The Man Who Would Fly

William John Frye was a Texan who was born to fly. When three Army planes made a forced landing near his father's ranch in the Panhandle during World War I, 14-year-old Jack Frye knew where his future lay.

A few years later he packed off for Los Angeles, saved enough money jerking sodas to take flying lessons. He soloed in seven hours, became a partner in a flying school, coolly gambled with death by stunt flying for Hollywood movies. Soon Frye and two pals bought a single-engined Fokker, set up Standard Air Lines, one of the first in the nation, to lift Hollywood stars from Los Angeles to their desert hideaways.

In the Depression, Frye merged Standard into Western Air Express, which later merged with Transcontinental Air Transport to, become Transcontinental & Western Air, a pioneering coast-to-coast airline. (T.W.A. billed itself as "The Lindbergh Line," kept Charles Lindbergh on the payroll as an adviser, but dropped the title in 1938 when Lindbergh made isolationist speeches for America First.)

A T.W.A. vice president, Jack Frye was equally at home with his burly, 6-ft. 2-in. frame folded behind an executive desk or behind the stick of a plane or draftsman's board. He helped develop some of the planes and practices that became standard among world airlines. With new planes, T.W.A. cut the transcontinental flight time from 48 hours to 16, and at 30, Jack Frye was elected the line's president.

He expanded T.W.A.'s routes, cajoled Howard Hughes into buying control of T.W.A. and pouring his millions into expanding the routes still farther. To do it, Frye and Hughes worked with Lockheed to develop the Constellation, electrified the air world toward the end of World War II by piloting a Connie across the U.S. in a record 6 hrs. 58 min. and from New York to Paris in 14 hrs. 12 min. With the new Connies in 1946, T.W.A. won air routes to Europe, Africa and Asia, rightly changed its name to Trans World Airlines. (Frye also enlivened the society pages; when he married his third of four wives, the ceremony was performed in Arizona's Echo Canyon, and the bridal couple rode there on horseback.)

The high cost of growing into a 26,000-mile line with 17,000 employees and $57 million in yearly revenues, plus a 25-day pilot strike, drained T.W.A.'s finances. When Frye proposed a new stock issue to get cash, Hughes balked, fearing the dilution of his own interest in T.W.A., and the Hughes-Frye team cracked up in 1947. Jack Frye was out of a job. Always well connected with the Democrats in Washington, Frye got a political plum, the presidency (at $97,000 a year) of the Government-held General Aniline & Film Corp. When political pressures eased him out of the job in 1955, he tried to start his own planemaking company. It never got off the ground. Last week Jack Frye, still determined to conquer a new air world, was in Tucson to seek a manufacturer for a propeller plane he designed. As he was driving a rented car, a speeding station wagon ran through a stop sign and broadsided into him. At 54, the man who had flown 7,000 hours without a serious accident to help pioneer the air age died in the car crash.

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