From the Ground Up
I
THREE representatives of New York dailies recently took part in a well-publicized race around the world, a circuit of some 25,000 miles, which proved, so far as actual flying was concerned, as uneventful as a bus ride from New York to Boston. Commercial airlines simply hauled them over land and sea in record time.
About the same time private endeavor was also active. An Englishwoman, New York bound from London, crashed in a swamp in Nova Scotia. Two Americans, a night-club singer and a professional pilot, attempting a New York to London round trip, wound up east-bound in a field in Wales; west-bound, they crashed in Newfoundland. A Swedish flier, out for a New York-Stockholm record, was extracted from the sea, alive and thankful, off the coast of Ireland. From the time of Lindbergh’s famous flight to Paris until October of last year, an interval of nine years, only one private transatlantic flyer succeeded in landing at his or her announced destination in Europe. During the twenty-four days of the globe-girdling race, private flying in this country resulted in 48 accidents and 16 deaths, while commercial airlines in the United States, flying day and night in all weathers, covered 30,000,000 passenger miles without incident.
The consistent difference between private and transport flying is inescapable. Not only is this difference underlined by the growing support of transport services by the man in the street, the man in whom family ties and responsibilities have implanted a deeprooted prejudice against risk; it is significant also in the policies of insurance companies. Flying, for instance, on a coast-to-coast trip via transport line, a passenger can insure himself for five thousand dollars at any ticket window, at a cost of two dollars. Insurance for corporation executives, flying on transport lines, costs fifty cents to one dollar per thousand per annum. On the other hand, insurance for an individual, flying privately, costs exactly ten times as much.
This might imply that transport lines have better ships, or better pilots, but that is not necessarily the case. There are, in the private flying game, many brilliant pilots, many first-class ships. Perhaps, when one has said ‘game,’ one has put one’s finger on the point. Transport flying is not a game; it is a business. As such it is organized, systematized, disciplined. It survives by routine, not by glamour.
Its attitude bristles with skepticism. Its strength lies in its passion for detail, in its determination to pass nothing that has not been checked and crosschecked as many times as there are means available. Instead of doing any one thing brilliantly, making isolated flights memorable, it must do a thousand little things, dull things, carefully and consistently. The system is essentially preventive; in the manner of the Chinese, it pays the doctor to keep it well, not to mend it when it is sick.
II
Suppose we take the oldest aerial highway in the country, United States Air Mail Route 1, followed, in turn, by covered wagons, pony express, overland stage, overland railroad, finally by giant liners of the sky, which in the past ten years have chronicled for the airway over 110,000,000 miles of flight.
Trip One, the brand-new, spanking coast-to-coaster, is just landing in Cheyenne, while the loud-speaker bellows : —
‘Salt Lake, Yellowstone, Boulder Dam, Grand Canyon, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and ’points West.’
The pilot, penciling in his Flight Log, has been listening to Trip One the way a symphony conductor listens to his orchestra, listens impersonally right through to the humblest part. Strings, wood winds, brasses . . . pistons, propellers, bearings. Across the clean white space headed Remarks the pilot scribbles ‘None.’
Sixteen hundred miles in less than ten hours, and no Remarks. Trip One is feeling fine. She is young and healthy, and a master pilot, a man who happens to have more than 2,000,000 flying miles inside his belt, has just pronounced her perfect. Good enough?
The chief dispatcher walks up to the pilot.
‘Trip One. Grounded for general overhaul. Change planes.’
Here we have the first hint of an inflexible system, which ordains that the responsibility for every trip shall lie, not, as in private flying, on the shoulders of one man, but with a coöperative unit, 95 per cent of which is on the ground. Every pilot in his cockpit is inevitably propped up, strengthened, relieved by these invisible hands. Here are the figures: —
Pilots in the air at one time 38
Ground force on duty at one time 950
These figures do not include the government employees, men who keep aerial lighthouses, weather stations, radio beacons, emergency fields, inspection services, and so forth, or company men in ticket windows and business offices.
Every flight on U. S. A. M. 1, however short, is rehearsed beforehand. It is the subject of a specific conference between the two pilots and the chief dispatcher. From it derives a specific Flight Flan, prepared as carefully as that of any transatlantic flight — perhaps more expertly. It is prepared from weather data observed within the hour from every key point of the huge network, data assembled by the government and by the company. From information on the coast-to-coast teletype before them, from a connected diagram of ceilings, visibilities, conditions, from wind velocities measured and tabulated by small balloons, from a correlation of all these things, is determined the plan, and the height at which the flight shall take place.
Once the Flight Plan has been agreed on and the flight is under way, there is no deviation except in face of emergency, of sudden and eccentric weather change, and then only after another conference between pilot aloft and dispatcher below. Radio telephone communication is instantaneous; even the motion of lifting the receiver is eliminated, since earpieces are clamped to the head.
The chief dispatcher is not merely a ground man. At regular intervals, and preferably in the foulest weather, he flies over every mile of his division, refreshing his mind, perhaps, on how insidiously a northwest wind can sweep around the mountains at Rock Springs or how the North Platte beacon sounds in an electrical storm. He knows how fast a chasm in the Medicine Bow range fills with clouds, like cotton poured into a basin; which is the safest course to follow when a snowstorm clamps down on Cheyenne. The system does not deal in theory. When the air calls to the ground, the ground replies in the same language. It has to, or the system would not work.
III
It is the system which arbitrarily prescribes a general overhaul for every transport ship every three hundred flying hours. Trip One may be in Spokane, Des Moines, or New York; when her number comes up she must fly back to the repair base in Cheyenne and take her medicine.
Now it is Trip One’s turn — seven and a half tons of her, cost $110,000. She is barely three months old, one of a brand-new fleet of day planes, club cars, and sleepers, with oversize bunks and private drawing-rooms. The fleet supplanted was strong and sturdy, still good for many million miles of useful flying after its three brief years of service. Good, but a little dated, like last year’s car or last year’s radio. Not good enough when there is something better to be had. These new types offer more economy, more comfort, and more speed.
Trip One comes to rest inside the operating room and instantly the gang is on her. Men come swarming from the surrounding buildings, from radio test rooms, motor-overhaul shops, instrument departments, welding shops, machine shops, maintenance rooms, accessory and stock rooms. Young men, old men, each must have a Department of Commerce license before the law allows him to lay a finger on Trip One. It took ten years to get this team together, three hundred and fifty of them.
Steel scaffoldings the size of a young house are towed up to Trip One, clamped tight to the concrete floor as men pile up them. Propellers first, and then the engines. Overhead cranes grind into position, and the job of taking off the giant motors leaps ahead. Another boarding party is already swarming up the platform. They are the amputators, calling for the wings. Operating tables are all ready for them, hefty benches fit for the ninety-five-foot burden. Now a stern attack. The rudder goes down, also to a gang of scaffold workers. Hydraulic jacks push up the massive body, while another gang abducts the undercarriage. The instrument division has assailed the cockpit, working gently, swiftly. The big panel, with its forty-odd dials, its labyrinth of switch and lever, is actually a symbol of the specialization that sets transport methods apart from any other type of flying. It reveals the evolution of control from the vagaries of hunch, feel, human instinct, to the impersonal precision of science. The panel is full of twins; for duplication, whenever possible, is an insistence of the company. Carry a spare; there is safety in numbers.
‘Two pilots, to begin with,’ explains the Superintendent, ‘ because two heads are better than one. Two engines, although the ships can fly a maximum load on one. Two spark plugs in every cylinder, two altimeters, two compasses, two air-speed indicators; you can see the panel even has two clocks. Safer.’
Wings, propellers, motors, rudder, instruments, undercarriage — all Trip One’s extremities by this time have been wheeled away, festooned with colored tags and cabalistic messages. The hull is left, but things are happening there as well. In the cabin, the seats have been removed, the racks, the ash trays. So has the carpet; men are busy taking up the floor, exposing Trip One’s entrails. It is no worse than taking up Times Square. Pipes, wires, air conditioners, steam-heating manifolds, CO2 bottles, hydraulic lines, pumps, controls — this is the ambush of the great trunk nerve, the branches of which reach into every part of Trip One’s body.
IV
Now for the motor room; the engines have been wheeled in on two traveling tables, great metal slabs with dozens of compartments. Ceremony Number 1 is: take apart and bathe well. Taking apart a 1100-horsepower engine is the sort of job that makes spots dance before the eyes. A dozen men are busy giving each individual bit a laundering in gasoline. Swab, scrub, sponge, rinse. Valves, cylinders, pistons, connecting rods, wrist pins, every last niggly cotter pin and roundhead comes out spotless and is taken back to its particular compartment in the traveling tables.
Next come inspections. First is the naked-eye inspection, for which each part is made to run the gauntlet between two lines of men; inspectors work under mammoth lights that throw no shadows. Now the red and green tags start to fly. Pass. Pass. Replace. Pass. Anything these men reject is scrapped; an order for a brand-new duplicate goes out to the stockroom. Compared with what is coming, this, however, is just minor-league stuff.
All the ‘passes’ land upon a bench that has, attached at eye level, a cluster of binoculars. Defects no naked eye can see begin to show up quickly underneath the powerful lenses. A scratch on this connecting rod; a tiny blur of wear along that wrist pin. Pass. Pass. Replace — a red tag and another order to the stockroom. The line of ‘passes,’ still in a brave majority, forms to the right to undergo Test 3. This is the Magnaflux, the ultimate test.
‘See this?’ asks the Superintendent, He picks up a connecting rod, a pass. To make quite sure, he takes another look through the binoculars. Flawless. He clamps it into the Magnaflux machine and, switching on the current, magnetizes the whole rod. He dips it into a suspension of iron powder, wipes it clean, and brings it back to the binoculars.
‘Here’s an example,’ says the Superintendent, quietly elated. On one side of the polished surface is a Something. It cannot definitely be called a crack, because the thing is finer than a hairline. It shows up only because, when magnetized, each cliff of the invisible crack assumes a different polarity, locking the iron in a magnetic field. The clinging iron makes the flaw perceptible. Imperfect. Replace. The system is one up.
They have taken Trip One’s pumps apart, checked them, cleaned them, and now they are running a twentyfour-hour test with more than maximum load. The way they are chugging on monotonously, Trip One is practically in India. . . . A row of slim blue flames, below a battery of dials, reveals the test block for the spark plugs, where sparks are being taped and measured for intensity. Magnetos, lubricating pumps, carburetors, generators, supercharger blowers, all the remaining engine parts are undergoing similarly intimate attention.
At last the tide begins to turn. Gradually each integral part, checked and cross-checked, flows back for reassembly. Suspicious to the last, the system now proceeds to check up on the checkers. The engines are promoted to a mount, an odd contraption slung between four hawsers, tight as bars. The point of slinging is to let the mount vibrate a little in excess of normal wing vibration. This is the prelude to the day-and-night test, through which the engines now begin to thunder, deafeningly, uninterruptedly, watched by a crew whose own idea of heaven is to catch the engine overhaul department off base.
V
No pilot in the world can fly through zero weather without instruments, because, unless he sees the sky or ground, he has no way of knowing whether he is upside down or in a spin or falling. His senses tell him that something has gone wrong, but they cannot tell him what it is. Flying through zero weather sends him to his instruments, or, if he has none, to his doom.
Instrument flying is a subtle art. It demands constant practice if it is to stand its exponent in good stead. The problems that confront a pilot in this kind of weather are both instant and persistent: (a) Is he in perfect practice? (b) Are his instruments in perfect order? He is wise to stay below unless his answer in both cases is affirmative. U. S. A. M. 1 rules out both uncertainties. Instrument flying is a part of its routine, which does not permit its pilots to get out of practice. Regularly they must take off, fly cross-country, execute complicated manœuvres, find their way home and land, all under a hooded cockpit. This practice is as compulsory for pilots of the Line as is their monthly medical examination.
Since transport, pilots trust their dials before their instincts, it follows that instrument accuracy is of paramount importance; and responsibility weighs heavily on the men whose job it is to keep these instruments infallible. They work unhurriedly. Here is a man preoccupied with a small towel and a pair of tweezers. The reason for his absorption is a steel ball no bigger than a piece of buckshot, which he has just placed on a watch glass. It is part of a directional gyro, so sensitive that he must even make allowance for expansion caused by the electric light bulb two feet off. He wipes his hands continuously so that no particle of moisture may wander from his forceps to the ball before he grades it. His job is making sure that next time Trip One takes the air, flying, say, Course 270°, the course is going to be just that, not 269° or 271°. A mere degree of difference, important perhaps once in a thousand trips. Important enough.
This tall board with the glass tubes is checking the twin barographs, the height recorders, on which most frequently the pilot’s eyes are fixed. Error here might be far-reaching; it might, for instance, negative the work of an entirely different department of the system, the one in which the winds aloft are surveyed and recorded, to determine the most advantageous course of flight.
Compensate, test, calibrate. A dozen experts are busy on other instruments — on climb indicators, turn-and-bank recorders, revolution indicators, gyro and magnetic compasses, hydraulic pressure indicators, air-speed indicators. Everything, down to the humble clocks, is being cleaned and checked.
VI
The wings are still upon their trestles, split into sections, with their plates off and their insides showing. Trip One did not feel the pebbles kicked up landing in Toledo last week, but they left a small memento, a slight dent, and that means a new plate. Here are half a dozen rivets that the chief inspector does not like the look of. Replace.
The wide-vaulted metal spars that honeycomb the inside of a wing are being examined for corrosion. They must be strong enough to stand at least five times the maximum load of twelve tons which the government allows — in short, carte blanche to the kind of tempests that were never seen o’er land or sea or in Hollywood. The load is checked before each flight, attested by a triple signature. A private airplane may or may not carry overload. There is no one to stop the pilot if he wants to take that risk.
These flaps, now getting their ‘okay’ tags, are the newest contribution to safe landing. Landings and take-offs hold far more opportunities for hazard than any other period of normal flight. The greater the landing speed, the greater the hazard. Thanks to their speed-curbing flaps, these huge air liners come down more deliberately and thus more safely than many a twoplace cabin job. The flaps hinge on the trailing edges of the wings, and, when Trip One is coming in to land, hydraulic pressure pulls them down exactly as a bird pulls down its feathers to check speed.
The two thick rubber strips these men are servicing, de-icing boots, present Trip One with still another unit in the sum of safety. Their place is on the leading edges of the wings; pumps, switched on from the cockpit, make them pulsate just enough to prevent ice from forming. The weight of the ice is unimportant, but it alters the curvature of the wings and so brings down the plane. Similarly for winter protection is this band of armor around the fuselage; it acts as buffer against any ice thrown off from the propellers.
In the radio test room, Trip One’s three wireless outfits have been disemboweled. Earphones, tubes, antennæ, wires, dials, disks. Here is the device which transmits to the cockpit the Department of Commerce weather reports. Here is the one communicating with the chief dispatcher. This knob taps the radio range beacons, makes contact with those wonder-working lighthouses of the sky. Pass. Replace. Pass. Pass.
Next door is the landing-gear department, where undercarriage men get hairy-chested changing the enormous tires. Trip One has got an order for new shoes. Metal bracings and hydraulic rams are being passed. The undercarriage must push down or be retracted in exactly thirty-five seconds. Variation might indicate a leak in the hydraulic setup. Not that the system fails to protect itself in other ways against such an emergency. If the hydraulic equipment should jam by some chance, the gear can be brought down by hand. And if — a thousandth chance — that fails, Trip One’s retracted tires protrude just far enough for her to land in safety with her undercarriage up.
The stockroom, where the tires come from, is larger than a good-sized store. Here is the source of all replacements for the repair shops, from complete engines down to minute rivets. Propellers, wing plates, undercarriages, rudders — from this stock alone a brandnew fleet could be constructed. Things one is less prepared for are here by the carload. Cartons of baking soda (used for battery cleaning), whiskbrooms, fly swatters, spray guns, sponges, rubber mats, paper cups, soap (plain for the men’s washroom, scented for the ladies’), paper towel dispensers, serving trays, thermos bottles, ash trays, electric light bulbs by the thousand, pillow slips, blankets, sheets, mirrors, hat clips, magazine covers. Nothing is too unimportant to be kept on hand. Even art needlework is playing its part. Behind the stockroom, a crew of seamstresses is overhauling Trip One’s cabin decorations, re-covering this chair, rehemming that curtain, patching the spot where someone ground a cigarette out on the carpet.
Trip One is practically whole again. The scaffoldings have come away, the metal hull gleams from the blasting ministrations of the cleaning jenny.
Propellers, acid-etched, are bolted fast, the tanks are back inside the wings after a two-day sweat under high-pressure steam. Men have just finished covering up the soundproofing replacements in the cabin, testing telephone connections from the cockpit to the stewardess. A hundred details of reassembly are completed with the decisive assurance of routine.
A day ahead of schedule, on the sixth day, Trip One is prepared to face the cold eye of the Superintendent. Trailing electric cables, he leads off at the nose and inches aft methodically, on his feet, on his knees, on his back, poking and prying, covering in several hours the sixty-five-foot journey to the tail. He is from Missouri and he believes nothing he has not seen. His approval is withheld until late afternoon, when Trip One comes in from her test flight.
She rolls back to her parking space inside the traffic hangar, ready for duty on the morrow. It is not necessary to certify her with a final okay tag. The Superintendent’s nod has countersigned the affidavits of three hundred and fifty men.
VII
The United States is the only one of the great nations where progress in aviation has come about, not at the behest of war offices, but through the medium of peace. In Europe, air ministries, circled by crouching tigers, keep designers strictly to business — military business. Air forces set the pace with emphasis on bomb capacities, fields of fire, and high speeds. Perhaps that is why so many of Trip One’s sisters are exported to countries that might reasonably be expected to build good commercial airplanes of their own, and why the winner of the journalistic race flew round the world in American ships, except for one link in a Zeppelin. Perhaps that is also why the United States is so far ahead of foreign air transport that there is not even a comparison.
Aviation in this country has moved forward steadily during the past ten years at the direct impulse of our air lines. For the advances in safety, in design, in operation, their insistence has been responsible. They have brought out the all-metal ships, the variablepitch propellers, the slow-landing flaps, the high-power radial engines, the deicing boots, the automatic horizon, the robot pilot, instrument flying, the elaborate ground control, and the thousand and one invaluable little contributions to organized flying. The government has coöperated with them handsomely, but its hands have been outstretched from the Departments of Commerce, of Agriculture, from the Post Office, the N. A.C. A. — rather than from the war bureaus. Anyone doubting the complete divorce between military and commercial flying in this country has only to pause and consider the tragic fiasco which resulted from the Army’s attempt to fly the mail in 1933.
The American public may well be proud of its great airways, which hold all records for airplane transport, — unheadlined records, — and prouder still of their abundant demonstration that the gift of flight can find a worthier application than a perversion into schemes for mass destruction.