Reach for the Skies Read online

  Swords into plowshares: the Avro Lancastrian was a modified RAF bomber.

  It was the jet stream that killed them. The Lancastrian was one of the very few airliners flying high enough to nudge the bottom of the jet stream, which in this area normally blows from the west and southwest. According to their reckoning—calculating the aircraft’s position from its direction and speed and time—they should have been heading into Santiago. Heavy cloud cover hid the terrain from view, and the crew had no idea that a powerful wind was pushing them more than 50 miles off course.

  The moment they entered the cloud layer, they were finished. The crew and passengers of flight CS 59 flew into a nearly vertical snowfield near the top of the Tupungato glacier. An avalanche buried them.

  Today, as I mentioned, commercial airlines make as much use of jet streams as possible, to shorten journey times and save fuel. There are four major jet streams, two in each hemisphere, circling the globe at middle and polar latitudes. If you’ve flown across the Atlantic and wondered why it’s quicker to get to Europe than it is to fly from Europe to America, it’s because your eastbound flight hitched a lift on the jet stream.

  In the future, the jet stream may have other uses, too. Ken Caldeira, an atmospheric scientist at Stanford University, certainly thinks so: “My calculations show that if we could just tap into one percent of the energy in high-altitude winds, it would be enough to power all civilization,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle in May 2007. Plenty of people agree with him. Designs for high-altitude wind turbines come in a dizzying array of shapes and sizes. Some resemble zeppelins, others futuristic helicopters. There’s much buzz at the moment around a wind-power company called Makani. They are developing kite-assisted high-altitude turbines. They’re keeping the details a close secret and may be years away from setting the world alight with their technology, but you have to love their background: a president who made self-replicating machines at MIT and writes comic books in his spare time showing children how to make gadgets; a professional windsurfer; and a world frisbee champion. As we’ve already seen, it’s exactly Makani’s sort of people who (if they’re lucky) take technology forward. Larry Page, one of the cofounders of Google, reckons the thirty-strong gang of kite surfers at Makani are the Wright brothers of their age. He has put $30 million of Google’s money where his mouth is. Who knows? He may be right.

  Part Two

  Up and Away

  A first-class cabin, c. 1960. Just looking at this picture makes my back ache!

  six

  Shrinking the World

  I seem to have spent my life—in the aviation business and elsewhere—separating the Things Not Done Because They Don’t Work from the Things Not Done Because We Don’t Do Them.

  Here’s something not done because it doesn’t work. Not long ago I suggested we tow our planes from their berths to the start of the runway. In theory, this ought to have saved us an extraordinary amount of aviation fuel. It turned out after tests, however, that tugging a jetliner around by its nose isn’t very kind to the airframe. We’re now looking at installing electric motors in the front wheels of our aircraft instead.

  Next, by way of contrast, is something that’s Just Not Done.

  If you want to arrange seats on a plane so people can lie down and have a decent nap, your best bet is to arrange the seats in a herringbone pattern. That way you can fit more people into the cabin and give everybody greater comfort. Everybody in the industry told us this couldn’t be done. Everybody explained that it was because, in the event of an accident, the seat belts would cause an injury. Nobody, it seemed, had heard of airbags.

  Today, our herringbone seating, complete with airbag-equipped seat belts, is the glory of Virgin Atlantic’s upper-class cabin.

  Over the years we’ve pioneered comfortable reclining seats, flat beds, lounges with hairstylists and masseuses, and a motorcycle-and-limo home pickup service. Virgin Atlantic was the first to provide personal video screens in every seatback so our travelers could choose the films and television shows they wanted to watch. These are some of the ideas that worked. There were plenty that didn’t. Does anyone remember our live in-flight entertainment?

  One of the most difficult and exciting challenges of running an airline—and it amazes me how few airlines take it seriously—is how to maintain the glamour of air travel. Many of our passengers have only ever flown economy class. Given how thrilling and magical flying can be, I think it’s up to us to make their experience different and exciting or, at the very least, comfortable.

  September 11, 2001, changed air travel forever. Nineteen hijackers flew two passenger jets into the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon, and a fourth into a field: the plane’s passengers had somehow, and at the expense of their own lives, stood up to the hijackers.

  Needled by silly measures, inconsistent rules, and careless government scaremongering, we too easily forget that security is an important issue, and that airport security has been greatly improved since the attacks. No, really. It’s easy to forget how lousy it used to be, especially on U.S. domestic flights. In 1997, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration tried to smuggle 173 imitation firearms past airport security. They were caught only 56 times—that’s a detection rate of less than one in three.

  After the September 11 attacks, something had to be done. I have no complaint with extra security; I just don’t understand why it has to be done so shoddily. You want to take my mother’s knitting needles away? Okay, but why can I still buy a glass bottle full of flammable liquid once I get past security? Why can I buy razors? You want me to wait in line for half an hour? If you must—but how about a bottle of water while I’m waiting? You want to x-ray my shoes? Fine—how about giving me a chair so that I can put them back on?

  What with the rigmarole of customs beforehand and the dread prospect of immigration afterward, making flights fun for people is, to say the least, challenging. So we start with the little things. We try, against all the odds, to make you smile. “Please ensure that your seat is in the upright position,” says V Australia’s new safety animation; “check that your tray table is folded away and that your hair is just right.” V Australia’s CEO, Brett Godfrey, had epic arguments with the Civil Aviation Authority over that one: they thought it was demeaning. Brett took a few weeks out and came back with data to prove that passengers were paying far more attention to his “demeaning” presentations.

  I can’t quite believe we’re still having these arguments. Virgin Blue’s cabin crews have been turning safety briefings into vaudeville performances for years, for good reason, and to good effect. When the cabin crew tells you the whistle on your life jacket is just about perfect for attracting sharks, you’ll laugh, you’ll shudder, and you’ll surely remember that there’s a whistle tied to your life jacket.

  It’s always been my philosophy that airline staff are in the entertainment business. They have to be. Every day, the industry ties one and a half million people down in narrow metal tubes for hours at a time and insists that they do exactly what they’re told. For the sake of everyone’s safety, we must never forget that we’re asking a hell of a lot from human nature.

  I spend much of my life in the air. I’ve grown used to sleeping on airplanes, and, at the risk of sounding like an advertisement, that herringbone seating of ours really does guarantee me a comfortable night. Comfortable—but short. I get up well before we land to walk the aisles and say hello to our passengers. Showing my face is good for the brand; even more useful, I get to see for myself where we can improve and strengthen our service. For the cabin staff especially, there is no getting away from me.

  Hence the look-alike competition.

  Madame Tussaud’s waxwork museum in London is an eerie place at the best of times, but for Virgin Atlantic’s twenty-fifth birthday, our marketing people went one better. They filled a room with people who had the misfortune of looking an awful lot like me. It had sounded great on paper. I entered the room.
I grinned and greeted myself, again and again and again. I tried not to hyperventilate.

  After the party, I went off to circumnavigate the world. This time, Joan would not have to fear for my safety. I wasn’t attempting to break any records. I was simply circling the world in comfort, on board passenger jets. From Heathrow to Hong Kong to Sydney to Los Angeles and back to Heathrow was going to take me about eight days. What made my journey a first was the tickets in my pocket: each one bore the Virgin brand.

  The last thing I ever expected when I entered the field—a Freddie Laker fanatic wielding a single secondhand 747—was that one day I’d be able to fly around the world on Virgin-branded airlines. Boarding Virgin Atlantic’s Heathrow service to Hong Kong that night, I was struck by how much these companies had achieved. The airlines I’ve invested in and helped create over the years are now, indisputably, playing their part in making the world a smaller place.

  What does that mean for the world? Back in the 1940s, and after the terrors and losses of two world wars, shrinking the globe seemed a good idea to pretty much everybody. Passenger aviation would make all places local. It would bring the world together. I firmly believe that it has done just that—as surely as I know, beyond a doubt, that a price has been paid.

  During the 1950s, airplanes carried Western culture—and American brands—around the globe. By 1961, there were Hilton hotels on every continent except Antarctica, and already people were starting to complain that international travel was beginning to feel less vivid. Charles Lindbergh remarked: “I never feel more keenly the separation of tourist from native life than when I stay in an ‘American hotel’ abroad.”

  The smaller we make the world, the more we have to cherish its richness and diversity. The global airline industry, with its expensive, identikit machinery, its great manufacturing monopolies, and its pan-national regulatory framework, doesn’t look much like a champion of diversity.

  There is no pressing logical reason why the air industry should look this way. Much of its shape and character was set in 1944 by the Convention on International Civil Aviation, which became known as the Chicago Convention. The idea was to regularize and control the planes crossing our skies, for the world’s greater good. The convention was shaped by ideas that seem strange to us now but made good sense considering the firestorms of Dresden and Hamburg and the atomic annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  The convention’s primary assumption is that all planes are military assets. At the time of the signing, there was no distinction to be made between commercial aircraft and military aircraft. Planes simply fulfilled the requirements of the time. The fighters and bombers of the First World War were old mail planes. The early commercial airliners, like the Boeing 377 and the Avro York, were all converted Second World War bombers.

  The Convention assumed that civilian planes had military capability. Therefore (ran the logic), whoever owned the most planes posed the most serious global war risk: private aviation companies were effectively private armies!

  The specter haunting the Chicago Convention was of an international criminal mastermind launching terrorist raids in the hope of destabilizing world order. The idea goes back further than Wells, to Jules Verne’s The Master of the World (1904), and by the 1940s it was cropping up in virtually every comic, radio show, and cinema serial. (The 2004 film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is a deliriously accurate big-screen pastiche of that kind of story.) Many of us must at one time or another have smiled at the quaintness of the idea—until the smiles were wiped off our faces by the attacks of September 11 and the videotaped posturings of Osama bin Laden.

  Boeing’s 377 Stratocruiser: a world-beating civilian version of the B-29 bomber.

  The last thing the signatories of the Chicago Convention wanted to create was a free market in passenger air travel. From their point of view, that would be tantamount to creating a free market in mercenary air power! Far from setting civilian air travel free, they did their level best to leash and muzzle it. The Convention took aviation under the wing of government. The United States with its large internal market, went down the road of heavy regulation and protectionism. The Europeans, who were much better placed geographically to fly the world, from India to Africa to the Americas, preferred uniform regulation and state control—hence the creation of flag carriers like Air France (founded in 1933) and the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC, founded in 1946).

  The Chicago Convention was a compromise; it ensured that no one nation-state would dominate world air travel, while in the same breath enshrining Britain and the United States as the world’s most powerful commercial air operators (an unsurprising bias, given that they had just won the war). Among the “freedoms of the air” guaranteed by the Convention were the right to overfly a country without landing; the right to refuel without disembarking passengers (the most famous example being Ireland’s Shannon Airport, which was used as a stopping point for most North Atlantic flights until the 1960s); and the right to operate connecting flights from another country. To win those rights, each airline needed to obtain government approval.

  Government set the schedules. Government controlled the number of flights per day, the number of destinations covered, and the number of planes. It controlled the prices. Airlines did not serve the customer; they served the government. If an airline could not meet its obligations, the government ensured that it did not fly at all.

  Pan American Airways—the airline immortalized in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 as an operator of orbital space shuttles!—typifies the kind of airline that benefited most from the Convention. Pan Am, as it became known, was the brainchild of Juan Terry Trippe, one of the most celebrated of the early airline moguls and the undisputed pioneer of international aviation in the United States.

  Trippe saw his first plane in 1909, when his father took him to see Wilbur Wright fly. Inspired, he and his friends became Navy pilots when America entered the First World War; but they saw no action. This youthful nonadventure behind him, Trippe—a Yale graduate with a privileged New York background—was all set for a steady and lucrative Wall Street career, but boredom got the better of him. After receiving an inheritance, he went to work with New York Airways, an air-taxi service for the city’s smart set. He invested in a company called Colonial Air Transport, scared the life out of his colleagues with ambitious plans to fly all over the Caribbean, and eventually created the Aviation Company of the Americas—the company that would eventually become Pan Am.

  Trippe secured U.S. Air Mail contracts, flew the 90-mile airmail route from Key West to Havana, and lobbied successfully to become a “chosen instrument” of American policy in South America, where the United States had many strategic and economic interests. With State Department backing, Trippe’s company secured landing rights, built terminals, and won customs privileges all along the seaboards of South America, and by 1929, the year its celebrity adviser Charles Lindbergh opened the company’s route to Panama, Pan American Airways’ routes covered 11,000 miles. Ten years later, Pan Am straddled the Atlantic—all this before transatlantic airliners were invented!

  For its ocean crossings, Pan Am needed a plane that could fly 3,000 miles (long enough to reach Europe or Hawaii) while carrying a payload equal to its own weight. The successful design was the work of Glenn Martin, described by Time magazine in 1939 as “exhibit A1 of what a human being can do by channeling all his time and talent in one direction.” This backhanded compliment presumably refers to Martin’s being possibly the least colorful figure in aviation history. Martin lived with his mother, Minta, until she passed away, and he inherited his fascination with planes from her. She used to read him to sleep at night with newspaper articles about the latest experiments of aviation pioneers, from the American engineer Octave Chanute to the German inventor Otto Lilienthal. Martin’s first aviation experiments were box kites; he turned them out at a rate of three per day and sold them out of Minta’s kitchen for 25 cents each. He also experimented with sails and foun
d novel ways to harness the wind, propelling himself along on ice skates and even his bicycle.

  Juan Trippe founded Pan Am, for years America’s flagship airline.

  He founded the Glenn L. Martin Company in 1912. (It survives to this day as part of the aerospace giant Lockheed Martin.) Martin, who mostly made planes for the American military, turned out three huge four-engined flying boats for Pan Am—aircraft that came to symbolize the glamour and luxury of flying.

  Though designed for transatlantic service, Martin’s M-130s were to spend their working life flying in the opposite direction—over the Pacific. Much as Trippe wanted to establish lucrative air routes to Europe, he was at first stymied by politics. Britain wanted to protect its own “Empire” flying boats, manufactured by Short Brothers and operated by Imperial Airways, so the British were not likely to give Trippe landing rights on their territory. Given that their territory included both Newfoundland and Bermuda, this made an Atlantic crossing impossible.

  So Trippe bided his time, christened his first M-130 China Clipper, and turned toward the Pacific. Again, Trippe lobbied the U.S. government. Pan Am’s ambitions to open air routes across the Pacific as far as China chimed perfectly with the U.S. government’s own desire to spread the American sphere of influence into areas that would otherwise fall to Japan. Trippe got government assistance to build facilities across the Pacific, in Hawaii, Midway, Wake, and Guam—and Pan Am became what, according to the Chicago Convention, a civil airline was supposed to be: an instrument of foreign policy. A flag carrier.

  China Clipper made its most famous flight on November 22, 1935, before a crowd of 25,000. Carrying 58 mailbags bound for Manila, it lifted off from the waters of San Francisco Bay. It was supposed to fly over the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge, which was then still half built, but it proved too heavy and flew under it instead. At last it lumbered into the air and headed west to Honolulu, the first stop on its five-leg trip across the Pacific.