An American Astronaut Saves the A300 and Airbus

The first several years of Airbus' existence after the first flight of the A300 were miserable ones as orders slowly trickled in while the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 and the Lockheed L-1011 Tristar were racking up order after order from the world's airlines. Between the end of 1975 and May of 1977, Airbus failed to get even a single order for the A300. The joke at the factory at Toulouse was "Don't miss the last train out of town to Germany" in reference to the large number of German workers present. Part of the problem was the recession in the wake of the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the Arab oil embargo on the West. But a big part of the problem was the Airbus was an upstart facing the powerful sales machines of Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, and Lockheed. For a lot of the world's airlines, buying the A300 simply wasn't on their radar screen. The program was in jeopardy and the member nations of the Airbus consortium were getting restless as debates continued on whether they'd misread the market or not. 

But all of that was to change with the passage of airline deregulation in the United States. The world's largest airline market in terms of passengers moved, breaking into the US market was a key goal for Airbus and one of the main reasons that they had sought the advice of Frank Kolk at American Airlines back in the late 1960s when the design was still being formalized. With deregulation, free market forces now determined routes, fares and frequencies on the US East Coast, one of the dominant legacy carriers was taking a severe beating on its prized routes between the US Northeast and Florida. Eastern found itself embroiled in a bruising market fight with National and Delta. Eastern was already operating the Lockheed Tristar on the routes and word got to Airbus that they were interested in a 200-seat aircraft with better operating economics than the Tristar. With only two engines, the fuel burn on the A300 was already lower than that of the Tristar and with 2/3 the seating capacity, Airbus felt they had an ideal product to meet Eastern's needs. 

Eastern had been in discussions with Boeing, Lockheed, and McDonnell Douglas already but Eastern's financial position in the wake its battle with National and Delta meant it needed an aircraft with better economics than the Tristar and it needed them at a sweet deal. On the day of the final sales presentations by the all the manufacturers, Airbus was slotted in to present to Eastern's management and its president, former Apollo 8 mission commander and astronaut Frank Borman. Airbus' team gave its presentation and then offered a sweetener- they had four "white tail" aircraft (completed A300s that had no buyers) that Eastern could immediately lease for a four month trial. If they were happy with the aircraft, they could order more. Borman sent word to Toulouse after deliberations "Congratulations, you've got a blue-eyed baby." It was the breakthrough that saved the A300 program- after a very successful trial, on 6 April 1978, Eastern ordered 23 A300s with options on more. But the bold move by Borman upset many. 

The Department of Commerce and some in the US government demanded an explanation from Borman. After all, political influence several years earlier was successful in steering Western Airlines away from the A300. Borman was accused of being anti-patriotic depsite his military and space records. Charles Forsyth, the VP for McDonnell Douglas, even angrily called Borman directly and accused him of being unpatriotic. Borman reportedly asked Forsyth what brand of luxury car he drove, knowing the answer wasn't American. Borman explained that the most valuable part of the Airbus A300 were its engines and those engines were GE engines along with a large amount of American content from thousands of subcontractors. Congressional hearings were even held at Boeing's urging with accusations of predatory pricing by Airbus to make the sales- many of the same arguments being made these days in Airbus versus Boeing sales fights. Regardless, it was a major achievement for the young Airbus Industrie and would become legend throughout Europe how an American astronaut saved the A300 program. 

Source: Flight of the Titans: Boeing, Airbus, and the Battle for the Future of Air Travel by Kenny Kemp. Virgin Books, 2006, p96-99.

The 1938 Hurricane Relief Flights That Led to the Air Transport Command

The relief efforts following natural disasters have often reminded me of the first humanitarian airlift in the United States after a natural disaster. It was September of 1938 and one of the few Category 5 storms to strike the US mainland had just come ashore with unprecedented destructiveness in New England, causing widespread devastation throughout Long Island, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts.

While the forecasting technology of the day paled in comparison with what we have today, there are sufficient meteorological records from 1938 that give an impressive picture of what historians call "The Long Island Express". The storm formed off the coast of West Africa and tracked westward. Lacking offshore weather buoys, the US Weather Bureau (the National Weather Service's predecessor) relied on reports from ships at sea to track the progress of the storm. From a climatological standpoint, most hurricanes in the late part of the hurricane season that form in the Eastern Atlantic usually track to the west and curve back to the northeast, remaining out to sea and having little effect on the US East Coast.

However, on the morning of 21 September 1938 as the storm was off the coast of Norfolk, Virginia, it made a sudden veer due north instead of continuing out to sea on a northeast heading. Not only did this storm head due north for New England, it also picked up speed with a storm motion of 70mph, making the "Long Island Express" one of the fastest moving hurricanes in recorded history.

The sudden change in direction caught most of New England unprepared and when the hurricane made landfall that night, wind speeds gusting to as high as 185mph were recorded along the coast of New England. The extreme forward speed of the storm made the right quadrant winds 70mph faster than they were and this put Long Island, Rhode Island, and eastern Massachusetts square in the crosshairs of this monster. A 12+ foot storm surge slammed into Providence, Rhode Island and all throughout the area, lines of communication were cut- roads, railroads, phone and telegraph lines. Not until Hurricane Andrew hit Florida in 1992 would there be a storm that caused as much damage as "The Long Island Express". The Boston area found itself cut off from the rest of the nation as thousands were made homeless and the local infrastructure of the area was destroyed.

Enter C.R. Smith. Two years earlier Jack Frye of TWA decided the US airline industry needed a common voice to work with the government in improving air safety and efficiency. He managed to convince C.R. Smith of American, Eddie Rickenbacker of Eastern, and Pat Patterson of United to form the ATA- Air Transport Association. Headed by a former military aviator of unqualified technical experience, Edgar Gorrell, one of the ATA's first acts under Gorrell was to propose that the airlines form a plan to organize their resources in the event of a national emergency to form what Gorrell called a "civil reserve air fleet".

Now keep in mind that this was a time when the airlines were run by rugged individualists like Rickenbacker or Smith. Just the fact that four disparate personalities of the magnitude of Smith, Frye, Rickenbacker, and Patterson even agreed to form the ATA was a miracle in and of itself. But to form a unified plan in case of national emergency? The other member airlines of the ATA balked at the idea despite Gorrell's pleadings- "If we don't have our own plan, the government will shove one down our throats!" But only one airline president backed the ATA proposal and that was C.R. Smith of American Airlines. The ATA proposal languished for two years until that dark night that the "Long Island Express" came ashore.

The only airline that operated on the New York-Boston route was American Airlines and C.R. Smith immediately assigned every available DC-3 the airline had to fly humanitarian missions to Boston Logan Airport which was pretty much the only functioning airport in the area in the hurricane aftermath. Flights were cancelled throughout American's system as DC-3s were pulled for the airlift. Within 24 hours, C.R. Smith realized the job couldn't be done alone- usually American carried 200 passengers a day between Boston and New York and on the first flight out of Boston, over 1000 people were looking for seats on American's mercy flights. With the local authorities also wanting to deploy medical personnel as well as rescue and construction crews to New England, American needed help.

C.R. Smith phoned Edgar Gorrell for an urgent request for help- Gorrell in turn telephoned Jack Frye at TWA, Eddie Rickenbacker at Eastern and Pat Patterson at United. Each of these airlines had the most capable airliner of the day, the DC-3, and Gorrell asked them to pull their DC-3s out of service to fly the humanitarian airlift. Without question, without argument, the three airline presidents had DC-3s streaming into Newark within hours of Gorrell's call. He then secured temporary route authority for them to fly the New York-Boston route from Washington (the nation's airlines had their route structures regulated by the federal government in those days).

For the seven days following the hurricane's landfall, the four airlines operated 24 hours a day, flying over 60,000 tons of medical supplies into Boston, carrying over 1000 rescue workers into the area, and flying out over 1500 refugees out of the area. Those numbers pale in comparison to the airlift that took place after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, but keep in mind that the DC-3 only carried 21 passengers and was the state of the art in 1938. American and TWA even added their older DC-2s to the airlift. Newark, as the bridgehead of the airlift, was the scene of unprecedented cooperation by the rival airlines. American's crews often led formations of other aircraft to Boston as some of TWA and United's pilots had never flown on the East Coast. Airlines shared spare parts, even mechanics to keep the airlift running.

By the time the airlift ended and the airlines and their personnel returned to normal operations, Gorrell as well as the presidents of the four airlines realized the potential of the US airline industry to step up to the plate in times of crisis. When the first bombs dropped on Pearl Harbor just three years later, Edgar Gorrell already had a template in place to organize the US airline industry to provide airlift for the war effort- during the Second World War, the Air Transport Command (ATC) was formed by the US airline industry with government backing. And to head this massive undertaking, Edgar Gorrell turned to C.R. Smith. Not only did C.R. Smith demonstrate initiative in organizing the 1938 airlift, in 1940, a full year before Pearl Harbor, C.R. Smith had already had his own experts formulating an emergency war mobilization plan involving all of the US airline industry.

On 13 December 1941 President Franklin D. Roosevelt was prepared to sign an executive order to nationalize the US airline industry. Sitting in the Oval Office with FDR on that day were Edgar Gorrell and the chief of the US Army Air Corps, General Henry "Hap" Arnold. Both of them convinced FDR to tear up the executive order as Gorrell showed the President C.R. Smith's war plan to mobilize the airlines. In his postwar autobiography Global Mission, General Arnold noted that air power was useless without air transport.

Source: When the Airlines Went to War: The Dramatic, Never-Before-Told Story of America's Civilian Air Warriors by Robert J. Serling. Kensington Press, 1997.