Читать книгу Brace for Impact - Peter Pigott - Страница 10

Celebrity Deaths and the Rise of Commercial Passenger Flight

There are aircraft accidents that change the course of aviation history, and what happened in March 1931 did just that. Once an assistant to German aviation pioneer Dr. Hugo Junkers, Anthony Fokker branched out on his own and took with him his mentor’s idea of thick wings. Throughout the 1920s, Fokker’s thick-winged aircraft featured in many records: first over the North Pole (1926), first across the Pacific Ocean from the United States to Hawaii (1927), and first from the United States to Australia (1928). With the exception of the Ford Tin Goose, the trimotor Fokker F-10A had captured the airliner market in the United States. To rival Ford, General Motors invested heavily in Fokker to build his aircraft in the United States. What Fokker didn’t take from his mentor Junkers was that his aircraft’s wings should be made of metal. Even though the F-10A’s fuselage skin was metal, the airliner was crowned with a thick wooden wing. As early as 1918, Junkers himself had lost confidence in wood, using metal wings on his postwar aircraft. When the Tin Goose appeared with an all-metal wing, Junkers promptly sued Ford for patent infringement but lost in court to the automotive giant. Fokker could never hope to afford the same lawyers that Henry Ford retained, so he made do with wooden wings.

Universal Studios sent Knute Rockne, the University of Notre Dame’s great football coach, a plane ticket to get to Hollywood, where he was to advise on a movie about his life. On March 31, Rockne boarded a Transcontinental & Western Air (TWA, and later called Trans World Airlines) Fokker F-10A at Kansas City to fly to Los Angeles. An hour into the flight the aircraft’s wing broke off, and it fell out of the sky and crashed into a wheat field, killing all eight on board. How a beloved sports figure could be killed in a supposedly safe airliner transformed the accident investigation into a media frenzy.

No attempt was made to secure the accident site. Souvenir hunters and spectators rushed to the crash, tore off souvenirs, hauled away the propellers and parts of the fuselage, and destroyed all evidence. When Anthony Fokker and the investigators arrived the next day, only the aircraft’s two wings and three engines were left. With the nation hanging on to every word, the Aeronautics Branch of the U.S. Department of Commerce issued a public statement three days later that said the agency “assumed” pieces of propeller blade had broken off and severed the wing. It also speculated that a piece of ice had formed on one of the propeller hubs, broken loose, and struck the propeller blade. The statement ended with, “no blame can be attached to the pilots.”

What the press release didn’t add was that as early as December 1930 there had been concern about the wings on Fokker aircraft. The U.S. Navy had tested the F-10A, found it unstable, and rejected it. The manufacturer maintained that operators didn’t have to worry about the F-10A’s wing structure as long as the plywood skin remained glued to the spars. That prompted the Aeronautics Branch to take a closer look at the wings, particularly when maintenance couldn’t be performed without ripping off the plywood skin. The day before the Rockne crash, the Aeronautics Branch felt it had enough evidence to justify grounding all F-10As immediately.

The media’s first resort in an air crash is to sensationalize it, and there was no better way in this case than to suspect sabotage. As the Hindenburg disaster seven years later demonstrated (and the Arrow Air crash 54 years afterward), the hint of a time bomb on board sold more newspapers than a mundane mechanical failure. One of the passengers on the Fokker had been the fake priest who “fingered” Jake Lingle, the stool pigeon who was stupid enough to double-cross Al Capone. Then the press used the indefensible “Act of God” explanation: the F-10A had flown into a thunderstorm from which there was no escape. But no storms had been reported in the vicinity. With the media spotlight on it, the Aeronautics Branch conducted the first technically intense air accident investigation in history, which yielded the hard evidence to confirm suspicions about “dry rot.” Investigators discovered that the wing had come off because cracks had gradually developed in its sealed plywood skin, allowing rainwater to seep in. This had softened the plywood, dissolving the glue that had kept it together.

Basing its decision on this finding, the Aeronautics Branch banned the use of all F-10As in passenger service. Anthony Fokker was furious at the verdict, and as aircraft manufacturers would do many times in the future, he blamed poor maintenance by the operator rather than his design. To make safety such a priority set a gutsy precedent in the aviation industry. In an era when it was accepted that all aircraft were inherently unsafe, to ground one as more unsafe than the others was splitting hairs. Also, for a country in the midst of the Great Depression, putting safety before jobs was politically expensive. To compete with Ford and his trimotor, General Motors had invested substantially in Fokker, and the aircraft’s designer had even sat on the automotive giant’s board. Expanding their networks, American Airlines and Pan American Airways had also just purchased F-10As. There was so much at stake that historians have speculated that, if not for a public figure such as Rockne being killed, the Aeronautics Branch would have been tempted to keep the cause of the crash secret.