Hard Landing (79 page)

There were other hopeful signs in 1996. The airlines at last seemed to be coming to terms with the off-putting effects of their poor service. Inspired by the benign internal culture of Southwest and the thrilling (if tentative) outbreak of harmony at employee-owned United, many airlines began trying to patch things up with their disaffected employee groups. The best proof was American’s preliminary agreement in September 1996 on a conciliatory contract with its pilots—an agreement that had remained pending since about the time of the 1993 flight attendants’ strike. The late 1990s was a period of heightened management sensibility throughout the industry, and although the major airlines were late getting with the program, they were at last getting in. No one remembered that nearly two decades earlier, a brilliant if emotional founder named Donald Burr had built what was briefly a fine airline on the principles of trust and empowerment.

The second generation of startups—the heirs to People Express—remained a vibrant force. Here too the major airlines appeared to be changing their spots, controlling, to some degree, the blood lust they had once exhibited when an upstart dared encroach on their turf. But the competition remained vigorous. Perhaps the most pitched battle was between Delta and the upstart ValuJet, which after a surprisingly strong beginning lost a plane in the Florida Everglades in the spring of 1996, with the deaths numbering 110. While investigators continued to probe, many people could not avoid drawing a comparison to the Air Florida crash in Washington, D.C., at the dawn of deregulation—another case of an airline brought down to earth following a furious growth campaign.

And what of the original upstart, Southwest Airlines? Herb Kelleher had taken it into Florida and the Northwest (although, conspicuously, not into New York). In the summer of 1996 he hosted a huge soiree to celebrate the company’s twenty-fifth anniversary, asking guests to come dressed in tuxedo jackets and jeans. Southwest had grown into the seventh largest airline in America, and it showed little indication of slowing down.

There were other signs that the industry’s leadership had learned some lessons. Despite the booming economy of 1996, the airlines kept their capacity under rigorous control instead of ordering every new airplane in sight, at last overcoming the “sex appeal” factor that Alfred Kahn had once identified. This fact, combined with ever more powerful yield management systems, helped the airlines sell a larger proportion of their seats than at any time since Juan Trippe put wicker chairs in the back of the mail planes to Cuba. The majority of flights, in fact, were flying virtually 100 percent full. The fare wars were few and far between. And although the business traveler was still getting gouged, there remained bargains for families and other leisure passengers who could plan their travels ahead.

Of course, all these positive developments were occurring in a time of strong economic expansion and relentless globalization. It was easy to forget that the airline industry—that management tightrope, that balancing act—had as much leverage in good times as in bad. Only when the economy again moved into the minus column would anyone know for sure whether the leaders of the industry had changed their war-mongering ways, or whether, at last, they, and their industry, had matured.

NOTES

This book is based on hundreds of hours of interviews with the principal characters, as well as tens of thousands of pages of published materials—court records, private correspondence, articles, studies, and other books. To keep this section from overtaking the entire book I have tried to limit the number of citations within the goal of satisfying a skeptical reader, one who might ask, “I wonder how he knows that?” I have particularly emphasized citing sources for the thoughts and words I attribute to my characters. Every one of these comes from somewhere—from one or more parties to a conversation, a published quotation, an assertion in a legal affidavit, a speech. Where no citation is given for someone’s words or feelings it is usually because I have judged the source to be obvious from the context or from nearby citations.

In the case of articles I have generally provided a full reference, including the headline and byline, on the first appearance of a citation within a chapter and an abbreviated note for any subsequent appearance within the same chapter. The following abbreviations appear throughout the notes:
BW
for
Business Week, NYT
for
New York Times
, and
WSJ
for
Wall Street Journal
.

I have not followed a uniform style for captioning speeches and correspondence. Instead I have generally described these in the form in which they appeared on the documents themselves.

Prologue

1.
“a single gesture”: Saint-Exupéry,
Flight to Arras
, in
Airman’s Odyssey
, page 383.

2.
more adult Americans: Extrapolated from vehicle registration figures and Gallup surveys.

3.
world’s biggest industry: “Travel and Tourism Is Top Employer,”
Travel Weekly
, Apr. 6, 1992.

4.
“godlike power”: Lindbergh,
The Spirit of St. Louis
, page 94.

5.
“savagely competitive”: Quoted in “The Airline Mess,” by Wendy Zellner and Andrea Rothman,
BW
, July 6, 1992.

6.
“don’t have the stomach”: Baker 4/23/93 interview.

7.
offers from the White House: Borman,
Countdown
, page 260.

8.
43 vice presidents: Eastern Air Lines, Inc., 1968 annual report to shareholders.

9.
9 mm handgun: Borman 1/29/94 interview.

Chapter 1: Takeoff

1.
unsteady his hand: Ross,
The Last Hero
, page 69.

2.
“airlines radiating”: Lindbergh,
We
, page 61.

3.
“passengers for half-price:”
Ibid.
, page 79.

4.
“What would you think”: Quoted in Lindbergh,
The Spirit of St. Louis
, page 74.

5.
“I’ve got a reputation”:
Ibid.
, page 61.

6.
“I made it”: Quoted in Solberg,
Conquest of the Skies
, page 70.

7.
baseball games:
Ibid.
, page 71.

8.
the Lindy hop: Sann,
The Lawless Decade
, page 162.

9.
“most cherished citizen”:
Time
, Jan. 2, 1928.

10.
four million New Yorkers: “A Little of What the World Thought of Lindbergh,” by Fitzhugh Green, appendix to Lindbergh,
We
, page 300.

11.
window in the Union Club: Daley,
An American Saga
, page 62. For Trippe’s background, including the formation of Pan Am, see also Solberg,
Conquest of the Skies;
Bender and Altschul,
The Chosen Instrument;
Davies,
Airlines of the United States Since 1914;
and Gandt,
Skygods
.

12.
fraternity brothers: “The Only Way to Fly,” by T. A. Heppenheimer,
Audacity
, Spring 1995.

13.
bidding low: Johnson,
Airway One
, page 13; “United Air Lines,” by F. Robert van der Linden, in
Encyclopedia of American Business History and Biography
.

14.
4,000 guests: Green, “A Little of What the World Thought.”

15.
Trippe … distinguished himself: Daley,
An American Saga
, page 62.

16.
retainer of $10,000: Herrmann,
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
, page 58. Lindbergh entered into a similar arrangement as technical advisor to TWA, which for a time called itself “the Lindbergh Line.”

17.
traffic jam: Daley,
An American Saga
, page 67.

18.
“bathe in Bacardi”: Quoted in Solberg,
Conquest of the Skies
, page 80.

19.
Al Capone:
Ibid.
, page 80.

20.
elegant civilian clothes: Bender and Altschul,
The Chosen Instrument
, page 136.

21.
aunt named Juanita:
Ibid
. page 26.

23.
public relations operative: Daley,
An American Saga
, page 73.

24.
wet blotters: Rickenbacker,
Rickenbacker
, page 176.

25.
Christmas cards: Davies,
Airlines of the United States Since 1914
, page 43.

26.
busiest airport: Remarks by Robert L. Crandall before the Rotary Club of Tulsa, July 12, 1978.

27.
“stars weren’t right”: Quoted in
Aircraft Year Book for 1933
, page 56.

28.
followed railroad tracks: Solberg,
Conquest of the Skies
, page 106.

29.
whirling propellers:
Ibid.
, page 115.

30.
hosed down: Solberg,
ibid.
, page 115.

31.
a presidential commission: “Walter Folger Brown,” by David D. Lee,
The Encyclopedia of American Business History and Biography
.

32.
Brown changed the rules: Brown’s maneuvers are described, among other places, in “U.S. Aviation and the Air Mail,”
Fortune
, May 1934; Davies,
Airlines of the United States Since 1914;
Serling,
Eagle;
and H. Smith,
Airways
.

33.
“If we were holding this meeting”: Quoted in H. Smith,
Airways
, page 242.

34.
12 army fliers perished:
Ibid.
, page 256.

35.
last their lifetimes: The bitterness between Lindbergh and Roosevelt intensified their conflict over U.S. intervention in World War II. The feud is detailed in Lindbergh’s
Wartime Journals
.

36.
a dozen skeletons: The cartoon is reprinted in Allen,
The Airline Builders
, page 90.

37.
hard-drinking Texan: Smith’s background is told, among other places, in “Interview with C. R. Smith,” Dec. 4, 1975, on file in American Airlines historical records; “There’s More Than One Way to Run an Airline,” by Perrin Stryker,
Fortune
, February 1961; Serling,
Eagle;
and Allen,
The Airline Builders
.

38.
ragtag fleet: “Interview with C. R. Smith,” Dec. 4, 1975.

39.
increased the cost: The economics of the DC-3 are detailed in Miller and Sawers,
The Technical Development of Modern Aviation
, pages 100-103.

40.
“Brooklyn Bridge”: Quoted in Serling,
Eagle
, page 103.

41.
Shirley Temple: Solberg,
Conquest of the Skies
, page 171.

42.
“He still loves me!”: Quoted in Serling,
Eagle
, page 103.

43.
best route: The North Pacific flight of Charles and Anne Lindbergh is chronicled in Ross,
The Last Hero;
Herrmann,
Anne Morrow Lindbergh;
and Daley,
An American Saga
.

44.
no mail contract: Daley,
An American Saga
, page 144.

45.
Trippe chartered: The account of Pan Am’s South Seas adventure is based on a 42-page internal Pan Am account called “History of the Transpacific Air Service to and through Hawaii,” dated Aug. 12, 1944, on file in the Pan Am Collection at the University of Miami Library.

46.
“imagination of a Jules Verne”: Quoted in
Ibid
.

47.
“That’s illegal!”: Rickenbacker,
Rickenbacker
, pages 218-21. Serling,
From the Captain to the Colonel
, page 149.

48.
commodity markets: Serling,
Eagle
, page 81.

49.
“prevent the … system from crashing”: Quoted in Richard H. K. Vietor, “Contrived Competition: Airline Regulation and Deregulation, 1925-1988,” in
Business History Review
, Spring 1990.

50.
Interstate Commerce Act: Breyer,
Regulation and Its Reform
, page 199.

51.
Louis J. Hector: This CAB case is described in Johnson,
The Abominable Airlines
, pages 224-26.

52.
installment loan contract: Solberg,
Conquest of the Skies
, page 349.

53.
“Present rates”: “A Statement of Certain Policies of the Executive Branch of the Government in the General Field of Aviation,” Air Coordinating Committee, Report to the President, Aug. 1, 1947.

54.
“the best impression”: “The Cautious Pioneer,”
Forbes
, June 1, 1956.

55.
“most important … since Lindbergh’s”: Quoted in Bender and Altschul,
The Chosen Instrument
.