The airline industry is constantly evolving. Some of the biggest names in the airline industry did not last. There are 10 major airlines that no longer exist.
The sun is setting PAN AM.
Pan Am, Pan American World Airways are the first airlines that need to be remembered for a trip down memory lane. It's hard to imagine that they charged $25,000 to fly from San Francisco to Hong Kong with ocean liner quality food, service and bedding, when the competition was actual ocean liners. The first revenue flight of a Boeing 707 from New York to Paris was flown by Pan Am on October 26, 1958. The Soviet Union and the British both had flights from London to Moscow, but it was the Pan Am Jet Clippers that flew from London to Irkutsk.
The Pan Am experience is what it is.
The jumbo jet proved to be Pan Am's undoing, as it was the brainchild of Juan Trippe and Bill Allen. A product that worked perfectly on a 707 flying from San Francisco to the South Pacific with two dozen passengers served by a cabin crew who were the daughters of diplomats and European royalty was lost on a plane with 300 passengers. In 1973, the price of oil doubled, making flying much more expensive, and soaking up disposable income that would otherwise be spent on travel as gasoline and heating shot up in price. The first jumbos were a big deal in 1970, but by the middle of the decade, all their competitors had jumbos as well.
Pan Am Eastbound was from Karachi to Hong Kong in 1972
Pan Am was the USA's chosen instrument abroad, but with no domestic network at all, it was a near monopoly on international routes. Pan Am paid $1 billion for National Airlines in 1978 because they decided that building a domestic network from scratch would take too long. The airline lost money after the 1970s and went into freefall, including the famous Pan Am Building in Manhattan in 1980, the Intercontinental hotel chain in 1982, and the Pacific network to United in 1985. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 robbed the once great airline of any chance of survival and the last flight landed at Miami on December 4, 1991. The blue meatballs, the airline's logo, once upon a time was the second most recognised corporate logo in the world after Coca Cola.
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TWA is a trans world airline.
Trans World Airlines was founded in 1930 as Transcontinental & Western Air. After World War 2, Howard Hughes took over the airline, and it expanded to a round-the-world operator with planes built by Lockheed, most notably the L-1649 Starliner, which is considered to be the final incarnation of the airline.
TWA joined the jet age with Boeing 707s, 727s, and CV- 880s. TWA jets were used in many movies and TV shows, including All About Eve, Giant, Airport, Rocky III and IV, Annie Hall, and many more. In the 1970s and 1980s, TWA and corporate raiders were taken over by Carl Icahn who used creative accounting to enrich himself and impoverish, because of too much aeroplane in an oil price rise and recession.
The 1990s saw a retreat as it sold its slots to American Airlines and the Pacific market and cargo market were ignored. Icahn was ousted but his company Karabu was able to buy unlimited tickets with a 45% discount and sell them via travel agents at the market rate or undercutting TWA's own published fares, a significant handbrake on progress.
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The airline was able to restructure as a purely domestic airline, with inefficient 727s and Tristars retired in favor of a slimmed-down fleet of 757s, and MD-80s. American Airlines bought out the airline in December 2001 because it was ripe for a takeover.
The Boeing 747 is the most complex model aircraft.
Eastern Airlines
Eastern Airlines was the biggest airline outside of the Soviet Union by the mid-1970s, with a slogan like The Wings of Man and an Astronaut CEO. Their network grew up on the eastern seaboard of the United States, with a large fleet of propliners, and Eastern continued their loyalty to Douglas into the jet age, buying DC-8s instead. They bought the short range version of the 707 and the medium range version of the 727 and used them to bring jet service to suburbs and towns. A large fleet of Douglas DC-9 twin jets followed, then another product launch, introducing the world to the widebody Lockheed L-1011 Tristar in 1972. Eastern took a fleet of A300 widebody twins in 1976. Eastern had to pay for the fuel in order to get four A300s from Airbus, which was desperate to break into the US market. The fuel burn on the A300 was 30% less than the Tristar on the same route and Eastern loved it.
The sharp-eyed will have noticed that Boeing, Douglas, Lockeed and Airbus are just a few of the aircraft manufacturers. Tupolev was missing. Borman sold the airline to Frank Lorenzo, who already owned Continental Airlines, because he couldn't keep costs competitive.
Eastern was the most strike-prone airline in the country, and Lorenzo went to war with the unions. The Boston-NY-DC shuttle, a 727 every hour with guaranteed space available, and a back-up aircraft ready to fly even one extra passenger were some of the Chunks of the airline sold. The infrastructure and aircraft was transferred to the non-union Continental at a rate of disadvantagious to Eastern, and what was left over went bust in January 1991.
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Ansett Australia
Australia has a population of only 25 million and has struggled to sustain more than two airlines. Virgin Australia has filled that role in the past, but back in the golden age of travel, it was Ansett. ANA, Australian National Airways, was taken over by the airline in 1957.
In those days, Australia had only one national carrier, Trans Australia Airlines, and one privately-owned carrier, Ansett, which both operated the same fleet and charged the same fares. When the widebody era began, Ansett bought 767-200s and TAA bought A300B4s.
The style was different. In the 70s Ansett wore a red-and-black cheatline, and in 1981 it adopted a white livery with a Southern Cross constellation as a shooting star. Cheatlines were cutting edge in the early 1980s.
In 1993 Ansett leased three jumbo jets from Singapore Airlines to start long haul flights to Osaka, Hong Kong and other destinations. The airline was still enjoying its reputation for quality and style despite the fact that it was replaced by a new type of plane.
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Air New Zealand bought Ansett in 2000 just as the airline was running into problems, with many aircraft types operating in small numbers. Air New Zealand was soon losing more than a million dollars a day. The New Zealand government saved Ansett with a NZ$885 million bail out. Ansett closed down in 2002 despite the Australian public's desire for the government to save it.
Braniff.
Braniff was a conservative Texas-based regional carrier with a good reputation until 1965, when it was bought by the Greatamerica Corporation, which appointed a Continental Airlines executive as its president. The end of the plain plane is a radical rebrand that he oversaw with advertising executive Mary Wells, graphic designer Alexander Girard, Italian fashion designer Emilio Pucci, and shoe designer Beth Levine. The aircraft were painted in a single solid colour, but there were at least fifteen different colors. Air traffic controllers would place bets on which plane would fly over their radar rooms and passengers would try to get the set. Braniff is the most stylish airline in the world because everything from ground equipment to jet bridges and ticket jackets received the same rebrand. The Big Orange was the only plane they bought to operate Dallas to Honolulu. The Big Orange spent sixteen hours in the air completing the round trip, making it the highest time in the world.
The pride of the fleet was a pair of jets painted by Alexander Calder, a DC-8 in the orange and red of South America, and a 727 with patriotic red white and blue streaks.
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Braniff applied for everything they could, including opening 32 new routes in a single day and buying jumbo jets to open flights on half a dozen trans-Atlantic routes, because they feared that the opportunity to acquire new routes might not last.
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Braniff started flying Concordes domestically between Dallas and Washington, although as this route was overland, they had to remain subsonic, so other than a dramatic takeoff, the true advantage of an SST was lost. There weren't enough people using the service to notice the upgraded soft product. The cabin crew would take the unused caviar home to feed their cats.
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American Airlines under the guidance of Robert Crandall was making their frequent flier programme and computer based reservations systems more efficient in order to take advantage of the new deregulated market. Braniff lost hundreds of dollars a year in their chaotic attempt to manage in the new reality, which ended on May 6, 1982. Their last revenue flight was the arrival of the big orange plane from Honolulu.
The Braniff II flew a fleet of over 50 727s starting in 1983, but like the various Pan Am and Eastern start ups and sequels that have tried to find gold in former glories, this was not a return to the golden age.
Have you flown on any airlines? What is your experience like?
Next week's Part 2 will be announced soon.
