I had reason to be. I was suspicious of Noah too. One of Noah’s secretaries was on my payroll at the time. I had to know what Noah was doing, because Noah had completely free rein, except on the decisions. He could have stolen me blind. There’s an old biblical saying: ‘Who will watch the watchers?’
It was also around this time, shortly after I bought into TWA, that I designed the plane that came to be known as the Constellation. It was the plane that, more than any other, changed the history of commercial aviation.
It made long-distance flights possible, in relative comfort, for large groups of people. Today that’s commonplace, but then it was a breakthrough.
Jack Frye helped me with the design, and Bob Gross was in on it too. That’s why Lockheed finally built it. Consolidated had turned us down, and then we went to Bob Gross at Lockheed. I got the idea for the plane when I was breaking the crosscountry record, Chicago to California, in the Northrop Gamma. I was so goddamn uncomfortable up there – the oxygen equipment wasn’t working, I was gasping for air, the hard pieces of the seat were jabbing into my spine – that I said to myself, ‘By God, when I finish this I’m going to design a plane that can carry people in comfort, nonstop from coast to coast.’
I really said that – it’s not a line from a movie script. I said it. I always talk to myself out loud. It’s not the habit of a lunatic, it’s the habit of a man who wants to remember what he thinks.
And that ship was the Connie. The most successful commercial piston-driven aircraft that ever flew. A radical departure from everything that went before.
In what way?
If you want to get technical, the fuselage had a curvilinear design that cut down the drag factor in an entirely new way. And it also worked as an airfoil. That had never been done before in an aircraft of that size. The Constellation carried a payload of 6,000 pounds and cruised at 250 knots. She was a very stable ship with a very soft ride. It went through a hell of a lot of changes after it was operational, got stretched and stretched until I thought, Jesus, soon you’ll be able to board the ship on the flight deck and walk aft and you’ll have walked from New York to Philadelphia. Bob Buck, who became TWA’s chief pilot, flew the first flight on regular passenger services. He said it was the finest aircraft he’d ever flown. And you know who else flew a Connie, one of the very early Connies, even before Bob Buck? Orville Wright. He took it up with me one day out of Miami. It was meant as a kind of tribute to him. I wanted to do something for him. He was a very old man then, on the way out, and I thought it would be nice for him. He flew it himself for over an hour.
While we’re on the subject, did you prefer piloting propeller planes like the Connie, or did you prefer jets?
A piston-driven aircraft is a delight to fly. A jet is a headache – far more complicated, a very mechanical operation, a power plant. A prop plane, especially the smaller ones, like the F-11 or the Sikorsky, the Lockheed Vegas or even a Northrop Gamma – that’s something you can feel. With a plane like that, you can dance. You can hardly love a jet but you certainly could – at least I could – love a prop plane, and I’m sure that most pilots who have flown both would agree with me.
Actually I loved all the planes I designed and flew, but never for very long. I was fickle. You could say I had a harem of planes if you want to talk about it that way. I didn’t actually get tired of them, but I always had at least three or four that were operational, and I used them all. Of course when I was building something from scratch, like the H-1 or the F-11, I put my heart and soul into it to the exclusion of everything else and to the exclusion of any other aircraft I was using at the time – so you could say those were very intense love affairs.
Anyway, on the first flight of the Connie, I broke the transcontinental record again, although it’s really a matter of absolutely no significance. The record has been broken a hundred times since then and it will be broken a hundred times more. I wasn’t setting out to break any record. I was just setting out to prove that the Constellation was a plane that could carry people in comfort from coast to coast, nonstop. And it did. But in the light of what we have today, in the light of what we’re going to have in future planes, in the history of aircraft, my record-breaking flights in the Constellation will be a footnote on page twenty-nine. My contributions to the industry were more basic than that.
You know, I almost didn’t make that first flight in the Connie. We were ready for takeoff from Burbank when two young women came running out in the lights of the field. It was late at night, about three o’clock in the morning. One of them was a girlfriend of mine named Fran Gallagher, a gorgeous dark-haired woman, really talented and passionate in bed. She’d brought a girlfriend along – I seem to remember that her name was Valerie, and she was another knockout. So I had a ladder lowered and went out, and got involved in conversation with Fran and her friend Valerie. Fran wanted to come along – she said, ‘If you let Valerie and me come on this flight and the three of us are alone in the cockpit, Howard, this will be the most memorable flight of your life.’
I was tempted, needless to say, but it was a proving flight and I didn’t want any noncontributing passengers aboard, even if they promised memorable fun and games. Still, I hesitated.
When I looked round, the ladder was up in the cockpit and the plane was taxiing down the field. I said, ‘What the hell’s going on here?’ Jack Frye was my copilot and he was at the controls. It was just a joke, he wanted me to get moving. And so I kissed Fran goodbye and waved to Valerie and ran after the plane. They stopped and put down the ladder and I climbed up, and we were off.
Didn’t you break the record again, in 1946, on a second flight with the Connie?
Yes, we broke the speed record that time too, but again it was the kind of record that would last until the next favorable tail wind. That was a publicity flight for the plane, more than anything. You could call it a VIP flight, in a way. Some senators were aboard, and Danny Kaye and his wife, and Linda Darnell. Poor Linda, I was fond of her, and we had some wild times together, but she came to a bad end. Burned to death, set herself on fire smoking in bed in a drunken stupor.
At one point I stepped out of the flight deck and went up to Linda and said, ‘Dig out that bottle of hooch you’ve got in your handbag.’
She gave it to me, and everybody watched me walk back carrying a bottle of bourbon. I heard afterwards they thought I’d finally gone off the deep end and was going to go up there and get plastered. But I needed it. One thing we’d forgotten on board was the methylated spirits to clean the windshield. I needed alcohol, and I knew Linda had it.
In 1946 I developed a radar system for the Connie, and that was a significant step forward in airline safety. It was the only radar for commercial aircraft that was worth a damn at the time, and I demonstrated it in 1947. It was the only device that gave the pilot a warning if he was too close to mountains or any other obstacle. It flashed a red light, and a warning horn sounded in the brainbox, the flight deck.
I demonstrated it near Mount Wilson, in California, because, as usual, there were skeptics who didn’t think it would work. I took a group of newspaper people up in a Connie, and I scared the holy hell out of them. They thought with a 500-foot warning, that only allowed a few seconds for the pilot to avoid whatever obstacle there was. But that wasn’t the case, since this was a radarscope that picked up the obstacle at ground level.
I flew them all around Mount Wilson and into those canyons around there. Naturally, the moment we got close to the mountains the red light went on and the horn started to sound. It was loud as hell – I’d had it amplified because I was too deaf to hear it at its normal pitch. I knew that part of the country pretty well, and I went up in the evening, just when it was getting dark, and each time the horn would sound and the light would flash on, I’d start a conversation with one of these guys and pretend I hadn’t heard the signal, which drove them out of their minds. I knew I still had thirty or forty seconds to get the ship out of danger, and I used pretty near every second of it. I proved my point. The newsboys weren’t skeptical anymore.