The New York, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires Line

LXXXIX

Just as Juan Trippe was about to begin expanding Pan American Airways deep into Latin America late in 1928, he faced competition from a very unexpected direction. 

Colonel Ralph O'Neill USAAC, the fourth American Ace of World War I. O'Neill never forgave Juan Trippe for destroying NYRBA

In large part, what happened next could be put down to the interservice rivalries that often haunted (and still haunt) the American military establishment. In early 1929, Colonel Ralph O’Neill, the fourth Ace of the U.S. Army Air Corps, established a new airline focusing on South America.

O’Neill had spent the decade since the end of the Great War training the various Latin American air forces. He knew South America well. He spoke Spanish like a native. Due to his involvement with their air forces O’Neill was able to acquire both airmail contracts and landing rights with Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay on the basis of a handshake. 

The NYRBA logo with a flying fish

Sometime in 1928, Colonel O’Neill had been approached by that same mysterious Captain J.K. Montgomery (who O’Neill later described as “a SCADTA employee” (!) ) to create a new airline. 

Seemingly, O’Neill had a meeting with Admiral William Moffett of the Naval Air Service (the same Moffett who supported the building of the Navy’s lighter-than-air flying aircraft carriers Akron and Macon).  

Moffett told O’Neill just what Hap Arnold had told Juan Trippe --- that SCADTA represented a threat to U.S. security. Moffett asked O’Neill to set up a rival airline that could function as a check on SCADTA.  

It is a bit of an historical oddity that the Army Air Corps General recruited the Naval Air Service man (Trippe) and that the Naval Air Service Admiral recruited the Army Air Corps man (O’Neill) but that kind of cross-purposes history would mark Trippe’s and O’Neill’s brief, painful relationship. 

The galleon replaced with a clipper ship, the globe with an added wing,  the mountains rising behind the harbor framing the flying boat, the convention of naming planes "Flying Clippers" instead of "Flying Yachts." Pan American Airways used most of the same images as did NYRBA before it, but many histories of Pan Am don't mention NYRBA at all

O’Neill, who was brash and pugnacious, managed to raise the incredible sum of six million dollars (83 million dollars today) from Wall Street backers to fund his airline, despite fierce opposition from the Pan Am contingent on Wall Street.  Juan Trippe had clearly made many enemies. 

O’Neill called his airline the New York, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires Line (NYRBA Line for short). The name was meant to evoke the comforts of first-class rail travel. He called his aircraft “Flying Yachts.”

Admiral Moffett had a Navy order in for several of Consolidated Aircraft’s large “Admiral” flying boats. They were identical (except for the interiors) to the Consolidated civilian “Commodore.” Although military orders always got priority over civilian orders, Admiral Moffett advised Consolidated that the Navy could wait on the “Admirals” while NYRBA received its lushly-appointed “Commodores.” NYRBA also bought several Sikorsky S-38 flying boats.

NYRBA's East Coast South America route. Inland destinations were handled by Trimotors. When Pan Am acquired NYRBA it maintained the identical route

And that was it. Had it been merely a matter of money, NYRBA, with its unheard-of capitalization, would have swallowed up Pan American in a twinkling. But Juan Trippe, with his Skull-and-Bones Old Boy Network connections via Yale, was able to block NYRBA’s acquisition of airmail contracts with the United States. In brief, NYRBA could carry mail north to the United States but not south to Brazil or the Argentine. 

It was an impossible conundrum, but O’Neill decided to go forward anyway. He planned to have his first Commodore --- named Rio de Janeiro --- christened by Mrs. Herbert Hoover, the First Lady of the United States on October 2, 1929. When Mrs. Hoover arrived for the ceremony, to O’Neill’s horror and everlasting rage, she was being escorted by none other than Juan Trippe.

The Commodore "Havana." Were it not for Juan Trippe's piracy of NYRBA, Pan Am might have struggled to develop its South American routes. Juan Trippe's machinations in regard to NYRBA in particular were always a skeleton in Pan Am's closet

Trippe pushed past O’Neill to the phalanx of microphones at the podium, and announced that Pan American hoped to be providing regular service to South America on such luxurious ships as these on a regular basis very soon.  Flashbulbs popped. No one seemed to care that the plane wasn’t in Pan Am’s livery. 

Mrs. Hoover (who seemed oblivious to her role in this gross faux pas) cracked a bottle of Prohibition seltzer water across Rio de Janeiro’s bows, and the deed was done.  Trippe disappeared from the crowd before O’Neill could find him and strangle him. A fuming O’Neill had to suffer through a clutch of handshakes from men who thought he was working for Trippe. 

To regain some measure of prestige, O’Neill decided to captain the first flight to South America himself. For insurance, he brought along several Sikorskys as backup planes. 

As it turned out, O’Neill’s decision was wise. The several-stop flight to Buenos Aires was a either a comedy of errors, or Juan Trippe was paying NYRBA’s pilots to wreck their own aircraft, which clipped boat masts on takeoffs, struck seawalls on landings, or sprang sudden leaks at anchor.

 

Worse yet, local officialdom in South America ignored their own central governments’ authorizations to allow O’Neill landing rights and mail carrier rights. Gunplay was involved at one or two points. Several times O’Neill’s planes were chased by police speedboats as they raced across harbors to take off before they could be seized. There were a series of minor crashes. By the time NYRBA’s little air fleet reached its final destination all the planes had suffered some kind of damage. 

During this inaugural trip NYRBA actually managed to deliver the mail on time, and began a regular flight schedule thereafter. But the lack of U.S. Air Mail contracts, plus the onset of the Great Depression, plus an increasing lack of faith in O’Neill’s management abilities doomed NYRBA, which squandered its six million dollar bank account very quickly. The U.S. Postal Service refused to grant NYRBA any contracts (even as it awarded contracts elsewhere). Pressure built among the shareholders for O’Neill to sell out --- to Pan Am. 

A NYRBA Sikorsky S-38, “Pernambuco.” All of NYRBA's planes became Pan Am's planes, giving Pan Am an instant long-distance air fleet. When NYRBA went down it owned 14 Commodores and 8 Sikorskys, along with numerous Trimotors

“We’re getting a rooking,” complained O’Neill. In spite of everything, he argued, NYRBA had an impressive fleet of proven long-distance flying boats, while Pan Am was still toddling along with Ford and Fokker Trimotors. A sell-out would be a sellout, he thundered. It didn’t matter. O’Neill was outvoted and NYRBA’s fleet became Pan American Airways property in the summer of 1930. The bitter Ralph O’Neill disappeared from the pages of aviation history.  

Clearly, without NYRBA, Pan American would never have been what it ultimately became. At this remove, it’s difficult to determine if Trippe got his ideas from O’Neill, or vice-versa, but Pan Am’s corporate culture and NYRBA’s weren’t just parallel, they were virtual clones of one another.