got off the ground), "is an uninterrupted, navigable ocean that comes to the threshold of every man's door." It remained for Trippe to use the air to build an empire.

To many Americans, Trippe's given name sounds vaguely like some foreigner's; to many Latin Americans, the Juan sounds vaguely like some countryman's. Both notions are wrong, although the second has had its subtle advantages in his diplomacy south of the border. The name came from his Aunt Juanita Terry; he speaks neither Spanish nor Portuguese. He comes from a long line of Marylanders, one of whom fought in the battle of Tripoli.

An erect, well-knit six-footer, Trippe, at 49, still packs the same weight (1961bs.) that he carried in college. He runs his global empire from a barren, middling-sized headquarters on the 58th floor of Manhattan's Chrysler Building. There, he swivels between a clean work table, where he does his conferring, and a rolltop desk (always locked when he is away), where he does his thinking, figuring and secret dreaming. Close at hand are two small globes. (The big three-foot one on which he used to plan his routes and spot his far-flung bases, measuring off the distances with pieces of string, has been placed in the Institute of the Aeronautical Sciences.)

To his staffers he is something of a mystic, inclined to mull over big plans while he puffs on a pipe or a 10-c- cigar. Then, with every detail worked out in his mind, he springs his ideas without warning. Sometimes, when crossed in an argument, he will seem to fumble for words, with a disarming, apologetic smile, a brown-eyed stare, and an Oh-gosh stammer. "That's the time to look out," says a man who has been fencing with him for years. "He's never fumbling for ideas; his mind simply outruns his tongue."

The Captain. Though Trippe is surrounded by crack engineers, and financial and diplomatic experts, he runs Pan Am as a one-man show--and no one ever forgets it. His tight-fisted rule has been shaken more than once, but never broken.

In 1939, Cornelius Vanderbilt ("Sonny") Whitney, a Yale schoolmate, and at the time Pan Am's board chairman, teamed up with some directors against Trippe. They felt that Trippe was spending too much on new planes and routes, instead of on dividends. They shunted Trippe aside and Whitney took over. But Whitney was unable to take over the thousand & one details of Pan Am's far-flung operations which Trippe kept in his head.

After ten months of floundering around, Whitney was glad to step aside and let Trippe take over again. The lesson was plain: Trippe would run things his own way because he had shown that he was the only man who could run them.

Pinfeathers. One reason he could was the fact that he has been living his job all his life. As a ten-year-old, he flew homemade model planes in Manhattan's Central Park. At the Hill School, classmates nicknamed the quiet youth "The Mummy"; but at Yale, Trippe blossomed out, went in for crew, swimming and football. "I was a guard," he grins, "on a very poor football squad--we lost twice to Harvard and twice to Princeton in my two years."

After service as a World War I Navy pilot (he did not get overseas), he returned to Yale's Sheffield Scientific School. He organized a flying club and an intercollegiate air meet, which he helped to win in a souped-up Jennie. He also became fast friends with a rough-cut classmate named Samuel F. Pryor, now his right-hand man. The old school tie is strong at Pan Am: Vice Presidents Howard B. Dean, Franklin Gledhill and David S. Ingalls were all Trippe contemporaries at Yale.

Three years out of college, he helped organize Colonial Air Transport, which won the first U.S. airmail contract. But when he daringly proposed that little Colonial's Boston-New York route be stretched all the way to Florida, his staid New England backers were alarmed. Trippe pulled out, having learned a lesson: never to take a board of directors into his confidence until his plans were all set.

Though the U.S. had no international air policy in the early '20s--and did not even know that it needed one--Trippe did. In 1927, while Sonny Whitney lined up $300,000 capital, Trippe merged three aviation firms into what eventually became Pan American Airways, and started flying the 110-mile Key West-to-Cuba route.

He lost no time in donning his seven-league boots. Working hand in glove with the post office, he won contracts to fly to San Juan and the Canal Zone, and overnight was assured $2,500,000 a year in mail revenue for ten years. Pan Am began the year 1929 with no miles of routes; at year's end it had 11,000. By 1930, at the age of three, Pan Am was the world's longest airline, and still is.

Birdmen in Serge. From the start, Trippe's was a seagoing airline. His "captains" and "first officers," dressed in blue serge, talked in knots instead of miles per hour. On long overwater flights they flew by celestial navigation. While they piled up experience on the short Caribbean hops, their boss, with vast energy, got ready to send them across the oceans. He worked with planemakers to turn out the flying boats he needed, sent Charles A. Lindbergh, a consultant to Pan Am, on Great Circle survey flights to the Orient. Trippe's agents roamed south, east and west lining up the exclusive landing franchises that paved the way for mail contracts. In island chains and jungles, his crews hacked out airports, strung together radio and weather networks. The better to feed his mushrooming lines, he formed a brood of subsidiaries and affiliates, of which he still has 18; the biggest are Pan American-Grace Airways and Panair do Brasil.** Whenever competitors tried to horn in, quick-thinking, quick-moving Juan Trippe managed to outfly them, outflank them or simply outlast them.

Across the Seas. If frontal attacks failed, Trippe was ready with an end-around play. In 1930, he made a deal with the British for landing rights so that Pan Am could fly the Atlantic. But he agreed to wait till the British were ready to fly too. By December 1934, when his Martin 1305, the first clippers, were ready, the British were not. Trippe.called in his staff and said: "We'll fly the Pacific instead." When the balky British refused him entry into Hong Kong, Trippe sent his planes to nearby Macao. Hong Kong merchants raised such a howl that the British backed down and let Trippe in.

Five years after the Martin 130, Trippe got his famed Boeing 314 flying boats, and the British were still not ready to fly the Atlantic. But when he got rights to land at Lisbon and Marseille, they wearily told him he might as well come along to Southampton.

All along his road to empire, he competed with the empire-building air routes of the British, Dutch, French, Nazis and Italians, and usually won a place for Pan Am. He negotiated his own treaties with 62 foreign governments. "If Pan American had let the State Department deal with these countries in its behalf," Trippe says, "the U.S. would have had to grant reciprocal landing rights, and today would be crisscrossed with foreign carriers. As it was, by doing its own negotiating, Pan American had to offer nothing but air service."

War Horse. The day after Pearl Harbor, this air service became a prime military asset to the U.S. as a means of quick transport across the oceans. On the routes which Trippe had first plotted with a piece of string on the globe in his office, the armed forces built their huge transport service. Drafted by the Army & Navy as a contract carrier, Pan Am ferried high brass, spies, planes and war materials into Africa, Europe and Asia, and built 53 airports. Its payroll swelled from 4)395 to 88,000 and its Lisbon base for a time was the only Allied radio outpost on the Continent.

There were complaints from the Army & the Navy that Pan Am's expenses and accident rate ran too high and that it sometimes gave its own cargoes priority over theirs. But a report by MATS, the combined Army-Navy transport services, this month summed up: "The importance of P.A.A. bases established before the war to the success of the South Atlantic ferrying and transport route cannot be overestimated."

In the Capital. For its negotiating at home & abroad, Pan Am has a crack diplomatic corps topped, of course, by Trippe, who is his own persuasive, far-seeing secretary of state. He keeps on excellent terms with 73 nations, running all the way from democracies to dictatorships, by a simple rule: he never ties himself to any political party, and he keeps his political opinions to himself.

Under the increasing strictures of state control--and in a closely regulated industry--he has also managed to keep a maximum of freedom because, as one politico commented: Trippe has not wasted his time and strength fighting regulation; he has learned to make it work for him. He did well under a Republican administration, did even better under the New Deal. His political fences are always carefully tended. Pan Am Vice President Pryor, onetime Republican national committeeman from Connecticut, knows his way round G.O.P. circles in Washington. On the Democratic side, Pan Am has Vice President J. Carroll Cone, onetime Army pilot and all-around air expert, who campaigned and raised money for Truman before Philadelphia and helped keep his native Arkansas from going over to Dixiecrat Thurmond.

To this combination, Trippe adds meticulous planning--and an allout attack. Said one bureaucrat: "When you close the door to Pan Am, it comes in the window. And when you close the window, there they are, coming right through the wall." Trippe usually gets what he wants by getting there first.

New Dealing James M. Landis, ex-chairman of CAB and of SEC, who has had many dealings with Trippe, says: "Juan Trippe is thinking about the next decade ... If anybody ever flies to the moon, the very next day Trippe will ask CAB to authorize regular service."

Stay-at-Home. At home, with his handsome wife Elizabeth (a sister of ex-Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius***), Trippe is a relaxed and placid parent, a two-Scotches-before-dinner man who likes to hear all about his four children's day in school. The Trippes see little of Manhattan's night life. They usually spend Trippe's off hours at home in their big apartment on fashionable Gracie Square, a stone's pitch from Mayor O'Dwyer's mansion and the tooting tugs on the East River. (A deafening blast once startled a telephoner into asking Mrs. Trippe: "Madame, do you live on a barge?")

What entertaining they do is largely confined to aviation people or representatives of nations with which Pan American has air agreements. Adaptable Mrs. Trippe has had to learn to chat intelligently about everything from "chosen instruments" to wing loadings. She learned from the start the importance of the air. On their wedding day in June 1928, while friends gathered on Long Island for the ceremony, Trippe put in a brisk morning's work at the office. He barely made it on time. Said a friend: "Juan's idea of relaxing is to sit up till 2 a.m. talking aviation." Even so, he bounds out of bed at 7, can get along on five hours' sleep.

The Trippes weekend at an eight-room French Provincial-style house in a patch of woods near Greenwich, Conn., hard by the Round Hill Club where "Tripper," as some golf partners call him, plays up to 36 holes a day, usually shooting in the low 80s. In the summers the Trippes take their 16-year-old daughter, Betty, and three young sons, Charles, John and Edward, to a rambling, grey-shingled house on the ocean's edge at East Hampton, L.I., where Trippe likes to swim and surffish with the boys, exercising hard to work off tension. In winter the whole family occasionally goes skiing in a body.

As airline executive, Juan Trippe gets a salary of $23,050 a year. His fortune stems from what he has been able to make on Pan American stock, of which he owns or controls some 69,000 shares (now worth 1,000), only 1.1% of Pan Am's 6,145,082 shares. Said one friend: "Trippe doesn't care about making money. He's thinking in terms of domination of the air."

Pink of Condition. In 1949, the network that Juan Trippe built is one of the healthiest in the industry. Last week, releasing its 1948 financial report, Pan American estimated its net income at $4,590,000 (nearly 50% above its 1947 net), on $145,216,000 worth of business, including $32 million in mail pay.

Pan American's 152 land planes (the flying boats have been retired) fly 61,038 route miles. The line's safety record is one of the best, thanks in great part to Vice President Andre Priester, 57, a brilliant engineer who for 22 years has been in charge of Pan Am's planes, maintenance, traffic guides, etc., and is fondly called "our Steinmetz" by Pan Am men.

Battle Royal. For the first time, Pan Am is now facing serious competition by U.S. airlines on its richest routes. A fortnight ago, Braniff Airways started a new service to Rio de Janeiro. For ten years Trippe had argued against more U.S. competition on international routes (although some customers had felt that as Pan Am's competition increased, its service improved). Instead he propagandized for a monopoly-like "community company" (one U.S. flag line owned by U.S. airlines, railways, etc.) which was, in effect, a "chosen instrument," as the best way to meet foreign carriers. Almost all other U.S. airlines were against it. They feared--without reason, says Trippe--that he and Pan Am would end up running the show. Trippe shelved his plans.

"If Congress and CAB want competition," he says, "we'll be glad to operate under that policy. It will just be a matter of time to find out who's right."

Though the question has not been finally answered, the evidence so far seems to be proving Trippe right. The three U.S. airlines in the North Atlantic--Pan Am, T.W.A. and American Overseas Airlines (a subsidiary of American Airlines)--were carrying 71% of the air passengers on the North Atlantic a year ago. Now, because of gains by foreign airlines, U.S. lines carry only 61%. American Overseas is already pulling out of the field. It is ready to sell out to Pan Am, if CAB permits, because it does not think there is enough business for all. In a two-way race, T.W.A. would not be able to furnish tough competition for Pan Am for long, unless it was shored up by heavier subsidies and other means. If competition alone were the deciding factor, Pan Am might soon, in effect, be the U.S. chosen instrument in the North Atlantic by default.

Pan Am is also in a mood to get in and compete in the U.S. domestic field. It is mulling over plans to buy into National Airlines on the East Coast (TIME, March 21) and Western Airlines on the Pacific, thus get its foot into the domestic door for the first time. All the deals would have to be approved by CAB, but CAB apparently takes a favorable view of them. CAB is already echoing what Trippe said three years ago, that there is not room enough for all the airlines now flying and that "sensible mergers" should be made.

Trippe hopes that eventually CAB and U.S. airmen will come around to his way of thinking, as some of them have already done. In any case, he holds that the big job of U.S. airlines is not merely to scramble to get the biggest share of present business, but to go after the new business. Says he: "We've passed out of the exploration stage. Now we're going to cross the bridge into volume operation. There's a tremendous market to tap. This business is just getting started."

* Of the 775,000 who crossed the Atlantic in 1948, about 225,000 flew. But the fast-expanding airlines expect to overtake the shipping lines by 1955.

** Others: Compania Mexicana de Aviacion, S.A. (called CMA), Aerovias Nacionales de Colombia (AVIANCA for short, successor to the German-controlled SCADTA), Compania Cubana de Aviacion, S.A., China National Aviation Corp. (or CNAC, quaintly called "Middle Kingdom Space Machine Family" by the Chinese) and small Uraba Medellin & Central Airways, Inc., operating between the Canal Zone and Colombia.

*** For other news of Ed Stettinius see EDUCATION.

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