AVIATION: Domesticated Tiger

When Major General Claire Chennault, wartime commander of World War II’s famed Flying Tigers, decided to start an airline in the Far East in 1946, most professionals gave him about as much chance of survival as a turkey in a typhoon. He had only a few war-weary transports, a handful of his old U.S. fighter pilots and a $1,000,000 loan (at 10% interest) from the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, which wanted to fly food and medicine into China. But last week, as Chennault’s Civil Air Transport got ready to celebrate its tenth anniversary, few airmen would recognize the old line. Chennault’s bedraggled CAT had become a plump, purring creature with a gross of more than $20 million annually and a reputation as the Far East’s best airline.

Switch in Control. For years it looked as though Chennault’s CAT would never get off the ground. Caught in China’s civil war, it was the world’s most shot-at airline, struggled to stay aloft as a civilian support organization for the retreating Nationalists armies. Profits were nonexist ent, payrolls tough to meet. But between 1946 and 1948, CAT flew the Nationalists out of some 72 threatened bases, in one operation evacuated 30,000 wounded soldiers from Manchuria ahead of the advancing Reds.

With Nationalist. China crumbling in 1948, Chennault loaded his Shanghai maintenance base onto a converted LST, fled first to Canton, then to Hainan, on to Hong Kong and finally across the Formosa Strait to Formosa, where CAT has stayed ever since. Flying along the perimeter of Red Asia, Chennault and CAT staked their entire future in 1949 on a coup to keep 71 planes of two Chinese national airlines from falling into Red hands. When the crews defected, leaving most of the transports at Hong Kong’s airport, Chennault and his friends signed notes for $4,750,000 to buy the planes, then spent three years fighting costly legal battles before they could finally take possession. The struggle nearly bankrupted CAT, and Chennault had to turn over control of his share of the line to a syndicate of U.S. backers. Chennault himself moved up to chairman of the board, has since played a largely advisory role. Yet he has no regrets. Says he: “Personally, that operation gave me more satisfaction than anything we’ve ever done.”

Paratroops & Passengers. Chairman Chennault can also take satisfaction from the fact that CAT’s new management, headed by ex-Pan American Pilot George A. Doole Jr., vice chairman, has managed to turn his idea into a moneymaking operation. With a reputation for flying anything, anywhere, anytime, CAT was right on the spot flying charter flights for the U.S. Air Force during the Korean war, helped out during the fight for Dienbienphu in Indo-China, where CAT pilots buzzed through murderous antiaircraft fire to drop French paratroops, munitions and medical supplies. As a scheduled airline, 60% owned by Nationalist Chinese, 40% by its U.S. backers, CAT flies its 32-plane fleet (DC-35, C-46s PBYs) along 7,000 miles of routes throughout Asia, proudly notes that it has never lost a passenger. Its repair operation (100% U.S. owned) on Formosa currently does 15% of all CAT’s business repairing U.S. Air Force planes as well as civilian transports.

Looking back last week, Airman Chennault could hardly believe that his airline had come so far. Said he: “CAT reminds me a lot of the Tigers. They were both one of those things you could sit in a corner and think about-but you couldn’t actually do it.” Chennault did.