Target Manhattan

Grofeld

Your name, please, Captain?

Henry L. Grofeld. L. for Listowel, if it matters. Captain, NYPD. Chief of the First Division.

I gather that’s a statement you’ve prepared for us?

That’s right.

Would you like to read it into the record?

Is that necessary?

We could simply have the stenographer insert it, if you prefer.

That would save time, wouldn’t it? Why don’t you do it that way, then? Here you go.

Thank you…

(Pause)

Good Lord. This isn’t exactly what I expected.

I guess it’s not the usual officialese.

Did you prepare this for publication, Captain?

Sort of. But under the circumstances I don’t suppose I can ever submit it.

It’s a shame. This looks like a nice piece of work.

Well, I’ve got a confession to make. I moonlight as a writer-detective stories, crime novels. Under a pen name, of course. I’ve written several books.

Just leafing through this, it looks like a remarkable job of reconstructing the background of this case-the histories of the two men. How did you find the time?

I asked for it. It wasn’t just that I’d participated in the case. The whole thing fit into all my interests, as it happened. Criminal psychology, aircraft, and of course writing. I was given departmental leave to research the profiles on Ryterband and Craycroft. The leave was granted because the department was interested in the case the same way you’re interested in it-the idea that possibly we could determine what had caused the thing, and maybe if we knew that, we might be closer to preventing it happening again. Anyhow, I was put on detached duty with the assignment of compiling dossiers on the two men and the background of the case from its beginnings. Eventually, as you see, that took me back nearly forty years.

(Reading) “The bombs were five-hundred-pounders. Armed, contact-fused, balanced with machine-shop precision. They squatted in the abdomen of the thirty-year-old Flying Fortress like a deadly brood embryo.

“They hung in racks above open bomb-bay doors, poised to drop. Beneath them was the unsuspecting target: Manhattan, the city of New York-innocent hostage to one man’s demented dreams.

“Harold Craycroft had prepared a squadron of Eighth Air Force bombers for their participation in the deadly bombardment of the city of Dresden in the Second World War. Now he had prepared his own bomber-an airplane which actually had flown in the Dresden raid-for a macabre encore against the most concentrated urban center in the United States.

“The anatomy of the Craycroft-Ryterband case is unique in American criminological history. There can be no question that Craycroft was deranged, but his derangement led to a crime that was stunningly brilliant in the simplicity of its plan, awesome in concept, terrifying in implication. Drawn up and executed in its entirety by one solitary man (with incidental assistance from his brother-in-law), the Craycroft ransom may well turn out to have been literally the crime of the century.”

That’s an impressive opening, Captain. Here-I return this to you temporarily so that you can refer to it. I wonder if you’d mind covering the essentials of your paper orally, for our tape recorder. You may use the paper for reference as you talk, of course, and read from it if you wish. We’ll enter the entire document into the record, of course, but I’d rather go over it with you orally because various questions are bound to occur to me that may not be covered by the document itself. Do you mind?

No. However you want to do it.

Well, just start at the beginning then, if you will.

Right. I began with a biographical resume on Harold Craycroft. You want me to go over that?

Please.

Craycroft was born in Cincinnati on January twenty-third, nineteen eighteen. His father was an American aviator, in the Army, fighting in France. The father was killed when Craycroft was barely three months old.

(Reading) “Craycroft grew up in the shadow of his father’s legend. His mother (who gave piano lessons to augment the meager pension) and his two older sisters seem to have lived their lives as supplicants at the altar of Jeremy Craycroft’s memory; their Bible was the scrapbook of the elder Craycroft’s heroics.

“By the middle nineteen thirties, encouraged by the pressures of mother and sisters, Craycroft had apprenticed himself to a series of itinerant aviators of the breed that drifted incessantly across the Midwest during the Depression: the barnstorming county-fair pilots who walked the wings of their fabric-and-wood biplanes, slept in open cornfields under the wings of their rickety Spads and Jennies. At the age of seventeen Craycroft had already developed a reputation in the Ohio-Indiana area as one of the most exciting daredevil pilots on the fairground circuit.

“In nineteen thirty-six his mother fell ill with a lingering ailment, which probably was Parkinson’s disease. To support the family-only one sister had married-Craycroft was forced to seek gainful employment…”

He was eighteen then? What about education?

He’d left high school at fourteen. Of course it was the nadir of the Depression then. But he found a pretty good job right away, as a flight-line mechanic on the Trimotor assembly line at the Ford plant in Dearborn.

Sorry. Go on.

(Reading) “He was even then, according to testimony provided by retired Ford employees, a genius with aircraft engines.

“In nineteen thirty-eight he joined forces with Charles Ryterband, an aircraft designer and fellow Dearborn mechanic, to form the short-lived Cray-band Motors, Incorporated, an independent and privately owned company organized for the purpose of designing and building specialized airplane engines for racing planes, polar exploration aircraft and other custom uses. The company foundered within ten months.

“Evidently in search of adventure, Craycroft left the Midwest shortly after the death of his mother in December, nineteen thirty-eight. In July, nineteen thirty-nine, his name is found on the roster of the Balchen Expedition. Craycroft was in charge-”

I’m sorry. What was the Balchen Expedition?

An Arctic expedition. An attempt by air to land at the North Pole. I’ll go on, if I may?

Yes, Please do.

(Reading) “Craycroft was in charge of maintaining the two aircraft used in the successful leg of the expedition (to Nome and Point Barrow), but he did not accompany the party on the ill-fated final leg, which led to the deaths of two explorers and the loss of one aircraft; the Pole was not achieved.

“Craycroft remained in Alaska for several years, working first as a hired mechanic in Juneau, then opening his own maintenance facility at Anchorage; in the latter enterprise he was again joined by his former business partner, Ryterband, who was some six years older than Craycroft.

“In nineteen forty the U.S. Army Air Corps delivered its first defense squadrons of bomber and fighter aircraft to Alaska. A cold-weather testing facility was established at Fairbanks under the command of Colonel Everett S. Davis. Throughout nineteen forty and nineteen forty-one Harold Craycroft worked informally with and for the Davis laboratory, on a part-time basis, helping to devise cold-weather navigational techniques and solving problems caused by the extreme low temperatures of that region, in which oil would congeal and rubber turn brittle.

“At the outbreak of the war in December, nineteen forty-one, both Craycroft and Ryterband volunteered immediately for the draft. Ryterband was refused-he had a history of asthma and rheumatic fever. And until nineteen forty-four Ryterband continued to operate the Craycroft-Ryterband maintenance hangar at Elmendorf Field near Anchorage. The business went bankrupt in November, nineteen forty-four. In the meantime Craycroft had been accepted by the draft and, through the influence of Colonel Davis, had been granted an Air Corps commission as a first lieutenant. He earned his pilot’s wings in June, nineteen forty-two, at Travis Field but saw no service as a combat pilot; he was transferred immediately back to Alaska and by nineteen forty-three had become chief of maintenance for the Eleventh Air Force in that theater of war (the campaign in the Aleutian Islands).

“In November, nineteen forty-three, Craycroft was assigned to a training command in Nebraska, where he trained ground crews until May, nineteen forty-four, when he went to England, now carrying the rank of lieutenant colonel, to become deputy maintenance commander for the Eighth Air Force.

“His reputation among the warrior pilots was supreme. Craycroft by now had become the best-known mechanic in the American air forces. He had redesigned the cooling mechanism of the P-48 cowlings to prevent them from overheating in high-speed combat climbs; he had rebuilt the bomb-rack systems of B-17 and B-24 aircraft (systems which invariable arrived from the factories in nonfunctional condition); he had contributed subtle revisions to the designs of propeller blades and wing-control surfaces which had the effect of increasing both the speed and maneuverability of several types of combat aircraft, both American and British.

“Craycroft’s ground-crew teams, used as cadres by every squadron in the ETO, became justly famous for their ability to repair virtually any shot-up airplane and have it ready to fly within twenty-four hours-often by the cannibalization of parts from unserviceable wrecks. The period nineteen forty-four to forty-five was characterized by daily maximum efforts-against the factories of Germany, the cities of the Reich, the V-l and V-2 rocket installations and the waning Luftwaffe. Craycroft’s teams invariably provided more airworthy planes for each mission than the commanders had anticipated having available. Shortly after the Normandy landings in June, nineteen forty-four, Craycroft was promoted full colonel and took over the post of maintenance commander for the Eighth Air Force; he still held that position at the end of the war.”

It was during that period that he assembled the airplanes for the Dresden attack?

Well, that was a bit earlier. He was only responsible for one squadron of bombers at Dresden.

Dresden keeps being mentioned in this inquiry. That’s why I asked.

It had a devastating effect on anybody who had anything to do with it.

Go on then, please.

(Reading) “In nineteen forty-six Craycroft left active duty but retained his commission in the Army (subsequently the Air Force) Reserve. He rejoined his former partner, Charles Ryterband (who in nineteen forty-four had married the younger of Craycroft’s two sisters), in yet another abortive commercial enterprise, called the Alpine Aircraft Company. Buying a small hangar and machine shop in Palo Alto, California, the brothers-in-law set out to design and manufacture light planes for the hobbyist and business-travel trade. Experts interviewed recently have attested to the ingenuity and economy of the Alpine designs; evidently they were first-rate airplanes, well ahead of their time in performance and stability. But only three prototypes were built-a twin-engine executive plane and two single-engine models (a two-seater and a five-passenger model)-before Alpine Aircraft obeyed the precedent and went bankrupt. Graycroft and Ryterband seemed as ingeniously dedicated to financial failure as they were to superb mechanical work.

“Between nineteen forty-eight and nineteen fifty the partners went separate ways, Ryterband securing a position with the aircraft-testing division of Lockheed Aircraft and Craycroft returning once again to Anchorage, where he set up and managed the maintenance operations of Alaskan Airlines.

“When the Korean War broke out, Craycroft’s Reserve commission was activated and he was shipped out to Japan to supervise repair and maintenance for the American Air Force wings stationed there. Evidently his performance during the first phase of the war was exemplary; but the Air Force was in the process of switching over from the P-51 Mustang (a propeller-driven pursuit craft) to the F-80 and F-86 jet fighters. When one reads between the lines of Craycroft’s service record, one reaches the conclusion that the man had no affinity for jet-powered aircraft. It seems clear he lost interest in the mechanical ingenuities that had made him such a legend; he became, in the words of one veteran who recalls him in his last months in Japan in nineteen fifty-three, ‘kind of a tired old pencil pusher. He was just going through the motions. We all figured he was washed up.’

“One notes that this ‘tired old pencil pusher’ was, at the time, barely thirty-five years old. (He had attained an important World War Two command and the rank of full colonel at the age of twenty-six.)

“Craycroft was rotated back to California before the end of the Korean War. In Los Angeles he stayed with his sister and his brother-in-law, who had left Lockheed and gone to work for a stunt and special-effects organization which specialized in helicopter and airplane work for motion pictures.

“Craycroft resigned his commission at this time in protest against the replacement of piston planes by jets. ‘He never could abide the jets,’ one pilot recalls. ‘He was like a sailboat man sneering at power boats. Always called them stinkpots.’”

Obviously that had something to do with his choice of an antique propeller-driven bomber for this attack on New York. Is there anything in his background up to this point which suggests his later derangement?

Well, he was always an odd bird, that’s obvious from the word “go.” But he wasn’t a violent man. I mean his military service record is remarkable for the opposite reason. There were no black marks at all. No escapades. His formal efficiency reports praised his efficiency and initiative, but there isn’t a damn thing in them that could give you any clue to his character at all.

Perhaps the fact that he was such an unusually colorless person is a clue in itself. People who bottle things up too tightly sometimes tend to explode.

Well, one thing you learn when you make a study of criminal psychology is that there are certain kinds of cases that are easy to predict and certain kinds that are damn well impossible to predict. I mean, you take a standard case of a kid who grows up in urban poverty, in an atmosphere of drugs and street violence and maybe a family with no father and all the usual ghetto aspects that the ivory-tower types call you a bigot for mentioning. You take a case like that and you know it’s advisable to keep an eye on somebody from that background because the chances are he’s more likely to turn to crime than a well-educated kid from a solid home in some small town in New England. But, hell, you can’t take a background like Craycroft’s and make predictions from that. A lot of people with similar backgrounds are airline pilots or vice-presidents of aircraft companies or bank presidents.

Nothing at all in his attitudes or behavior at that time suggested he might go off the deep end?

We’ve all got our private demons, I guess. We’ve all got pressures. But Craycroft’s didn’t show. Not according to anybody I’ve talked to… Well, I’ll go on, all right?

(Reading) “The middle and late nineteen fifties were a period of big-budget Hollywood dedication to the Second World War. Ryterband and Craycroft worked initially as maintenance mechanics and gadget designers for planes which mounted aerial cameras, but soon Craycroft saw opportunity in the movies’ great interest in airplanes as subject matter rather than as flying camera platforms. In nineteen fifty-four Craycroft and Ryterband formed the only corporation of their checkered career that enjoyed financial success. It was given the name of Air Corps Associates, Incorporated, a company chartered in the state of Arizona for the purpose of ‘aircraft restoration and reconstruction.’

“Air Corps Associates had an interesting premise, and Craycroft was the ideal man to run it. The purpose for which the company had been organized was the restoration of World War Two airplanes for use in war movies. By nineteen fifty-five the U.S. Air Force had a combat flight line of jet aircraft; the designs of the war had been phased out and the surviving airplanes had been put in mothballs. Tens of thousands of aircraft stood parked in rows on a reservation in the desert of northwestern Arizona near the town of Kingman. For a time in the late nineteen forties the Air Force had made some pretense of keeping these planes in repair, as a reserve fleet; but the changeover to jets had rendered the old planes obsolete. The result was that the huge collection of warplanes had rusted, corroded, been pitted by desert sandstorms, ruined in all their ‘soft’ parts (rubber, canvas, wiring, tires), and generally rendered totally unserviceable. Desert packrats and rattlesnakes made nests in the cockpits. Seats rotted away. Glass windows and windshields were shattered by violent desert hailstorms; afterward rainwater seeped into the instrument panels and engine cowlings. By nineteen fifty-five the mothball fleet had been sitting on its flat tires for a full decade, and it was the rare plane that could be restored to airworthy condition with anything less than a complete rebuilding job from nose-hub to tailfin.

“In nineteen fifty-four the reserve fleet was designated ‘war surplus’ and the way was opened for civilian purchase of the planes. The initial purpose of this action, spurred by a Congressional economy drive, was to recoup some of the country’s enormous war-construction debt. But it soon became apparent that nobody had much interest in paying good money for rusted shells. (In many cases the engines had been removed from the airplanes for use in parts-replacement programs for training planes, and even for use in motorboats.) Tens of thousands of once-proud airplanes went begging for buyers.

“For once in their lives, Craycroft and Ryterband were the right men in the right place at the right time. They went to the Air Force with an offer of fractions of a penny on the dollar. It had cost two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to build a B-17 Flying Fortress; Air Corps Associates managed to buy these aircraft from the mothball fleet for prices ranging from ten thousand dollars down to seven hundred and fifty dollars, depending on condition.

“But that would have done no good without Craycroft’s genius for mechanical repair, redesign, and restoration. Other potential buyers-representatives of foreign governments, scouts for feeder airlines, hobbyists interested in air-racing-had looked over the bargain-basement airplanes at Kingman and had passed them up. To them it had appeared insurmountably expensive to get any of the corroded hulks back into flying trim. To Craycroft and Ryterband, evidently, the same challenge acted as a spur to their ingenuity.

“The result was that by nineteen fifty-six Air Corps Associates had equipped itself with an air force of considerable proportions. Starting from scratch in nineteen fifty-four with a capital investment of forty thousand dollars (most of the money put up by motion-picture producers), Craycroft and Ryterband had pyramided their operation within two years to a sixty-three-plane Luftwaffe; and of that inventory, according to company records dated twelve September nineteen fifty-six, fully forty-eight airplanes were in flying condition-including a full squadron of P-40 Warhawks and a ‘flight’ (six planes) of B-17 Flying Fortresses.

“Most war films used actual newsreel combat footage in their aerial sequences. But movies like Twelve o’Clock High and its many successors required substantial ground fleets of actual airplanes for use as backdrops in scenes set on the runway flight lines. A cliche in films of the period was the scene in which the wing commander stands at the railing of the control tower, counting the number of bombers returning from the day’s raid on Berlin or Schweinfurt or the Channel ports. These scenes could not be reconstructed out of wartime news footage; they had to be filmed on the spot, with real airplanes which actually flew. It was Air Corps Associates which provided these warplanes.

“Craycroft restored (and test-flew) the B-29s that bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki; he gave us-in several films-the Japanese air fleet that bombed Pearl Harbor (most of these being U. S. Navy surplus planes mocked up to resemble the silhouettes of Zeros); he made possible the movie scenes in which John Wayne and Robert Ryan fought the Japanese in the Pacific, in which countless Hollywood stars bombed Germany, and in which other stars fought dogfights with the Luftwaffe, the Italian Air Force and the Imperial Japanese Air Fleet.

“By the early nineteen sixties it was routine for Craycroft and Ryterband to accept a special rush order for a squadron of B-24 Liberators to be painted up with the markings of a specific World War Two unit (real or fictitious), and to actually fly the planes across the Atlantic and deliver them to the moviemakers’ locations in England or Spain.

“In his early forties Craycroft was a success. On paper he was a millionaire. But his wealth consisted entirely of stock certificates in Air Corps Associates. His standard of living was meager. He had never married; he lived in a modest apartment in Sherman Oaks, hardly a ten-minute drive from the company’s immense hangar-field in Burbank. His personal car was a war-surplus Jeep, made by Ford in nineteen forty-two; he had paid eighty-five dollars for it at an Army auction and had rebuilt it himself. He owned two business suits and, it is said, one necktie. His fingernails were invariably black with petroleum grease and grime. When not on purchasing expeditions to Kingman or ferry-delivery flights to film locations, he appears to have spent seven days a week working in the hangars of the Burbank facility. All evidence indicates he had little interest in money for its own sake; his work was his life. He neither swam nor played golf nor drank more than one or two drinks a week. He had no known romantic relationships, either heterosexual or homosexual. His social activities were minimal, confined to occasional dinners with his sister and brother-in-law and the unavoidable business lunches and dinners, the number of which he kept to an absolute minimum. He is not known to have had any close friends other than Charles Ryterband. He had not been in touch with his eldest sister, who still lived in Ohio, since the late nineteen forties.

“Interviewed recently by the FBI, an aircraft mechanic who was employed by Craycroft at Air Corps Associates during the period between nineteen fifty-five and nineteen fifty-eight had this to say:

“‘I guess most of us guys who devote our lives to airplanes are a little screwy. But most of us aren’t that screwy. I mean, I was married then, I had the first kid and the other one on the way, I had a bowling league, and we’d go to Disneyland or down to the beach on the weekends. We had plenty of friends, God knows. I mean we’re normal, you know? But Harold, he was something else. I mean, for openers nobody ever called him Hank or Hal or Old Buddy. He didn’t like “Mr. Craycroft” at all, even if he did own the whole shebang. But he’d only answer to “Harold.” No nickname. Now everybody in the airplane racket has a nickname. My name’s Joseph but half the guys I work with don’t know that; I’m Shorty, that’s all, on account of I’m so tall. Old Mr. Ryterband, we all called him Charlie.

“‘You know what it was about Harold? I’ll tell you how he always struck me. He never looked his age, you know. I guess he must have been around forty when I worked for him but he could have been twenty-eight, thirty. He was always kind of gangly and he had that shock of dark hair that he was always shoving back out of his face. He’d got kind of farsighted, I guess, and he had to wear glasses to do close-up work or reading. He had these great big black-frame eyeglasses that kept slipping down his nose. You’d see him working on an engine torn apart on the bench, and he’d be pushing his hair back, pushing his glasses up on his nose, and biting his lower lip-his teeth were a little buck. Actually he wasn’t bad-looking at all. He got mistaken for Gregory Peck a couple of times, only his jaw was a little small and he had those big upper teeth. But he always struck me like one of those introverted kids you always knew in high school-the ones that never had the nerve to date girls, they were always wrapped up in their toy chemistry sets and their microscope slides and their butterfly collections. You know what I mean? He wasn’t queer or anything. He was just sort of a teenage kid that never outgrew the stage of being fascinated with brainy toys. I bet you when he was fourteen he had an Erector Set.’

“Craycroft hadn’t had an Erector Set at fourteen, of course; by the time he was fourteen he’d dropped out of school and was learning to fly. But the characterization seems apt-as accurate as anything the detectives have been able to learn about Craycroft up to this time. He had a single-minded and virtually adolescent devotion to the mechanics of flight and the romance of aviation.

“This, mainly, is why it has been difficult to ‘get a handle’ on Craycroft’s psychology. It has been impossible to interview his friends because he had no friends in the usual sense. Employees, business associates, and fellow airmen have been interviewed but their answers have been limited to the sphere in which they knew Craycroft: the professional sphere. He lived for his work, and apart from it he seems to have had no life at all. Nothing about him, really, has been added to what was written in his early Army file reports. He was a mechanical genius, dedicated and devoted to the one passion of his life-the airplane.”

But evidently he’d made himself very successful. He was doing what he enjoyed doing, and making a great deal of money from it. How does that jibe with the obvious sudden desperation that led him to this incredible crime?

Well, it wasn’t all that sudden. And the success didn’t last you know.

(Reading) “By the early nineteen sixties the Hollywood fashion for war movies was waning. Apparently it was Ryterband who first saw the signs of change. Shrewdly Ryterband began to put subtle pressures on his brother-in-law to diversify the operations of the company. In time-by about nineteen sixty-three-Craycroft had been brought around to Ryterband’s way of thinking. By then ACA had a force of two hundred and forty-five planes, nearly all of them airworthy-and most of them, ironically, stored in mothballs because the movie market was drying up; nobody was making World War Two films anymore.

“It was Ryterband’s inspiration to go into the used-airplane business. Ryterband was by no means a marketing genius, but he had the intelligence to persuade Craycroft to hire a small staff of sales personnel, four former Air Force fliers who had flown both in the U.S. forces and in mercenary forces overseas, and who had a large number of business and foreign contacts among them.

“There had never been much of a business in surplus bombers. Progress in aircraft design had rendered them obsolete as military planes. And for civilian use-as cargo planes or passenger transports-they were ill-designed; they had not been built for comfort, economy, or spaciousness. The B-17 bomber, for example, was a huge airplane for its day: a wingspan of more than one hundred feet, standing nearly twenty feet high, weighing eighteen tons empty, capable of carrying another fourteen tons of fuel and cargo at a maximum speed well in excess of three hundred miles per hour (cruising speed two hundred and twenty-five) to a service ceiling of thirty-five thousand feet. It had a range, with three tons of bombs aboard, of two thousand miles.

“But the fuselage was narrow-too narrow to insert more than two rows of passenger seats abreast, and the diameter shrank rapidly toward the tail so that nearly half the length of the plane was unusable for passenger accommodation. At intervals the fuselage was interrupted by bubble canopies designed to house machine-gun turrets. There was no provision for cockpit pressurization or heating; combat fliers had worn electrically heated flying suits against the high-altitude outside temperatures of below forty degrees Fahrenheit, and crews had been forced to wear oxygen masks above ten thousand feet.

“And the in-flight economy of these planes was very poor. They were designed for power, not fuel conservation. The four Wright Cyclone engines developed a peak horsepower of nearly five thousand horsepower-a combined power plant which made for superb climbing ability and maneuverability, and meant that a shot-up bomber could still fly even if two engines had been destroyed. But in terms of ordinary cargo or passenger economy the B-17 was absurdly overpowered-much like a five-hundred-horsepower Detroit car: fine for the profligate owner, but useless as a taxicab.

“These factors had made it impossible for anyone to make a successful business out of converting old bombers to useful civilian aircraft. But that was before Charles Ryterband persuaded his brother-in-law to try it.

“By the end of nineteen sixty-three Craycroft had blueprinted two complete redesigns-for the B-17 and the B-24-which for the first time showed how these models could be rebuilt for passenger and air-cargo use.

“Two prototypes were completed and flown in July, nineteen sixty-four. Performance and economy figures were analyzed. Craycroft made further adjustments in his designs, and in August the two planes were flown again. Ryterband and Craycroft pronounced them satisfactory, and the four-man sales force was sent out into the world to secure orders.

“Craycroft had achieved nearly the impossible. By the astute use of new lightweight metal alloys (very expensive but used sparingly) and the almost total redesign of the Wright engines, using the original engine blocks and essential parts, Craycroft had devised inexpensive ways to reduce the bombers’ fuel-consumption by more than one-half. Performance suffered to a remarkably small degree. The service ceiling was cut from thirty-five thousand feet to twenty-four thousand but for normal commercial purposes that was still ample. Top speed was reduced by more than forty mph, but cruising speed-the important element-was actually increased: to two hundred and thirty-five mph at ten thousand feet.

“In fact, the most extensive and costly part of the redesign program was neither in the power plants nor in the mechanical components of the airframes. It was in the field of comfort and convenience. By sealing windows, building an interior skin and installing recirculation and heating systems (most of them acquired from parts-dealers specializing in scrap components from obsolete ruined civilian planes), Craycroft succeeded in building modern heating and pressurization systems into these airplanes which had never been designed for them. This was the crucial item in the design, because it meant the planes now could be used to carry passengers or live-animal cargo in comfort.

“In many cases the original instrument systems had to be updated to meet the requirements of international and domestic regulations. Radio-navigation devices had to be incorporated, to supplant or replace the original gyrocompass and magnetic gauges. LORAN and communications systems had to be installed. Even radar was built into some of the later models.

“It was inevitable that the end result would be far more expensive than the restorations in which ACA had specialized before. These new cross-breed aircraft weren’t dirt-cheap. But they were competitive, and that was the important thing. Craycroft’s converted bombers had cargo and passenger capacities which compared with those of the secondhand DC-6s and Constellations, which airlines were selling in order to make way for their new jets. He was able to undersell the airlines by about thirty percent in purchase price-and this made his planes very attractive to charter airlines, small governments, and business concerns which didn’t need jet transports or gigantic machines.

“ACA’s first customers included the government of Morocco, three group-charter airlines in the United States and one in London, and a fruit-plantation company which owned several islands off the coast of eastern South America. The latter concern bought Craycroft’s planes for fast delivery of fresh fruit to Florida and Texas markets; they chose Craycroft’s planes over the competition because their runways on the islands were of limited length and the Craycroft planes required considerably less runway than did standard transports for landing and taking off.

“A Greek intranational feeder line bought three planes in nineteen sixty-five, and this purchase pumped enough capital into ACA to convince Ryterband and Craycroft that they had made the right decision. Construction and sales efforts were intensified; ACA’s Burbank facility was expanded onto a leasehold next door, and at considerable expense the old buildings there were razed to make way for enlargement of the assembly shops and offices.

“Given Craycroft’s track record as a businessman, however, it was inevitable that a fly settle in the ointment.

“According to recent testimony by Fredric Phelps (then office-manager and treasurer of ACA), ‘We never had anything much better than a rickety jerry-built financial structure.’ Craycroft and Ryterband had built the initial company on investment capital they had raised by selling stock to four motion-picture producers. Each of the four producers had been in preproduction with war movies at the time. For the first few years the relationship between ACA and the four producers had been successful and symbiotic. But the producers were no longer making war movies. (One of them, in fact, was no longer in the film business at all.) ‘And ACA was no longer a Hollywood outfit,’ Phelps recalls. ‘I guess they felt they had no further reason to go on lending us the support and encouragement of the movie community.’

“To build the company in the first place, Craycroft and Ryterband had made an initial stock tender of ten thousand shares. By the time they got done raising capital, they ended up-between them-owning only twenty-six percent of the company. The remaining seventy-four percent belonged to the four producers.

“But the bylaws and articles of incorporation of ACA’s charter had left operational corporate decisions to the absolute authority of Craycroft and Ryterband so long as they, between them, controlled more stock than any other single stockholder.

“Since the company’s inception it had been the policy of the brothers-in-law to plow profits back into the company. By nineteen sixty-seven ACA had sold or contracted more than seventy converted bombers. In small-business terms they were doing a tremendous volume, considering that each sale meant gross receipts from forty thousand dollars up. But the large expansion of facilities between nineteen sixty-five and sixty-six still hadn’t been paid off, and operating expenses were climbing because of inflation and labor costs.

“By 1968 the producers were arguing that business was falling off because of the increasing obsolescence of propeller-driven aircraft. The world was well into its second and even third generation of jet passenger and cargo planes. Even the smaller countries and businesses were buying jets now. The invention of new, economical jets like the Lear and the Boeing 727 had made a large competitive dent in the market that had previously been dominated by the venerable DC-3 Dakota and the Craycroft conversions.

“Phelps recalls, ‘Back at the beginning, when we were doing mainly mock-ups and restorations for air-war movies, there was a time when I tried to persuade Harold and Charlie to restructure the financial setup. They could have gone public even then. It was a sound operation. It was making good money. If they’d gone public, they’d have ended up in absolute control of the company, with very little additional investment of their own. Or, I told them, they had the alternative of buying out a couple of the producers. If they’d bought that stock back then, they could have got it for ten bucks a share, and they’d have ended up owning more than fifty-one percent of ACA.

“‘But I couldn’t talk them into it. They didn’t want to go public because they didn’t want to hassle with the SEC and all that crap-they were both kind of naive, they didn’t want to get mixed up in the big bad world of high finance. And they didn’t want to buy out any of the other stockholders because that was money they’d rather plow back into the company to keep expanding. Hell, you couldn’t help seeing the handwriting on the wall.’

“The four producers soon reached loggerheads with the brothers-in-law; and a relationship that had begun at arm’s length ended up at sword’s point.

“The result was a complex series of legal maneuvers by the procucers. Two of them sold their stock, with buy-back options, to the other two. This made the second two producers majority stockholders. By August, nineteen sixty-nine, Craycroft and Ryterband occupied an untenable position, despite the protection they thought they had gained with their authoritarian charter and bylaws.

“Business was still excellent, but the number of new orders was falling off. The producers insisted this was because of competition from the new low-priced jets. They insisted that ACA could only prevail in the market by moving into the jet age.

“This was anathema to Craycroft, of course. He wouldn’t have a jet on a platter: He hated them.

“The end was inevitable. Craycroft and Ryterband were forced to divest themselves of control of the company. They sold their twenty-six percent of it to the producers, who promptly went public. ACA is a thriving corporation today, well invested in jet aircraft development and sales, but the partners who created the company were frozen out in nineteen sixty-nine and have had nothing to do with it since then.

“A small Long Island concern, Aeroflight, Incorporated, had been struggling along for years selling aircraft of its own design to the private-aviation market-mainly two- and four-seater monoplanes for the weekend-flier trade. It had never given Cessna or Piper any cause for alarm but for several years Aeroflight had been doing a steady little business in lightplane sales. The president and chief designer of Aeroflight was a man named Samuel Spaulding, who in World War Two had been a maintenance engineer under Craycroft’s command.

“Spaulding had been following the ACA case in the financial trade publications. When he learned of the ouster of Craycroft and Ryterband, he made contact with them and arranged a meeting.

“The conference took place November sixteenth, nineteen sixty-nine, in Aeroflight’s offices on the company’s private factory and airfield near Brook-haven, Long Island. Its result was that Craycroft and Ryterband joined Aeroflight.

“The brothers-in-law had realized a certain amount of capital from the forced sale of their ACA stock. Some of this had been eaten up by legal fees and costs, and a good chunk was taken from them as capital-gains taxes; but they had retained approximately one hundred thousand dollars each, and with that money they bought into Aeroflight-an investment which bought them eighteen percent of the company.

“Spaulding was tremendously loyal to Craycroft-it was a kind of hero worship-and it was not long before Craycroft moved into the center of action. Using Aeroflight’s capital, he returned to California and made a tender to the new bosses of ACA to buy some of the old bombers they still had in inventory from Craycroft’s tenure. ACA was only too willing to unload these obsolete craft; Craycroft-with Spaulding’s bargaining agents acting for him-was able to buy the old planes at excellent prices. ACA was happy to write them off as tax losses.

“There were twelve planes involved: six B-17 Flying Fortresses, four B-24 Liberators and two Lockheed Constellations. All of them were at least twenty-five years old. They had all been made airworthy, but since none had been on order by any paying customer, the pressurization and heating and navigational systems had not been updated. In sum they were sound but dismally obsolete.

“In March, nineteen seventy, Craycroft, Ryterband, two Aeroflight pilot-employees, and eight hired free-lance pilots arrived in Burbank to take delivery of the twelve aircraft on the ACA airfield. The sale was consummated and the airplanes took off on the first leg of what would have been a comic odyssey if it hadn’t been for its tragic consequences.

“With only one man aboard each plane-the pilot-the flight of twelve planes worked into an uneven formation over the San Fernando Valley and began flying eastward across the Southwestern deserts and mountains. The flight plan called for a route that took them across Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Nebraska, Iowa, and Illinois, and thence east to New York. Refueling and overnight stops were scheduled at Denver, Des Moines, and Toledo. It had been necessary to obtain clearances in advance for the twelve-craft flight, and therefore the expedition had to adhere to its precleared schedule; the airports en route were not equipped to handle such large influxes of transient aircraft normally, and special arrangements had to be made.

“An oxygen malfunction aboard one of the B-24’s forced that plane to deviate from the planned course over the Sierra Nevada range; the plane had to make its own way south and follow the much longer low-altitude route east by way of Tucson, El Paso, and Oklahoma City. This reduced the formation to eleven. It was further reduced-to nine-when one B-17 developed engine trouble and had to divert to Salt Lake City, and almost simultaneously a Constellation lost touch with the group in a heavy cloud formation-the result of primitive instrumentation and inadequate communication air-to-air-and because of a faulty compass ended up with insufficient fuel to reach the first stop (Denver). It had to divert to Grand Junction, Colorado, and because of a fuel shortage at that airport it never caught up with the rest of the flight.

“The nine remaining planes straggled into Denver over the course of ninety minutes during the evening of March twenty-first, nineteen seventy. A feature article from the next morning’s Denver Post includes an impressive photograph of the ancient planes lined up at their hardstands, and a brief nostalgia-slanted interview with Craycroft, who is quoted as saying, ‘You may never see their like again around here. They’re really kind of majestic, aren’t they?’

“Pushed by the tight schedule of clearances, the nine planes took off from Denver at six fifteen A.M. March twenty-second, heading for a midday refueling stop at Des Moines. The distance is about seven hundred miles and Craycroft expected to reach Des Moines by about eleven CST.

“A half hour out, Ryterband reported altimeter trouble but no one expressed much alarm, since they were flying VFR and the weather looked good, and there were no mountains along the route.

“Then a front, forecast as stationary, suddenly began to move north across Kansas and eastern Nebraska. Tornadoes struck four towns and several farm areas along the border between the two states, and Omaha radio advised Craycroft’s flight that it now looked as if the storm would be right in the middle of the flight plan if Craycroft stayed on course.

“It was a severe storm, the remnants of Hurricane Bertha, which had struck the Texas coast two days previously and was moving in an unusual due-north direction. Storm ceiling was altitude zero and the Air Force reported that it went straight up to thirty thousand feet. It was moving north, by eight that morning, at nearly sixty miles an hour and its interior winds were measured at more than that.

“Then a new meteorological report came in, at approximately eight fifteen, which said the storm appeared to be slowing down its rate of travel and veering toward the west.

“Craycroft elected to try and beat the storm into Des Moines. He did, however, order Ryterband to change course and land at Grand Island, because he didn’t want to risk Ryterband’s being stuck in obscure weather with a faulty altimeter. Ryterband peeled off in his B-24, and that left eight.

“At about nine forty-five (now on Central Time) the flight entered a bank of floor-to-ceiling cloud which obstructed visibility but contained very little turbulence; it was the remainder of a slow-moving cold front crossing the plains, and was not connected with the hurricane weather system to the southeast. Craycroft and his pilots seem to have felt no alarm about the cloud front. They had expected it. They also expected to emerge from its leading edge some twenty-five miles later.

“Some of them did.

“Unfamiliarity with the old controls, and lack of visibility within the cloud front, made for uncertain navigation for the pilots. At nine fifty-two one B-17 sideswiped another in the murk.

“The collision seems to have been wingtip-against-tail. The aircraft struck in the tail lost most of its rudder surface, and its elevator controls seem to have been rendered inoperative by the crash. The plane spiraled down out of control through the clouds and plummeted into a soybean field, killing the pilot instantly.

“The second plane, with part of its starboard wing crumpled, had lost much of the cambering effect of that wing, and while it did not go completely out of control, it was no longer capable of sustained flight. The pilot, Richard Tree, was commended afterward for the skill with which he set the plane down-a belly landing on farm fields. The plane was a total loss-cut apart with welding torches and sold for scrap after Aeroflight had salvaged some of the more portable components-but Richard Tree walked away from it unscathed.

“That left six. Emerging from the cloud front, regaining radio contact with the ground, Craycroft’s flight now found the entire horizon ahead of them blocked by black swirling weather. The hurricane had leaped across their path.

“Craycroft requested permission from the ground to divert to Kansas City, which lay to the south of the storm. Permission was granted and the six planes-half the original flight-arrived intact at KC airport shortly after noon. But facilities there had not been prepared for them, nor was it possible to get back on the original schedule; so the six planes had to wait on the ground in Kansas City for three days before a new clearance schedule could be arranged. In the meantime two of the earlier aborts bypassed them and made their way independently to New York, while Ryterband and the remaining pilot brought their repaired planes into Kansas, rejoining the flight and expanding its strength to eight aircraft.

“By this time the expedition was attracting more than just local publicity. The death of ‘Dusty’ Robinson, pilot of the B-17 that had crashed in Nebraska, had focused media attention on the Craycroft trek. Television and wire-service personnel began to crowd the KC airport and, angered by them, Craycroft kept his eight subordinates incommunicado and refused to cooperate with the press until a hurried call from Spaulding at the head office persuaded him, with reluctance, to grant interviews.

“The flight had become an adventure in the eyes of the public. In the eyes of Aeroflight, however, it had become a fiasco. The publicity was not the sort which was likely to encourage customer confidence in Aeroflight’s products. And the ferrying of the planes across the country was becoming tremendously costly-an expense capped by the fact that the insurance on the two wrecked B-17s was not nearly enough to cover their replacement cost on the open market; the insurance companies had refused to cover any sums greater than the actual purchase price of the airplanes, which had been bought from ACA at sacrifice price.

“It seems to have become a high-adventure challenge to the men in Craycroft’s flight group, however. Spurred by the television attention they were getting, the pilots encouraged Craycroft and on March twenty-sixth the eight planes left Kansas City in tight formation. Seven of them arrived in New York that night; the eighth was forced down in Pittsburgh by hydraulic failure. It was a minor dysfunction, easily and quickly repaired, but the news media seized on it and milked the story unashamedly: A photograph which appeared on front pages across the country showed the copilot-the hapless but expert Richard Tree-in the act of disgustedly hurling his cap at the ground, with the sagging airplane behind him on the runway.

“After that the disconsolate Craycroft sat in his office at Aeroflight waiting for the orders to come in, and evidently knowing in his bones that they never would.

“Of the ten surviving aircraft from the great cross-country adventure, only three were ever sold to paying customers. In nineteen seventy-two Spaulding donated two of the B-24s to the Air Force Museum at Wright Field in Ohio, hoping the tax credit from this contribution would wipe out the company’s taxes for the year; but as it turned out, Aeroflight had no profits on which to pay taxes anyway, and the donation simply reduced the company’s inventory assets by seventy-five thousand dollars.

“The two Constellations were the only planes from the flight to go into standard commercial operation; they were bought in nineteen seventy-one by a Canadian oil company for transporting workers to and from the isolated oil fields on the Western Slope.

“One of the B-17s was bought by an amusement park in upper New York State. The purchase price was approximately fifteen percent of the cost of Aeroflight’s investment in the plane.

“The remaining five aircraft took up space on the company’s runway. Out of what has been described, by company test pilot Richard Tree, as ‘that crazy obsession of Harold’s,’ the planes were kept in instant-ready condition at all times: fueled up and ready to take off. Now and then Craycroft would take one of them up for a spin, but these occasions became less frequent with time because of the expense of refueling.

“Aeroflight struggled through nineteen seventy-two and early nineteen seventy-three, staying afloat by selling its standard light planes. Craycroft and Ryterband had little to do, actually, other than kibitz with the production mechanics and toy with trifling improvements they incorporated into Spaulding’s designs. But Spaulding, out of intense loyalty to his old commander, kept the two men on; and they stayed because there were no other offers.

“On June seventh, nineteen seventy-three, Spaulding suffered an acute coronary thrombosis. He died within thirty-six hours.

“Controlling stock in the company went into the hands of Spaulding’s childless widow, but effective control of the company’s operations fell to Craycroft and Ryterband; Mrs. Spaulding, in ill health herself and severely traumatized by her husband’s death, trusted his two old friends and seems to have had little or no interest in taking part in company business.

“Craycroft and Ryterband, according to pattern, ran the company into the ground. They did so with amazing alacrity, even for them. By the end of nineteen seventy-three the company’s creditors were suing for payment of back debts, and Craycroft and Ryterband faced bankruptcy once again.

“Minority stockholders had no lever with which to prevent the brothers-in-law from mismanaging Aeroflight, because Mrs. Spaulding had gone into a sanitarium, had signed over controlling authority to Craycroft and Ryterband, and refused every effort by the stockholders to vote her stock against the two men. She seemed quite content to let them do as they pleased. A legal effort to have her declared incompetent failed in the courts.

“The issue was the same one that had faced the brothers-in-law at ACA. The stockholders wanted to change over to the design and manufacture of small jet aircraft. Craycroft, according to pattern, refused. ‘He was demented about that,’ Tree recalls. ‘Really bent out of shape. He refused to let anybody mention the word “jet” in his presence. Some of the rest of us felt the same way, of course, but we didn’t get violent about it. I mean the world changes, you’ve got to be realistic if you’re in business. You go along, or you go under. But Harold didn’t seem to care.’

“The question arises, what was Charles Ryterband’s role in all this? It is evident from the record that Ryterband consistently went along with his brother’s wishes in these matters. (The man tended to refer to Craycroft as ‘my brother,’ rather than as ‘my brother-in-law.’) But it is quite curious how Ryterband invariably agreed with and supported Craycroft, even though anyone can see that Craycroft was the inferior businessman. What vitality one finds in the records of the Craycroft-Ryterband operations are attributable to Craycroft’s engineering genius, yes, but also to Ryterband’s business sense, which, if not superior, was at least average. Yet time after time the brothers-in-law would reach a point of decision; and time after time Craycroft, making the wrong decision, would drag the loyal Ryterband after him down the road of disaster.

“Ryterband was older than Craycroft, far more worldly. He had the normal lexicon of social graces; he had a pleasant personality, a good family life, a normal quota of friends and acquaintances. Business contacts tend to characterize him as having been ‘a little big lightweight, maybe, but certainly not shifty. You could trust him, and his judgment wasn’t too bad most of the time.’

“Yet obviously Ryterband had a blind spot where Craycroft was concerned. Clues to it are scattered; probably the most plausible is found in such observations as this one, again by Richard Tree, interviewed recently at his home in Kansas, where he is now employed by Beechcraft:

“‘Hero worship. Spaulding had it. Ryterband has it, too, for the opposite reason, I think. Spaulding served under Harold in the war, and there’s no question Harold was one of the handful of guys who really contributed something to our winning the war. I mean he was a real legend, to those people who knew. Now, with Ryterband-it’s funny, I never knew him well enough to call him Charlie, but I think I got him figured out all the same-you see, the thing was, Ryterband didn’t serve in the war at all. He got turned down by the draft. Harold went on to become pretty famous among the airmen. Now, that had to have one of two effects on old Charlie Ryterband, didn’t it? I mean either he was going to get jealous and envious and hate his brother-in-law like poison, or he was going to knuckle under and treat Harold with awe. I mean real superman-style awe. And that’s what happened. Mostly because Ryterband wasn’t the kind of guy who hates easy. I rarely heard him ever say a cussword, let alone a nasty remark about any human being. Easygoing as hell, Ryterband. God knows what he had bottled up inside him-maybe he went along with Harold’s wild schemes just because he knew they’d be the ruin of Harold, and he didn’t care if he sank right alongside him as long as he was sure Harold was sinking, too. Maybe. But you’d have to ask a shrink about that. All I know is Ryterband would speak his piece and maybe he’d convince Harold, but if he didn’t convince Harold, then Harold would speak his piece, and that was that. Ryterband was invariably deferential, you know. He never contradicted Harold. Once it was clear Harold had his mind set on something, Ryterband backed him all the way. Always.

“During that same interview, Richard Tree was asked if he recalled the last time he had seen Craycroft.

“‘Sure. It was the day I left Aeroflight. I was just about the last one to go, you know. I stuck it out to the bitter end. I guess I had some of that hero worship myself, if you really want to know. I mean Harold’s-I don’t know, hell, it’s hard to explain. But he’s kind of vulnerable, you know? Kind of fragile. I mean you feel like you want to protect him. You keep rooting for him to prevail, even though you know he hasn’t got an ounce of common sense and he’s doomed to fail. Hell, I was still there two months after they gave out the last paychecks.’

“Asked when that was, Tree replied, ‘March of this year. When I left, I mean. The last paycheck was December’s. I finally had to feed my family, you know, so I got this job offer here and I came on out. But I didn’t really want to. It’s hard to put into words. Harold kind of creates this atmosphere around him, you know? It’s esprit de corps, something like that.

“‘It was like, hell, you know, it was like he was the coach and we were the football team and we’d lost every game the past two seasons because he was still using the old T formation and all the other teams had gone light-years ahead of that, but we went right on loving the old coach and playing the game his way. It was like that.’

“‘What happened to them after you left?’ the interviewer asked.’ Do you know?’

‘“I heard things. I’m not sure how true some of them are. I heard he ended up moving into the Aeroflight offices. Living there, I mean. He gave up his house, of course. He didn’t have much equity in it but he sold it and used the few bucks from the sale to pay some of the creditors or something. I mean Harold wasn’t a shyster. He always meant to pay his debts. He’d been bankrupt a couple times before, I understand-him or maybe his corporations, I don’t know which. But he’d felt demeaned by it, I know that. He hated the idea it was happening to him again. He scraped together everything he could, but it just wasn’t nearly enough. He ended up, I hear, living in the hangar. Sleeping in a bedroll on an army cot under the wing of one of those crazy old Flying Fortresses of his. The one they’d finished converting, with the pressurization and the new instruments and all. That was the only one they rebuilt before the shit hit the fan. Harold used it for a demonstrater, showing it off to potential buyers when they showed up. But nobody ever placed an order for it. I mean nobody wants those old crates anymore. Hell, they’re antiques. The only guy in the world who can still fix them up is Harold. What happens if you’re flying over the Sahara in one of those things and you need a quick tune-up? Nobody knows how anymore. It’s like antique foreign cars. They may be fun, but you can’t use them commercially. That was what Harold couldn’t see. He kept saying they were still the best goddamned four-engine planes ever built, those B-17s. Shit, yes, they were, there’s no question of it. But, for Christ’s sake, that old plane was thirty-two years old!

“‘Anyway that’s the last I heard of him. He was barricaded out there. When the lawyers came around to talk foreclosure, they got locked out. He wouldn’t let them in. I heard rumors he had a shotgun, he was threatening to shoot anybody that tried to break in.

“‘That’s the last I ever heard of old Harold. Until now, of course.’”