sedona legend helen frye

Jack Frye and TWA-
Fortune (500) Magazine

Sedona Legend Profile Series

April 1945

Mrs. Frye Looks On As Jack Works
"A painting of auburn-haired Helen Varner Vanderbilt Frye hangs on the wall of Frye's office in Washington D.C. She piqued Frye's attention when at a cocktail party (June of 1938) she attacked T.W.A.'s advertising as stuffy, and advised a shift in emphasis from mere safety, to the romance and adventure of flying. Frye accepted her suggestion, and a year and a half later they were married. He still listens to her advertising advice. This painting, done by an English artist, shows Mrs. Frye at their ranch house in Arizona."

The above photo with caption accompanied the magazine article found lower on this page.

Unfortunately due to copyright laws I am unable to use the music most appropriate for this webpage from the movie "Laura", in regard to Helen's famous portrait which graced the wall of Jack's palatial Washington D.C. TWA office. The song from the movie "Laura" with Gene Tierney was released in 1944. The movie was about a man's love for a beautiful woman as seen in a portrait hanging on a wall. The music, classic and dreamy was a sensation at the time. Recently I have found out that Gene and Helen were friends so the music is even more appropriate. The portrait, one of two, was commissioned by Jack and painted at the Frye's ranch house at Deerlick Ranch in Sedona Arizona. (It is possible they were painted at the "Willow House" on the adjoining Smoke Trail Ranch). This is due to my recently being able to personally verify the date of the paintings as (1942). The famous Sedona House of Apache Fires was not yet built at this time, but the Willow House was acquired by the Frye's fall of 1941. The artist, Sir Arnold Mountfort and his wife Paddy, were good friends of Helen and Jack's. Paddy managed their Smoke Trail Ranch for them and lived on property in the mid 1940's. I am currently trying to track down just how Gene Tierney and Helen Vanderbilt Frye knew each other. It is interesting to note that the famous film "Leave Her To Heaven" was partly filmed in Sedona in 1945. When Gene was not on the movie set she spent her time sight-seeing the Red Rock Country including Flagstaff. Gene like Helen, enjoyed riding horses in the Sedona area, it is likely she may very well have spent time at the Frye's Smoke Trail Ranch as well. Please see a magazine article about the movie's association with Sedona in the October 2004 issue of Sedona Monthly Magazine. In time if I find out more information about Helen and her friendship with Gene Tierney I will include it on this page.

Two more visuals of this incredible lifesize portrait, (unframed) are displayed here captured before the painting was recently, professionally restored. The magazine photo above does not do the actual painting justice. As you can see Helen is not frowning as it would appear in the magazine copy of the portrait. The famous Hollywood portrait artist Sir Arnold G. Mountfort, an intimate friend of the Frye's, seemed to capture Helen's essence remarkably well in 1942. The portrait above, I am told, is much more vivid and startling in person, as is the one below. It was said to have been captured in just two sittings. To the right, the image clearly shows Cathedral Rock displayed out the windows behind Helen Frye. The black and white, magazine photo of the portrait above, shows the original frame of the larger portrait matched the original frame still on the second one as seen below. On the back of the frame it says, New York City, where the Frye's evidently had the portraits framed. I have been told there was also a third portrait of Jack, but as of yet I have been unable to locate any details or photos of it.

This painting was the second portrait commissioned by Jack from the artist Sir Arnold G. Mountfort in 1942. Please click on it for larger file. A masterpiece of 1940's glamour, the painting leaves most people speechless. I had occasion to photograph and handle this portrait in May of 2006, it is truly one of the most exquisite paintings I have ever seen. Yes, it was deliberately painted to hang as shown, the signature is in the lower right hand corner. Although Helen had it re-wired to hang with the head at the bottom, (she evidently liked it displayed thus). Helen Vanderbilt Frye's beauty is legendary, this is remembered from all who met her. This representation of Helen Frye explains her ability to bring men to their knees. Those who knew her intimately say she was the personification of a walking dream, voluptuous and stunning- with all the curves in just the right places. With her movie-star-looks and alluring magnetic personality men did indeed fall at her feet throughout her life! For example, later in her life she was engaged to a legendary movie idol, see "Tyrone Power and Helen Frye" here. Personal friends of Helen's have related to me that at one time Helen and Howard Hughes were romantically involved. However, I have never found any evidence to support this rumor except that Helen and Howard were unusually close for over 20 years. If the rumor was indeed true the romance would have occurred in the late 1930's.

Click on the above photo to read an article about
Howard Hughes and Jack Frye from April 17, 1944.
Both were described as "Hollywood Playboys" at the time.

The above photo appeared with the article along with many others associated with T.W.A..

Although the press photo (above) implies the image was captured at the 22,000 acre Frye, Sunshine Ranch now known as the "Red Gap Ranch" near Flagstaff, the location appears to actually be the Frye "Deerlick Ranch" (now Cross Creek Ranch Estates) in Sedona, AZ. Date was about about 1945, Schuerman Mountain is clearly evident as seen displayed behind Jack and Helen Frye. Also see this page.

The following article is Copyrighted, and the sole property of Fortune magazine.

CHEST EXPANSION OF AN AIRLINE

(The following profile on Jack Frye appeared in Fortune, April of 1945)

With Jack Frye's Ambition, Howard Hughes' Money, and Three Years' ATC Experience, T.W.A. Would Like to Change Its Name to "Trans-World Air" and Fly Around The Globe

President Roosevelt, the Civil Aeronautics Board, and the State, Commerce, War, and Navy departments have ranged themselves solidly in favor of having the country represented on the transoceanic air routes by more than one company. Pan American Airways, pioneer of the international routes and chief proponent of the doctrine of representation abroad by one line only, is not yet ready to concede defeat on its scheme for a single "community company." It may have an ace in the hole in influence with the congressional committees that grant or withhold air-mail subsidies. But Congress tends naturally to favor competition over monopoly, and on such issues President Roosevelt usually carries Congress with him. So confident of the outcome are the domestic airlines desiring international routes that they are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on traffic surveys, studying weather conditions over projected routes, and making friends and influencing people in the countries where they hope to fly. In terms of ambition to operate overseas and activity to implement that ambition, Transcontinental & Western Air takes second place to none. Although it has never flown outside the U.S. at all - except under contract for the Air Transport Command - T.W.A. is applying to fly around the globe. Howard Hughes, chief owner of the line, and Jack Frye, its President, are talking of changing the name of T.W.A. to "Trans-World Airlines." The center of glamour and adventure in aviation has shifted from the domestic to the foreign field; Frye and Hughes, still young men in an industry that keeps even older men young, are determined to follow it.

Since late in 1941, when the Army asked the airlines to take over the major burden of its trans-ocean flying, T.W.A. has flown planes of the Air Transport Command some 6,000 times across the North and South Atlantic and thousands of miles more in Europe and Africa. It has flown one special mission around the world. T.W.A. officers and pilots like to talk about the notables they have flown, including President Roosevelt, Generals Marshall and Eisenhower, Admiral King, and General and Madame Chiang Kai-shek. What they are most proud of, however, is the skill and experience they have acquired in flying over oceans, deserts, icecaps, and through Arctic storms. They do not intend to let these assets lapse after the war, and so they have filed for around-the-world commercial routes, upon which they could launch their Stratoliners the day following authorization by the CAB. T.W.A. proposes to fly passengers daily to London in twenty-two hours, at a fare of $263.80, against Pan American's present charge of $525. When its forty-eight passenger Lockheed Constellations are available, T.W.A. plans to cut the flying time nearly in half, the cost well under $200 - as does Pan American. Frye is also talking of a twenty-seven-day deluxe cruise around the world; only three days would be spent in flying, the rest in sightseeing. Cost of an all-expense tour: about $2,500. If T.W.A.'s dream of postwar routes seems too expansive, it is at least in keeping with the past record of its President, Jack Frye. Had he lacked the imagination to project himself into an unlikely future, Jack Frye might never have left his father's ranch in the Texas Panhandle. In World War I, when Frye was thirteen, three Army "Jennies" made an emergency landing near the pond where he was skating. The boy forgot his new skates and spent the day running errands for the flyers. That day he contracted pneumonia, of which he was cured in due time, and a fanatical interest in aviation, from which, at forty, he shows no sign of recovering.

In 1923, when he was eighteen, Jack Frye went to Los Angeles, got a job as a soda jerk, and saved enough money to pay for flying lessons. He folded his lanky six-feet-two into an old Army plane and soloed in seven hours. He was so apt a pupil that his instructor almost immediately made him a partner in the "flying school." One of Frye's early pupils was Paul Richter, a swart, stocky youth who had fled his father's advertising business in Denver as soon as he could accumulate the wherewithal. He too made his way to Los Angeles and astounded Frye by paying his $250 flying fee in cash. Richter was clearly a young man worth cultivating. Before long he had bought into the flying school and helped finance an agency to sell planes. Piecing out their capital by stunt flying for Hollywood, the partners by 1927 had acquired enough money to set up a flight service between Los Angeles and Phoenix.
Richter, who is today Executive Vice-President of T.W.A. on leave as a captain in the Naval Air Transport Service, has fond memory of that first route, modestly christened Standard Air Lines. Its patrons were mostly movie people with hide-outs in Arizona, and on weekends traffic was so heavy, Richter recalls, that they "had to sort of wish the plane off the ground." Oxygen masks had scarcely been heard of in those days, but Frye and Richter, flying alternate trips, thought nothing of forcing their single-engine Fokker up to 16,000 feet to get above the clouds. The usual flight was from Los Angeles to Phoenix direct. But the plane's comfort facilities were suitable for men only; if women were aboard it was customary to put down on the sand and mesquite at a place now known as Desert Center, California, where a lonely filling station offered the luxury of two primitive outhouses. When the depression struck, Frye arranged for Standard, by now somewhat expanded, to be taken aboard by Western Air Express, which paid $1 million in stock for Standard, the flying school, and the airplane agency. Frye became Vice-President in charge of operations of Western Air Express.

ANGELS - ERSATZ AND REAL

From here on Frye's career toward the presidency of a major national airline was speeded by two guardian angels in the quaint disguise of Postmasters General. Western Air Express was one of the few really profitable airlines in the U.S. in 1930, and it would have been satisfied to limit its expansion to the West. But President Hoover's Postmaster General, Walter Folger Brown, was determined to combine the existing east-to-west airlines into two or three transcontinentals. For the New York - Kansas City - Los Angeles route he wanted to merge Western Air Express with Transcontinental Air Transport, which already flew across the continent - except for two gaps representing nights, when the job of advancing the daring traveler was turned over to the railroads. T.A.T., known as the "Lindbergh Line," was long on prestige but short on profits, and W.A.E. recoiled violently from the union. Through his power over airmail subsidies, Postmaster General Brown finally got what he wanted, but it was a shotgun wedding. Frye became operating Vice-President of the new cross-country line (now air all the way), which took its present name of Transcontinental & Western Air. The presidency went, after a short interim, to Richard W. Robbins, who had been head of a small Pennsylvania company included in the merger. In 1934, Mr. Roosevelt was in the White House and James Aloysius Farley was Postmaster General. He too unwittingly played good angel to Jack Frye's fortunes. Mr. Farley's part was to rule, after the air-mail contract cancellations of 1934, that anyone who had been present at the so-called "spoils conferences" in the Brown incumbency could not be represented in any reorganized company bidding to carry air mail. This arbitrarily forced Dick Robbins out of his job as President of T.W.A., and Jack Frye took over. Frye has been President ever since, but his seat has not always been as secure as it now is.

T.W.A. did not fare too well in the reallocation of routes after the air-mail contract cancellations. After making a profit in 1935 and 1936, the line in both 1937 and 1938 showed a net loss of more than three-quarters of a million dollars. Lehman Brothers and John D. Hertz, who had bought controlling interest in T.W.A. in 1935, were disgruntled. Hertz, a tough hombre who had put Yellow cab on top in Chicago in the taxi-war days, clamored loudly for the company to show a profit. Frye and Richter insisted on such new-fangled things as constant-speed propellers and Stratoliners. Hertz blew up. He moved to weaken the young men's authority, if not to dump them overboard. Frye and Richter, who are not the type to take a licking lying down, even from such a powerful operator as John Hertz, looked about for a backer who would let them run the line the way they thought it should be run. They unanimously nominated Howard Hughes, round-the-world flyer, movie producer, and multimillionaire heir to the Hughes Tool Co. of Houston, a business grown fat on an oil-drill patent. Hughes had met Frye and Richter in their gypsy days, when he was producing Hell's Angeles, and in the middle thirties he had spent some weeks around the home office of T.W.A. at Kansas City, "soaking up information about planes and airlines." Frye and Richter now made a date to meet Hughes at the Ambassador hotel in Los Angeles. Hughes listened sympathetically as his friends recited their worries. First he proposed to finance them in setting up an airplane plant, but Frye objected that they wanted to continue in air transportation. "Well," replied Hughes, a believer in direct action, "let's buy an airline. American? United?" Frye countered with the proposal to buy T.W.A. Hughes agreed. They bound themselves to secrecy and the next day quietly began to buy up stock. When they had acquired a few thousand more shares than Hertz and Lehman Brothers owned, Frye called on Hertz and proposed to buy the Hertz-Lehman stock. Hertz blanched and fidgeted and demanded the name of Frye's backer, but finally agreed to sell without being told. That was in April, 1939. Since then Hughes has added to his holdings, which now total 45 percent of T.W.A.'s common stock. (There is no preferred.) It appears now that Frye and Richter did Hughes about as great a favor as he did them in 1939. Hughes acquired his 440,000 shares of stock for a little over $6 million; it is now worth (at market) over $12,000,000. The whole company is valued, on the late February market, at about $28,000,000.

ROUNDING OUT THE ROUTES

Thus Jack Frye, a youngish forty, is the chief executive and part owner of the third biggest transcontinental airline. (American is the biggest and United second; Northwest became the fourth last December when it was granted a route from Milwaukee to New York.) Like all airlines, T.W.A. is physically less busty than the public's impression of it. Its gross revenue last year, $25 million, was chicken feed alongside - for example - the $1 billion take of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Even its 7,700 miles of routes are composed merely of paper franchises (revocable) to the upper air. But by airline standards T.W.A. is substantial. As of March, 1945, it had some forty-nine planes - or about one-seventh of all airline planes in the U.S. It also has seven maintenance bases, 6,700 employees, a chief operating office in Kansas City, a top executive office in a remodeled Y.M.C.A. annex in Washington, and ticket offices strung along its routes at thirty-one points in the U.S. Those measurements of T.W.A.'s domestic structure are true only as of today. Jack Frye is busily trying to correct certain weaknesses, most glaring of which is T.W.A.'s lack of a supporting network of routes to feed the main line. Always T.W.A. has been badly off for feeders. In the shotgun marriage by which T.W.A. was conceived, Western Air Express withheld from its dowry its most profitable lines. Later, T.W.A. came out of the air-mail contract cancellation minus two or three profitable auxiliary routes. So, sandwiched between American's and United's transcontinental routes, T.W.A. badly needs intermediate traffic, especially for the jump across the sparse area between Kansas City and Los Angeles. Since 1939 Frye has bombarded CAB with applications for additional routes - no measly stub-end line that winds up at a tank-town terminal with an empty plane, but a real network that will nourish T.W.A.'s main stem. The routes he has applied for lace Pennsylvania and Ohio, and to some extent Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri, like the chicken-coop struts of a museum biplane. Already he has been awarded several, including a route from Pittsburgh to Boston, and one from Dayton to Washington.

T.W.A. is faced with plenty of contenders for the rest of the territory it covets, but it ought to come out fairly well. The CAB, like Postmaster General Brown, prefers a limited number of strong, sound lines to a multiplicity of weak, cutthroat competitors. Growth, naturally, will take time. Meanwhile, what about T.W.A.'s current operations? Like those of every transportation company in wartime, they are grossly abnormal. Early in 1942 the Army began requisitioning equipment from the airlines, taking from each the same proportion of planes and paying a fair price. Of T.W.A.'s forty-two planes, eighteen were commandeered - just when passenger travel and air-mail and express loads began to increase. The planes have since been returned, and the proportion of occupied seats has continued to rise, so that in 1944 it averaged 92 percent, compared to 61 percent in 1941. Up, too, went the earnings from a 1941 deficit to a profit of about $2,700,000 last year. And, what with priority travel alone running at 60 percent on transcontinental lines, Jack Frye expects T.W.A. to earn even more in 1945, when its five big Stratoliners (commercial version of the Flying Fortress) are back in service. (The profit of T.W.A. on its ATC operation is negligible.) Still, T.W.A.'s profit chickens are not yet hatched, and the CAB is rooting rudely among the eggs. The CAB - which is to the airlines what the ICC is to the rails - feels that the government, having carried the airlines with mail subsidies in their lean days, deserves a break now that they are fat. Possibly the CAB disapproves a special tax concession that the airlines wangled from Congress five years ago. By the terms of that deal, the airlines enjoy an extra exemption on excess-profits tax equal to the total amount of a line's air-mail pay for the year! (One New York financial house has described this arrangement as a "mild form of financial mayhem") Whatever the reason, the CAB has recently ordered the airlines to show cause why their air-mail should not be slashed from 60 cents to 32 cents a ton-mile - an order which, in 1944, would have cut T.W.A.'s net profit in half.

PREPARING FOR PEACE

Whatever is done about air-mail pay, T.W.A. is assured a good profit so long as the war lasts. But Frye knows that when peace comes and the airlines can run all the planes they want, the payload will fall and profits with it. So he is tightening up his operation. For four or five years T.W.A. has been bringing in executives trained in corporation finance and administration, and the organization has been reshuffled on the staff-and-line principle. The operation heads have conducted an efficiency survey of the engine overhaul and maintenance departments, obtaining a notable reduction in man-hours. An executive committee is considering an incentive plan of pay for the employees. T.W.A.'s greatest weakness possibly has been the failure to do a better selling job. Its advertising and passenger traffic departments, for example, have not been as effective as those of American and United. American reaps a dividend from having built up a reputation for safety; actually there is little difference between American's and T.W.A.'s long-run safety record, with T.W.A. enjoying a margin. In its advertising, T.W.A. for years moved from one agency to another without finding a consistent theme with which to identify itself in the public mind. In the past four years T.W.A.'s advertising has improved, and for this romance must be credited with an assist. Jack Frye and Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr., nee Helen Varner of Clarksburg West Virginia, became interested in each other when she taunted him at a party for the dullness of T.W.A.'s advertising. She went home and wrote Jack a letter about consumer appeal in air travel; it made such an impression it still serves as T.W.A.'s informal advertising manual. T.W.A.'s recent full-page advertisement showing a Constellation (with the advice, "Don't travel unless your trip helps win the war," in type almost too small to be readable) is a model of sleekness. Mrs. Frye's influence is discernible also in efforts of T.W.A. to improve its dining service. Like other airlines, T.W.A. considers a planes's pay load too precious to permit the use of a kitchen. It is experimenting with a deep-freezing process that may bypass this limitation. The idea is to cook food as appetizingly as possible, then deep-freeze it, and reheat it electronically on the plane.

FROM CAIRO TO CATHAY

Nowadays it is only by a consensus exercise of will power that Jack Frye turns his mind to such things as T.W.A.'s advertising and dining service. His heart is in the drive to obtain a round-the-world air route. T.W.A.'s plans for global operation are encased in nine encyclopedic volumes known to the CAB ad Docket No. 1598 and Docket No. 1060. T.W.A. is asking for a route across the North Atlantic to the British Isles; thence across central Europe to Cairo, on to Shanghai and Tokyo by way of Calcutta, returning to the U.S. by Petropavlovsk, Nome, and Fairbanks. (See map, page 137.) In Europe the route includes London, Paris, Berlin, Belgrade, and Athens, and would serve ten of the twenty-six "air-traffic
generating areas" that T.W.A.'s staff of thirty-five economists and geographers have spotted in the world. Evidently Frye and Hughes were not suffering from bashfulness when they applied for this rich route. To Ivan Trippe, the architect of Pan American, the application must appear as sheer effrontery, a reaction possibly shared by American Export Airlines. These are the only two U.S. lines certified by the CAB for transoceanic routes, and the CAB's examiners have recommended that Pan Am and Amex split between them the four routes that CAB projects across the North Atlantic and through Europe. As for the route through Alaska and the Kuriles to the Far East, Northwest and Western airlines are contesting T.W.A.'s. The opposition to T.W.A. on both the Atlantic and Pacific might dampen the spirit of a less determined man, but Jack Frye is a congenital optimist and used to improbable odds. He thinks there is room for more than two American companies to share the traffic to Europe, and he doesn't give much weight to the examiners' report. With the enthusiastic backing of Hughes, who in 1938 made a round-the-world flight that is still a record, Frye is going ahead as blithely as if the CAB's authorization were in the bag. He has deployed private diplomatic agents to the non-Axis capitals along the proposed route. So has Pan American, but Frye has gone Pan Am one better by sending, at a total expense of several hundred thousand dollars, technical advisers to improve the domestic aviation of those nations. T.W.A.'s men go in and survey the air-transport needs of a country with a view to setting up a ten-or fifteen-year development plan covering "the whole damn thing." Frye thinks this investment will pay off in political friendships and joint arrangements when T.W.A. begins to fly abroad. Already it has produced an invitation from a great power to submit a brochure on T.W.A.'s proposed operations within its boundaries. At Hillcrest, a seventy-three acre estate across the Potomac from Washington, Frye entertains for the foreign diplomatic corps, concentrating on air attaches and missions. He has developed a special affection for representatives of the Soviet commonalty; they are as forthright as a ranch-raised Texan.

BATTLE OF THE LOBBIES

Forthrightness, nevertheless, has its limitations, especially when the main opposition is Pan American, which can claim as efficient representatives as can be found in Washington. Pan American is especially strong with the Senate Commerce Committee, whose chairman, Senator Bailey of North Carolina, has been trying to issue a report which, if it did not come out flatly for some version of the "chosen instrument," would at least urge that no domestic company be given a franchise for a trans-ocean route. So far, Senators friendly to the domestic lines have blocked such a report, and even if the committee should issue it, it is doubtful that Congress would make it law. (A compromise may be adopted requiring domestic lines to set up subsidiaries to qualify to fly abroad.) The CAB sides with T.W.A. in opposing Pan Am's one-company idea, but it wants to give our flag lines a chance for a sound profit, and it is well aware that on important transoceanic routes foreign countries will have lines. Even though CAB rejects the chosen-instrument idea, it is unlikely in the beginning to authorize more than one U.S. line to operate a complete round-the-world service; and that line almost certainly will be Pan American. President Roosevelt and the CAB both are said to believe Pan Am deserves the plum for its pioneering in the trans-ocean air. Against Pan American's experts, T.W.A.'s chief Washington representative is Jack Nichols, a former Democratic Congressman from Oklahoma who calls himself "a country lawyer." Nichols operates with all the subtlety of a politician trying to get an appropriation for a home-town airport. But he is aided by Alexander Royce, a Harvard-and-Yale trained lawyer who knows that in negotiation a straight line often is not the shortest distance from where one is to where one wants to go. Royce is chairman of the Seventeen Airlines Committee, jointly financed by all domestic lines opposing the chosen-instrument device. (All the domestic airlines, that is, except United.) If worst comes to improbable worst, T.W.A. will still have a foothold in the international air through TACA, a Central and South American airline in which T.W.A. owns controlling interest (see page 179). T.W.A. also owns a 20 percent interest in Hawaiian Airlines, a flourishing inter-island company that has applied for a route from Honolulu to San Francisco.

EYES VERSUS MOUTH

Unfriendly observers like to remark that "T.W.A.'s eyes are bigger than its mouth," by which homely figure they imply that the line does not have financial backing to support the additional routes it has applied for. T.W.A.'s working capital and cash at the end of 1944 totaled nearly $11,500,000 a fairly robust figure for a domestic airline, but not very hefty when set beside the cost of equipment for a whole batch of new domestic routes and an intercontinental route. Frye says, however, that a group of insurance companies has offered to buy $15 million worth of thirty-year T.W.A. debentures at 4.5 percent. More probably, T.W.A. will issue additional stock. The brokers have been trying for two years to get the company to sell more stock; Frye and Hughes may soon agree. How to find money is among the least of T.W.A.'s worries. Hughes's personal worth has been estimated as high as $80 million (the Hughes Tool Co. has a capital and surplus of about $25 million) and he himself can, if he wishes, underwrite any probable expansion of T.W.A. Presumably he would wish to take care of a substantial part of it, if only to prevent too great a dilution of his control. Hughes's interest in T.W.A., though definitely warm, does not extend to taking an active part in the management. Besides the tool firm, T.W.A. has several other competitors for Hughes's attention - Sturges-Hughes, Inc. (moving-picture producers); Hughes Aircraft, engaged in manufacturing military planes; and the Gulf Brewing Co., largest in the Southwest. There are also incidental enterprises like engineering the giant Hughes-Kaiser flying boat, soon to be launched. When T.W.A. is engineering a new transport plane, Hughes may work over the design twelve or fifteen hours a day. But on business matters he does not like to be bothered. He will go weeks without answering when Frye tries to telephone him, though the pending decision may involve sums running into the millions.

After Hughes had told Frye to buy control of T.W.A., he went off on his yacht and couldn't be reached for advice on how much to pay for the stock. Jack Frye is paid $40,000 a year by T.W.A. and $12,000 more as a consultant for Hughes Tool. His fortune, including stock options, runs to perhaps a half-million dollars. This may not make him rich by Wall Street standards, but Frye, like Hughes, can afford to be less interested in making money than in developing better planes and new techniques of flying. In this field T.W.A. is conceded high rank even by its rivals. In 1934, T.W.A. introduced the DC-2, the fourteen-passenger, 200-mile-an-hour plane that made all other transport equipment in use at that time obsolescent. American Airlines forged ahead in 1937 with the DC-3, but T.W.A. - with Pan American - was first to get the four-engine Stratoliner, first commercial plane with a pressure cabin, able to fly "over the weather." Had not the war intervened T.W.A. would have led again in 1943 with the Constellation. The war delayed completion of this plane, but it is now being used by the ATC. With a future speed of 400 miles an hour, a ceiling of 30,000 feet, the "Connie" can carry forty-eight passengers in complete comfort, or one hundred soldiers in bucket seats. It has a maximum range of 4,000 miles, and its ton-mile cost is a third less than that of older commercial planes. But Frye knows that the Constellation is not the last word. "Within the next ten years," he says, "we will have transport planes flying 400 or 500 miles an hour at an altitude of 35,000 feet. Such things as jet propulsion and boundary layer control (a wing-suction device) will assist these speeds. Reversible propellers will permit the planes to land at higher speeds without lengthening the runways. Souped-up models on demonstration flight will be able to fly around the world in thirty-six hours." Frye means to push T.W.A. ahead in the use of new planes and devices as fast as safety permits. T.W.A. as the first airline to use the Sperry automatic pilot, the wing de-icer, the propeller de-icer, and wing flaps as a means of reducing landing speeds. It was also the first line to train pilots in celestial navigation for night flights. Frye wants to add more "firsts." This technological initiative is especially valuable in an industry which, though far from mature, is closely regulated and therefore tends to become cartelized. T.W.A. urges further that this is an industrial asset worth fostering in the international as well as the domestic field. It is an asset that T.W.A. will continue to have as long as it is run by men like Frye and Richter and owned by a man like Hughes, and it constitutes T.W.A.'s best claim to fly the international air.

Thank you for visiting:
Sedona Legend Helen Frye

The Jack and Helen Frye Story