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In 1934 General Motors asked him to take over the management of a money-losing subsidiary, Eastern Air Lines. Red ink was hardly unusual in the aviation business in those days; no airline, in fact, had ever operated in the black. Within a year the tightfisted Rickenbacker made Eastern profitable, and in 1938 he raised $3.5 million and took control of the line. Every year from 1935 to 1960 Eastern turned a profit under Rickenbacker's management, thereby disproving the prevailing theory that airlines inevitably needed federal subsidies. Rickenbacker worked hard as a salesman for Eastern and for commercial aviation, and he pioneered Eastern's shuttle service between Boston, New York and Washington. He was a stern taskmaster as always, using a microphone at management meetings to heckle subordinates with withering sarcasm. "You're not managers," he would snap. "You're leeches!"
Direct Hit. In February 1941, Eddie Rickenbacker was aboard Eastern's Mexico City Silver Sleeper when the DC-3 crashed as it approached Atlanta. Rickenbacker was badly injured. In the hospital, he heard the radio voice of Walter Winchell announce that he was dying. "I began to fight," Rickenbacker recalled later. "They had me under an oxygen tent. I tore it apart and picked up a pitcher. I heaved it at the radio and scored a direct hit. The radio fell apart and Winchell's voice stopped. Then I got well."
Only 16 months later, while making an inspection tour of wartime bases in a B17, Rickenbacker crash-landed in the South Pacific. For 21 days, he and six other men survived on three rafts; an eighth man died of his injuries. Though he was the only civilian in the group, Rickenbacker took charge; he carefully divided four oranges and made them last six days. One day a seagull landed on his head. He captured it, apportioned its flesh and used its entrails as bait for fish. He cursed one man who prayed for death, and dragged back another who tried to drown himself to make more room for the others. His comrades later credited him with taunting them into staying alive.
"The sensation of dying is sweet, sensuous, placid," he once said. "It is the easiest thing in the world to die. The hardest is to live." His will endured, but his strength finally faltered. Last week Eddie Rickenbacker died in Zurich, of a heart ailment, at the age of 82. In his final years he had remained spry, cantankerous and active, devoting much of his time to right-wing political causes. TIME Correspondent Jerry Hannifin recalls seeing him disembark from a jetliner at Washington's Dulles Airport only a year ago, gruffly rejecting someone's offer to help him with his crutches. "Hell no, thanks, I can make it down on my own, goddammit," he said. Then, leaning the crutches against the stairs, he stopped to give autographs to a swarm of admirers, a hero to the end.