NAHF

William "Jack" Frye

Entrepreneur/Record Setter

When Frye was 14, three Army Jennies made an emergency landing near the pond where he was skating. He forgot his new skates and spent the day running errands for the flyers. Frye contracted pneumonia, which was cured, and a fanatical interest in aviation, from which he never recovered.

His motto, “safety, passenger comfort and schedule” greatly influenced the airliner industry.
Founder of the Aero Corporation of California in 1927, which formed Standard Airlines, a major airmail transporter.
Transcontinental and Western Air (TWA) became a leader in high altitude research and fostered the development of a series of advanced transport aircraft, including the DC-1, DC-2, Boeing 307, and Lockheed Constellation.
Frye set numerous records beginning with a commercial aircraft altitude record of 22,680 feet in 1929.
In 1934, Frye flew from Los Angeles, California to Newark, New Jersey in the new DC-1 setting a record transcontinental time of 13 hours, four minutes.
Frye and Howard Hughes piloted the Constellation on a record breaking flight across the country on April 17th, 1944.
In 1955, Frye formed the Frye Corporation to develop a rugged trimotor airplane for use in underdeveloped countries.

Biography

Enshrined 1992
1904-1959

William John Frye, known commonly as Jack Frye, had a major impact on the growth of commercial aviation in the United States during his 36 years in the industry. He preside over an airline that grew from a company with 600 employees to a $70 million corporation with 17,000 employees and a worldwide route network, and made vital contributions to the industry's technological progress. Under Frye, Transcontinental and Western Air (TWA) became a leader in high altitude research and fostered the development of a series of advanced transport aircraft. These included the DC-1, DC-2, Boeing 307, and Lockheed Constellation.

Frye was born on March 18th, 1904, near Sweetwater, Oklahoma, to William Henry and Nellie Cooley Frye. His mother died when he was eight years old, and he was raised by his father and grandparents on the family's 15,000-acre ranch in the Texas Panhandle near Wheeler. Frye dropped out of high school at age seventeen and spent a year in the Army Engineer Corps. In 1923 he moved to the Los Angeles area, where he worked as a dishwasher and soda jerk. To satisfy his interest in flying, Frye used his earnings to take lessons at a local airfield. Before the end of the year, he had borrowed money from his brother to buy a half interest in the Burdett Flying School, whose major asset was a single Curtiss Jenny.

Burdett developed slowly over the next two years, adding a second Jenny and expanding into movie stunt flying. In February 1926 Frye and two associates bought out the original owner of the company and renamed it the Aero Corporation of California. Aero prospered as regional distributor for Eaglerock and Fokker airplanes. It also operated one of the finest flying schools in the country, operated charters, and developed a profitable maintenance business. On November 28th, 1927, Aero capitalized on the "Lindbergh boom" by using a subsidiary named Standard Air Lines to begin a scheduled passenger and express service between Los Angeles and Tucson via Phoenix with a six passenger Fokker F-VII.

Frye, who often flew trips for the airline, extended service to El Paso in 1928. The following year, Standard became the western link in an air rail transcontinental schedule. Beginning on August 4th, 1929, passengers could travel from New York to St. Louis by rail, connect with a Southwest Air Fast Express Ford Trimotor for a flight to Sweetwater, then take the overnight train to El Paso. Standard took over at that point, carrying passengers to Los Angeles in Fokker F-X Trimotors along what its advertisement brochures described as "the Fair Weather Route." If all went on schedule, the coast-to-coast trip would take in 43 hours and 40 minutes.

In May 1930, with Standard feeling the efforts of the early stages of the Great Depression, Frye and his associates sold the airline to Harris M. Hanshue of Western Air Express. Frye served in the merged companies as Vice-President for Operations. Before the year ended, Postmaster General Walter Folger Brown forced the merger of Western and Transcontinental Air Transport. Frye remained in charge of operations for the new Transcontinental and Western Air.

Under Frye's direction, TWA inaugurated the first all-air transcontinental service on October 25th, 1930. The trip took 36 hours and required an overnight stop in Kansas City. Two years later, on November 5th, 1932, TWA began flying through the night on the route, reducing coast-to-coast travel time to 24 hours. Frye played a key role in the search for a replacement for TWA's Fokker transports, which had been removed from passenger service following an accident on March 31st, 1931, that resulted in the death of Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne. In August 1932 Frye wrote to the nation's leading aircraft manufacturers, setting out the specifications for an all-metal, three-engined transport that could carry 12 passengers at a cruising speed of 146 miles per hour over a distance of 1,060 miles. "This plane fully loaded," Frye stressed, "must make satisfactory take-offs under good control at any TWA airport on any combination of two engines." Only Donald Douglas responded to Frye's demanding requirements. The twin-engine DC-1, able to take off with a single engine in the event of an engine failure, first flew on July 1st, 1933. The production model, the 14-passenger DC-2, went into service with TWA the following year. The new Douglas transport reduced transcontinental travel time to 16 hours.

On February 18-19th, 1934, Frye made a dramatic demonstration of the capabilities of the impressive Douglas airliner. Responding to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's decision to cancel all air-mail contracts, Frye and Edward V. Rickenbacker, vice-president of Eastern Air Transport, set out from Los Angeles in TWA's DC-1 on a record-breaking transcontinental flight. One of the few air-line executives to hold a transport pilot's license, Frye flew the last load of airmail to Newark (with two refueling stops) in 13 hours and four minutes. A year that began badly ended well for Frye. Following a series of reorganizations caused by the Air Mail Act of 1934, which returned the airmail to private contractors, Frye was named president of TWA on December 27th. In the short span of 11 years, Frye had risen from a high school dropout and soda jerk to the youngest airlines president in the country. And, as TWA chronicler Robert J. Serling has emphasized, "Brash, energetic and fiercely competitive, he was the quintessential airline leader at the crossroads in aviation history."

TWA became known as a "pilot's airline" under Frye. Despite limited financial resources, TWA took the lead in exploring high-speed, high--altitude, all-weather flying. This work led to the development of the Boeing 307, the first pressurized passenger transport. Introduced by TWA in July 1940, the airplanes gave Frye a competitive edge on the transcontinental route before American entry into World War II in December 1941 resulted in their transfer to the Army for use in the foreign courier service.

By the time the 307s appeared, TWA's ownership had changed hands. John D. Hertz, who held 11 percent of the airline's stock and controlled its board of directors, had opposed Frye's plans to acquire the new-and expensive-transports. Convinced that Hertz, who lacked a background in aviation, was standing in the way of the airline's technological progress, Frye persuaded Howard Hughes, an old friend, to acquire a controlling interest in the company. With Hughes' sympathetic support, TWA continued its technological leadership of the industry. The results of the Hughes-Frye partnership could be seen in 1944 when TWA took delivery on the first Lockheed-049 Constellation. In April, Frye and Hughes flew the triple-tail airliner from Burbank to Washington, D.C., in a record six hours and 58 minutes.

TWA, which became the nation's third largest air carrier (after United and American) before U.S. entry into World War II, gained considerable experience on international routes during the war years. Frye used the airline's wartime work to challenge Pan American's monopoly of overseas markets. In July 1945 the Civil Aeronautics Board granted TWA the authority to fly to Europe, with onward rights to India. In August 1946, the airline received permission to fly across southern Asia to Shanghai.

Frye's own tenure with TWA came to an end in February 1947. Ever since Hughes had taken control of the airline in 1939-1940, Frye had been engaged in a constant struggle for power with Noah Dietrich, the new owner's chief assistant. In 1946 the temporary grounding of TWA's Lockheed Constellations to correct a design flaw, a pilots' strike, and the postwar recession had combined to give Dietrich the ammunition that he needed to get rid of his hated rival. Frye resigned to avoid being fired.

Frye landed on his feet. He became president of the General Ailine and Film Corporation at a salary that was four times what he had earned with TWA. On July 21st, 1950, he married Nevada Smith, a former Las Vegas showgirl. According to author Robert J. Serling, this was Frye's fourth marriage. Details of the first two marriages are not known. His third marriage was to Helen (Varner) Vanderbilt, former wife of Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr. They were wed on January 1, 1941, and divorced in 1950. Only the union with Nevada Smith produced a child, a daughter.

In 1955 Frye resigned from General Aniline and formed his own company, The Frye Corporation, to develop a rugged trimotored airplane for use in underdeveloped countries. The Northrop company built a prototype, called the Pioneer, which Frye used to interest potential investors and customers. He raised $2 million for the project, to which he added his own savings. He moved to Tucson, Arizona, and was planning a site for his factory when he was struck and killed by a drunk driver on February 3, 1959.

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