Raven Among Nightingales

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For U.S. airlines, this winter was one of the worst. On one of its dark days, dour Donald W. Douglas rolled his first postwar plane, the DC-6, out of his Santa Monica plant. A fat-bellied big brother of the famed DC-4, the plane was sold to United Air Lines, Inc. and its boss William Allan Patterson, who looks and sometimes sounds like a small, precise adding machine. Patterson thought that his new buy was a good plane. And his line badly Heeded such a plane. But he had no intention of putting it into service until he was sure. He had seen what had happened to Lockheed's Constellation because it had been rushed into service by the airlines before they had a chance to work out all the bugs always found in new planes.

So "Pat" Patterson put his pilots to work testing the DC-6. In four months they flew it 1,520 hours. They flew it at 25,000 feet to test the pressurized cabin; they flew it into a sleet storm so bad that a following DC-4 had to turn back. The DC-6, with its new anti-icing equipment (heated pipes along the leading edges of wings, tail and windshield), went right on through. Three weeks ago, Pat Patterson and about 40 officials and pressmen climbed into a DC-6 in Los Angeles, flew nonstop to New York in 6 3/4 hours, with the help of a mighty tail wind (top ground speed: 474 m.p.h.). Last week, United took another DC-6 out for a spin. It flew from Omaha to New York in some three hours. This week, after the exhaustive tests, Pat Patterson decided that the plane was all he had hoped for--and then some. He announced that he will have eight of the new ships to put into operation on his transcontinental routes on April 27, and on his new route from San Francisco to Honolulu May 1.

Slightly slower but more comfortable than the flashy Connie, the DC-6 will carry as many as 56 passengers at a cruising speed of 300 m.p.h., make transcontinental runs in nine to ten hours (cost: $685.000, plus radio). But what Patterson and all airline men fervently hoped was that it would win back the friends the airlines had lost.

Hope of Salvation? The U.S. airlines had gone through their own postwar hell. Some of the burning was due to their own sins. They had sometimes seemed to run their lines, not like globe-straddling enterprisers, but like cow-pasture barnstormers. They had canceled flights without telling passengers till they appeared at the airport; they had lost their luggage; when bad weather closed in, they had set passengers down in out-of-the-way airports and left them to shift for themselves. The winter weather had been terrible. In one grim period in December, so had the plane crashes. Many a traveler was browned off by the airlines; many were scared off.

For this combination of sin and misfortune, the lines paid dearly. In 1946, they lost some $13,000,000; they had made profits of over $16,000,000 the year before. In the first three months of this year they did no better.

The hardest hit lines were those which had overexpanded, eagerly gobbling up new routes and buying new planes. But even cautious lines like Pat Patterson's United had not been spared. In the first three months this year, United lost close to $3,000,000. That was a shock to the industry, for United has long been the bluest of its blue chips and it has shouldered the second heaviest domestic traffic burden. Its routes stretched 10,079 miles, including a Mexican subsidiary, Lamsa, second greatest on the continent (American is first); in 1946 United accounted for 18% of total passenger miles and about 30% of all domestic airmail.

But Pat Patterson had anticipated the stormy weather ahead. He had Pattersoned a commonsense pattern for all U.S. airlines. He trimmed down his payroll from 13,700 to 12,300. (Few were fired, but those who quit were not replaced.) As he sweated off the wartime fat, some of the travelers who had been scared away by last winter's crashes began to come back. Last week, United was in the black again. The dismal airlines skyscape suddenly brightened. Was the worst over? No one could say for sure. But Pat Patterson thought it was. Coming from him, that sounded more encouraging than the cheery prophecies of an optimist.

Blow Hot. In an industry noted for its highflying, Buck Rogerish schemers, and its sometimes low-grade economics, Pat Patterson, at 47, is an old killjoy. He is forever crying "Now, wait a minute," when someone wants to jump off the barn with an umbrella for a parachute. He is the No. 1 conservative of the airlines, and proud of the title. He still gets a thrill as an airliner roars up off the runway. But the thrill is enhanced if he knows that all the seats are filled.

Though he has learned to fly in the 1,200,000 miles he has ridden airlanes since 1929, Patterson looks, talks, and dresses more like the banker he started out to be. Small (5 ft. 5 in.), pale-faced, with sharp brown eyes, he usually dresses somberly in grey or black pin-striped suits, lets his dreams fly no higher than his staff of air economists permits.

To the helicopter-in-every-garage school which flourished during the war, he says "nuts." When the talk (emotional thinking, he calls it) was perfervid of a sky black with planes--and no one riding the railroads--Patterson snapped: "If all the hot air on the subject circulating today were stored, it would create enough energy to fly all the planes in the U.S. without gasoline."

Blow Cold. Patterson thinks the airplane is still in the taxicab stage, and that the day of cheap mass transportation is years away. Nor does he think that some magical new discovery will hasten things much. He believes in inch-by-inch progress all down the line--starting, for example, by cleaning up the washrooms in airports. The recent squabble over whether airlines shall use G.C.A. (Ground Controlled Approach) or I.L.S. (Instrument Landing System) seems silly to him. Says he: "We need them both, one to check on the other. And we shouldn't use them until we learn how. A safety device you don't know is worse than no safety device at all."

The way to get things done, to his mind, is to have one airline make an improvement; competition will force the rest to follow. He was the first to start installation of I.L.S. equipment on his planes. (The new DC-6s are I.L.S.-equipped.) Other major U.S. lines have already followed. They will not be able to use it for months, till I.L.S. ground equipment is installed in enough airports. But when it is, the lines will be ready to use it. If everyone sweats enough, and the new planes and safety devices work as well as expected, Pat Patterson expects that air travel will be as regular and safe as train travel in about three years. Then the air age will have arrived.

No Blow Hard. As a prophet, Patterson has acquired much honor, but he has not become cocky. Once, a little over a year ago, he nearly did. He was talking about United's safety record (no fatalities in over 3 1/2 years). "Why," he boasted in a speech, "even if we had an accident tonight, I would still believe that it is a good record." That night United did have a crash on Elk Mountain, Wyoming (21 killed), the worst in United's history. Pat has never forgotten that lesson. Despite his habit of being right, he gets on well with most other airmen, even better with his employees, especially his pilots (David Behncke, hard-to-please boss of the gold-plated pilots' union, calls Patterson the "best airline executive in the business.") But sometimes his crisp manner irritates some of his compeers in the industry.

Once, at an Air Transport Association meeting, Eastern Air Lines President Eddie Rickenbacker complained that he hadn't been informed of certain matters. Patterson snapped: "If you'd quit sitting on a life raft in the Pacific all your life you'd understand these things. We discussed them at our last meeting." Rickenbacker whipped back: "Yes, and it's little sonovabitches like you that make me wish I was back there."

Grounded. Patterson's machinelike way of operating enables him to get through an enormous amount of work in jigtime. In addition to bossing United, he is a director in three non-aviation companies. Yet his desk in his blue-green, semi-paneled office, across from Chicago's Municipal Airport, is usually clean of work. Sometimes he dictates for hours. He does it methodically, seldom fumbling for a word. He used to lunch at his desk, but an attack of stomach ulcers cured him of that. (The ulcers are also cured now.) As a result, he is a careful eater, but smokes two packages of cigarets a day, chews gum between smokes.

When he is not riding around on his airline (he spends about 40% of his time on air tours of his system), he arrives at his office by 9:30, leaves promptly at 5:30, and is driven in his Cadillac to his country house, a ten-acre farm 27 miles from Chicago. No party goer, he spends most of his off time there with his attractive wife, Vera, and their two redheaded children, Bill Jr., at 13 already taller than his dad, and Patricia, 18. The farm has a chicken house (85 Rhode Island reds), a three-hole golf course gone to seed (Patterson is considered by his friends one of the world's worst golfers), and a small lake stocked with bass, blue gills and crappies.

Patterson does not pretend to do the farming. He lets the caretaker and his wife do the chores. "The extent of my help," he gags, "is when I hold a chicken while someone doses it with an eye dropper." Usually he spends his time horseback riding, fishing in his lake or playing catch with his son. When mink began to eat his fish recently, the caretaker trapped the mink, and they are being made into a neckpiece for Mrs. Patterson.

Bottom of the Ladder. That Patterson became an airman was due largely to chance. But he came honestly by his liking for hard work. He was born on Oahu Island, where his father was overseer of a sugar plantation. A tireless man, his father often wore out three horses in the course of a day's riding about the fields. He died when Billy, as he was then called, was 8. Young Billy and his mother, who worked in different places while Billy sandwiched in his hit-or-miss schooling, traveled back & forth between San Francisco and Hawaii. When he was 14, his mother decided that it was time Billy got a formal education, and enrolled him in the Honolulu military academy. He had been there only six weeks when he learned that his mother was going to San Francisco. He ran away from school and joined her. That ended his formal education. So, at 15, he got an office boy's job with San Francisco's Wells Fargo Bank & Union Trust Co. at a salary of $25 a month. After work he went to night school.

He gradually moved up from office boy to paying teller, convinced Wells Fargo that he was the smart lad he seemed by catching a forger his first day on the new job. When his mother remarried, he moved into a house with twelve other young fellows, picked up the nickname "Pat." He never had much time for fun, but he distinguished himself one day by pouring a bottle of ink into the tub as one of his fellow roomers was taking a bath in preparation for his wedding. Toward the end of World War I, Pat enlisted. The war ended before he got to camp, so he went back to Wells Fargo. When Vera Anita Witt, a pretty, bright-eyed coed from the University of California, came to work in Wells Fargo for the summer, Pat married her. Then he settled down to his career as a banker.

Flying Up. By the time he was earning $350 a month, as assistant to one of the vice presidents, he was already dissatisfied with banking, because "there was no room for ideas, no room for ingenuity."

He soon proved himself wrong. When the operator of a fledgling airline, Pacific Air Transport, was granted a $5,000 loan, Patterson was put on the account. As most airlines were then regarded as being in the same class as fly-by-night carnivals, the bank took a somewhat dim view of the loan. Patterson brightened his employer's view by getting the loan paid off, but he soon found himself more interested in flying than in banking. Through his new concern with aviation he met the late P. G. Johnson, president of Boeing Aircraft, who was then helping William E. Boeing, board chairman of a gigantic aviation trust, United Aircraft & Transport Corp. By 1931 the company included the newly founded coast-to-coast United Air Lines and a number of plane-making and aviation-equipment companies. Patterson went to work for Johnson as his assistant. He had picked the right time and spot.

Not long after, in 1933, trust-busting New Dealers took over the Government. They promptly canceled all airmail contracts because of "collusion" between the airline operators in setting rates, split up Bill Boeing's trust and "exiled" Johnson from the airline business for five years. In the crisis, there was no one but Patterson to take on the job of running United, and pull it out of its tailspin (United's stock fell from $35 a share just before the cancellation order to $14 when the Army took over the mail routes). Patterson won back all but one of the canceled contracts. He looks back on this as "the greatest day of my life."

On Top. It turned out to be a great day for United also. The line, skillfully put together, tapped the richest, most heavily traveled U.S. routes. Now it needed the right kind of management to pay off. Pat Patterson supplied the management. He emphasized safety and regularity rather than speed. He pioneered safety gadgets, tried out new ideas to get riders on his planes. Example: for a time he carried the wives of men on business trips free, to get them over their objections to their husbands' flying.

Like the banker he had been, he figured that safety pays off in the cash register. Said he: "If we take a chance and send a plane from Chicago to New York and it gets through, we gain $3,000 in revenue. If it cracks up, it costs us $1,000,000. All humanitarian principles aside, who'd gamble with the odds a million to three thousand against you?"

To take the guesswork out of estimating future traffic and the number and kinds of planes needed to carry it, he set up an economics planning division. Dismayed by the wasteful and expensive competition between lines for new planes, Patterson got four other lines together, talked them into agreeing on a single new design for all of them. The result: the famed DC-4. As Patterson says: Why be first? Why not even up the gamble on a new plane? In the same way, he got together with American Airlines' C. R. Smith early in the war and got Douglas up to building the DC-6, to compete with Lockheed's new Constellation. By next fall, United hopes to have 35 DC-6s operating.

American plans to put two DC-6s in operation on April 27 also, has ordered 50. In all, six U.S. airlines have ordered DC-6s and another 41 planes have been ordered by foreign lines.

The Team. Despite Patterson's bounce, drive, and salary and bonuses of $50,000 a year, he does not fly United alone. Says he: "I can't build an airline myself. I surround myself with good men . . . give them every chance. This means they'll do good work and make me look good."

Those who do good work and make him look good are: J. A. Herlihy, a onetime Navy and airlines pilot, now United's operations manager; Harold Crary, a onetime newspaperman who handles United's advertising, publicity and traffic; Hal E. Nourse, who runs the economics planning section; and Ray Ireland, ex-colonel and deputy chief of staff of the Air Transport Command (he gave Elliott Roosevelt's dog, Blaze, his ill-famed plane ride). Ireland makes the policy decisions when Patterson is not available.

Under this team, United, which once carried less than 150,000 passengers a year and lost money, last year carried 1,760,000 and made plenty. (In 1944, it set its all-time earning record of $6,114,991, though half its planes had been turned over to the armed services.) Last year, netting $1,086,961, it was the second most profitable line.

Patterson figures he will carry 2,325,000 passengers this year, more in the future. He has already ordered the planes to do the job: 35 DC-6s, seven Boeing Strato-cruisers, 50 Martin two-motored 3035. Unlike some other lines, United did not over-order, has not canceled an order for a single plane. Nor has it had to scratch for cash to pay for them. Recently it raised $49,000,000, got even conservative Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., which had never invested in an airline before, to put in $10,000,000.

The Chosen Instrument. One of the things Pat Patterson's economics division has told him is that the international air policy of the U.S. is all wrong. When it first told him this, Pan American Airways' smart Juan Trippe was plumping for the Chosen Instrument. When Patterson supported Trippe, the other domestic lines went after him like a flock of hawks. But Patterson has stuck to his guns. The current U.S. policy of regulated competition, on international routes, says he, will not work. He has some claim to impartiality in the argument. United was--and is--the only big U.S. line that does not want to do any large-scale international flying.

Patterson thinks that events are proving him right. All three of the lines--American, T.W.A. and Pan Am--to date have lost money on their transatlantic routes, at a time when they had the field virtually to themselves.

And now foreign competition is increasing, much faster than anticipated. In the first half of 1946, U.S.-flag lines were carrying 96% of transatlantic traffic. By last week, although overall traffic was up after the bad winter, the percentage was down to 79%. U.S. lines, Patterson felt, could not compete among themselves and with government-backed foreign lines as well. To lick this foreign type of monopoly, he would set up U.S. monopolies.

Under his plan, the U.S. Government would set up two Chosen Instrument corporations or community companies owned, and run, by all U.S. airlines. One Chosen Instrument would run the U.S.-flag line in the Atlantic; the other would operate it in the Pacific. (Latin America would be left as is, with the present regulated competition.) Patterson thinks that the stultifying evils of monopoly could be avoided by using each instrument as an efficiency check on the other.

This scheme still has a horrid ring to free-enterprising airmen. But some of those who had been fighting the Chosen Instrument a few years ago have privately come around to Patterson's and Trippe's way of thinking. There have not been enough converts to cause a significant shift in thinking about U.S. air policy. But Pat Patterson is sure that the U.S. will soon have to face the hard fact that, in an international air world peopled by monopolistic Chosen Instruments, the U.S. will have to use the same kind of weapon.

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