Change of Pilots

The pioneers who span commercial aviation from jenny to jet are giving way to a new generation of executives. In the last year, the presidents of three major U.S. airlines have stepped either up or out to make way for new men. United's Pat Patterson moved up to chairman, and so did American's C. R. Smith; Malcolm Maclntyre left Eastern. Last week one of the greatest pioneers of them all relinquished some of the controls--although, like Smith and Patterson, he retained the post of chief executive. Just turned 65, Juan Terry Trippe gave up the presidency of Pan American, a seat he has held zestily since he founded the airline in 1927.

Moving up to the new post of chairman, Trippe picked Executive Vice President Harold E. Gray, 58, to succeed him as president and chief operating officer.

Scarcely five years out of Yale ('22) when he started his airline, Trippe nursed it with force and farsightedness. Pan Am began as a handful of flying boats shuttling 110 miles between Key West and Cuba; its 73,000 miles of routes now connect 85 nations, and last year's earnings of $33.6 million on $561 million in revenues were the most ever made by any airline. Gray has been in on practically all of this growth. A member of the first group of pilots hired by Pan Am in 1929, he was the first commercial flyer to cross the Atlantic, logged 15,000 hours before he settled behind a desk in 1944.

Like Gray, the other new presidents --United's George E. Keck, 52, Eastern's Floyd Hall, 48, and American's Marion Sadler, 53--are all operations men. So mammoth and complex has the aviation industry become that it now takes one boss just to schedule and maintain the jets and another to finance their $6,000,000 price tags and worry about the future. The time is ripe for moving in new men; recovering from the red ink that plagued them after jets were introduced, the industry last year racked up record profits of $84 million.

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