Cockpit Crisis

It started as an insignificant wildcat walkout of a few flight engineers on overseas airliners in New York. Before it ended in an inconclusive truce six days later, it had staggered U.S. airlines with the most crippling strike in their history. It was not a strike against employers, but against a ruling by an agency of the U.S. Government--and all because the 3,500 members of the Flight Engineers' International Association feared that through that ruling they might lose their jobs in the cockpits to pilots.

Before the bizarre strike was over, the seven struck airlines--American, Pan American, Trans World, Eastern, National, Western and Flying Tiger--lost $40 million in business, and the 84,000 nonstriking employees they had to furlough lost millions more in wages. Others also paid heavily. Miami's tourist business lost $3,000,000 a day.

What could not be measured was the widespread inconvenience and sometimes the anguish. A Dallas woman could not join her husband, who was facing delicate brain surgery 800 miles away; a widow was stuck at Miami's airport while her husband was being buried in New York. Jammed trains and buses could not handle the overflow, although strangely enough unstruck airlines often flew with empty seats because travelers assumed that it would do no good to try to get on. One businessman trapped in Los Angeles with an important appointment in New York let nothing stop him: he flew Scandinavian Airlines over the North Pole to Copenhagen, then to New York with a stopover in Greenland -- a 30-hour, 10,000-mile trip.

Third-Man Theme. The tie-up was a culmination of the No. 1 labor fight of the jet age between the golden-winged Air Line Pilots Association and the flight engineers' union. When engineers first went on planes after World War II, they had no quarrel with the pilots. Engineers were primarily flying mechanics, making preflight checkups, minor repairs, helping the pilot check on instruments during flights. But as the complicated jets came along, the jobs changed. Maintenance men did the checking up, and the engineers only checked dials and gauges in the air, worked closely with the pilots.

At the same time, the jetliners were bringing problems to the pilots' union: one of the big planes could do the work of three piston transports, and pilots were being laid off. For safety's sake, the pilots' union argued, every jet should have three pilots. It did not care if there was an engineer, too. The airlines accused the union of featherbedding; but in a series of strikes beginning with Eastern in 1958, the union won a third pilot on many lines in addition to the engineer. Since then, most of the major airlines have carried a four-man jet crew.

United Ahead. But not United Air Lines. Its cagey president, William A. ("Pat'') Patterson, for a long time had realized that new planes might need three pilots in the cockpit, but that one should be a combination engineer-pilot because they did not need a flight engineer. Back in 1954 he elevated the job to a training ground for future pilots, flew his jets with only three-man crews. This gave the A.L.P.A.'s President Clarence N. Sayen an opening: he asked the National Mediation Board, which has jurisdiction over labor questions on airlines and railroads under the Railway Labor Act, to rule on whether there should be one union or two on United's flight deck.

After a two-year study, the Mediation Board produced a 22-page document declaring that the flight engineer's duties have been so changed by the jets that "on United, the gap between the flight engineer and pilot, in respect to duties, functions and proficiencies, has steadily closed," so a vote should be taken to see if one union should represent them.

Code Word. The ruling chilled the engineers. There was no doubt that A.L.P.A. could easily win the election to represent United's flight crews, since pilots outnumber engineers. If this set a precedent for other airlines, the engineers' union feared that it would be out of business; engineers knew that if they were forced in with Sayen's pilots, they would go to the bottom of every seniority list and be the first ones bumped out of jobs.

Ironically, United, where all the trouble started, flew smoothly on; only a few of its 600 engineers are not pilots also. They saw no reason to strike. At the other airlines, where the engineers are not pilot-trained, their job fears were so great that for five days they defied President Kennedy's order to return to work. To evade the presidential order against striking, the engineers' tough President Ronald A. Brown declared it an unauthorized walkout and sent out pleas to his men to come back. The men knew they were not supposed to heed his public pleas unless they contained a secret code word.

The tie-up finally ended after long negotiations by Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg. His plan: a 90-day truce with no reprisals against the engineers while a three-man fact-finding board studied the situation. Only Western Air Line President Terrell Drinkwater refused to settle, angrily began hiring pilots to replace his 130 striking engineers.

In the long run, the President's fact-finders have no power to change the Mediation Board's decision on United. If the engineers are not satisfied with the decision of the President's board, the public may once again be stranded in airports. The engineers may have powerful allies next time. In the past they have twice been sustained in strikes by loans from James Hoffa's Teamsters Union, and they may join him. However, aviation's progress seems to make inevitable some solution along the lines of United's system, in which the engineers all learn to be pilots, with sufficient guarantees that they will not lose their jobs in the meantime. Those who cannot qualify as pilots may need guarantees that they can keep their jobs until the usual long-term job attrition eliminates them.

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