Flights Canceled

Touching down at Boston's Logan Airport in the small hours one morning last week after a flight from New York, American Airlines Flight 116 routinely rolled to the terminal, discharged 62 passengers. Then, in a grim departure from routine, the DC-6--strikebound American's last flight--rolled away to join 194 other planes already grounded indefinitely at airports around the U.S. Unable to reach agreement on a new contract covering its 1,500 American Airlines members, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. Air Line Pilots Association highest salaried and most intensively trained of all U.S. unions, had struck the largest U.S. airline, left thousands of holiday travelers digging desperately for other ways to get there.

The strike against American, which flies 24,000 passengers daily east and west, had been building since ALPA's contract expired 16 months ago. A principal point at issue in the onrushing jet age: whether the third man in the jet cockpit should be a pilot or flight engineer. ALPA and American had reached an informal agreement by adding a fourth man as third pilot. But then they disagreed on wages and flying hours for crews of both jet and piston-driven planes. American offered substantial wage increases, e.g., from $19,200 annually to $28,000 for eight-year pilots, but demanded that pilots continue to fly 85 hours a month, the maximum allowed by the old contract. ALPA asked a scale up to $27,500 for the same senior pilots, but wanted monthly flying time cut to 75 hours. Unable to resolve the differences, union and management broke off negotiations, and ALPA grounded pilots as each post-midnight flight ended. No pickets appeared. Said one pilot: "Why should we walk a picket line? Nobody's going to fly the airplanes if we're not there."

The walkout meant that two of the four major U.S. airlines were at a standstill. Eastern Air Lines, largest operator on north-south air routes, has been strikebound since the flight engineers' union walked out Nov. 24 in a disagreement over jet crew makeup. With airline flights 60% of normal, and the first of the holiday traffic on the move, thousands of travelers last week milled around terminals, reached destinations by circuitous routes and even by railroads and buses. The irony of it all: just when U.S. commercial aviation was entering a brand-new era, it was being assailed by the kind of featherbedding demands and jurisdictional disputes that smacked of hardening arteries.

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