Hard Landing: The Epic Contest for Power and Profits That Plunged the Airlines into Chaos

Braniff’s powerful hub vividly demonstrated another inviolate rule of the airline business: Whoever has the most flights from a city gets a disproportionate share of the passengers. Frequency enhanced convenience—the convenience of flying the day of your meeting, not the night before; the convenience of arriving just an hour before your business wa

In so cyclical an industry as aviation, in which tiny changes in interest rates and fuel prices and macroeconomic conditions have a huge effect on the bottom line, VEP gave Borman a stunning management advantage. It turned his employees, in essence, into Eastern’s bankers, enabling him to borrow tens of millions of dollars from them—unsecured, not

The Frontier directors were keen on selling

Other airlines, ordering whatever happened to be the new or sexy or cool plane of the moment, invariably wound up with many species of aircraft in their fleets. Southwest, by contrast, flew only 737s, requiring it to stockpile parts and train pilots and mechanics for only one kind of plane. The efficiencies were huge. Now, instead of rushing out to

They would walk into the meeting with knots in their stomachs, for it was an unforgivable sin at American Airlines to appear in a meeting before Bob Crandall without having every fact at one’s command. He would cut you to ribbons.

The union of devilish details and “godlike power,” as Lindbergh found in the act of flying, makes commercial aviation compelling for yet another reason: the anthropology of the executive suite. The men who run the airlines of America are an extreme type; calling them men of ego would be like calling Mount McKinley a rise in the landscape. Airlines

That was it. American could have its customers accumulate mileage instead of Green Stamps, earning free travel instead of household appliances. The concept was not unheard-of among the airlines. Southwest Airlines already had a program in which secretaries got free travel after booking so many trips for their bosses.

Kelleher perpetuated the company’s underdog spirit. He had never fully recovered from the legal battle to get Southwest aloft and the trauma of its harrowing shoestring days, and neither had the earliest generation of employees. Maintaining the culture of martyrdom became so essential a strategy that it overpowered other corporate objectives; South

Lorenzo knew he had a good reason to risk the dangers inherent in the merger of any two airlines, a reason he often described with the phrase “critical mass.” An airline didn’t necessarily have to be big in overall terms (although that had its virtues), but it had to be big in its principal operating locations. It was on the same principle that Bob