Flying High This Past Week 16 March-22 March

First a bit of housekeeping. This week I switched this blog over to have its own domain name at www.tailsthroughtime.com. The previous address of aviationtrivia.blogspot.com still works and you'll get a redirect notice if you use the old link that will take you to the new URL. Now, without further ado, here's what's been getting a lot of page views this past week here at TAILS THROUGH TIME:

• Two's Company and Three's a Crowd: The Boeing 737-200 Flight Crew Controversy: Quite naturally the latest post to the blog would be the most popular in the past week! The question of whether the 737-200 required two flight crew or three created quite a bit of acrimony in the late 1960s when the aircraft was introduced. Nowhere else was the dispute more pronounced than at United Air Lines, one of Boeing's key customers for the new jet.
• The Crazy Cats: The Lockheed Neptunes of the US Army: Yes, you read that right. The *Army*. In Vietnam, the Army found that it needed a bigger and longer ranged aircraft for the SIGINT/COMINT role that today's Guardrail aircraft perform. Intraservice rivalries being what they were then, the Navy stepped up to help the Army and offered some P-2 Neptunes from stateside Reserve squadrons for modification so the Army wouldn't have to deal with what was then a very prickly USAF. The AP-2Es (a spurious designation to avoid antagonizing the USAF) were the heaviest and most complex Neptune variant to take to the skies. Many of the SIGINT/COMINT equipment used on the Army Neptunes would influence the development of the Guardrail system used today by the Army. 
• The N-20 Program: Switzerland's First Indigenous Jet Aircraft: The Federal Aircraft Factory (FAF) N-20 Aiguillon was an attractive flying wing fighter design that only got as far as taxi tests and some very short hops short of a true first flight before being canceled. The Aiguillon had two flying forebears, though, that contributed to the flight test program and development of this aborted fighter design.
• Tupolev's Own Tristar Design: It's not unusual for the Russian design bureaus (called OKBs) to reuse designations. The Tu-204 that flies today is actually the third use of that designation. The first use was for an enlarged T-tailed jet development of the Tu-134/Tu-154 and the second use of the designation was for a widebody trijet that looked very much like the Lockheed L-1011 Tristar. 
• The Rocket-Boosted P-51 Mustang: In 1945 the USAAF's Mustangs were besting the Messerschmitt Me 262 jets over their German bases where the jets were most vulnerable. As a result of augmented airfield defenses, work turned to a rocket-boosted P-51 that would have the speed to catch the Me 262 at altitude and not have to run the gauntlet of airfield defenses.
• The Legend of Half-Moon Bay: In this day and age when most of us are jaded to air travel and complaints about airlines are the norm, from the 1962 Christmas season is a unparalleled story of ingenuity and a can-do spirit by airline employees to go the extra mile. I won't spoil it here, but let's just say we'd all be hard pressed to come up with anything that equals what a small California airline pulled off that year, creating the "Legend of Half Moon Bay"!

The next TAILS THROUGH TIME article goes up tomorrow night, 23 March. Stay tuned! 

PSA's Reasons for Betting on the Tristar

On May 6, 1949, twenty-six sailors on shore leave from the naval base at San Diego paid a $15.60 one way fare on a small airline called PSA (Pacific Southwest Airlines) which had a single red and white DC-3 to fly to Oakland, California. Over the course of the next 20 years, PSA would grow to dominate the West Coast market between the second busiest domestic air market in the world, that between Southern California and the Bay Area (the biggest domestic market in the world is the Boston-New York-Washington corridor on the East Coast). After what can only be described as the Cinderella story of the airline industry, 1969 presented PSA with a new set of challenges that would ultimately shake the foundation of the airline to its deepest roots and set the stage for its eventual acquisition in 1987 by USAir.

The first thing to keep in mind when looking at the historical context of PSA in 1969 is that unlike most other airlines, PSA only flew to cities in California and as an intrastate carrier, wasn't subject to the regulatory and market control oversight of the federal Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB). It was the CAB that got abolished with deregulation in the early 1980s. Instead, as an intrastate carrier, PSA had only to answer to the California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) to get approval for fare increases and new services. And for the 20 years that PSA had been flying up to 1969, the PUC always gave PSA what it wanted much to chagrin of the established majors that competed with PSA (primarily United and Western). PSA was getting competition from two fronts- first from the established carriers of Western and United which had traditionally been dominant on the West Coast. After 20 years of getting their lunch eaten by PSA, they were fighting back with increased frequencies on the California Corridor. The second front was from a small intrastate start up based in Orange County called Air California. Though smaller, they proved to be just as an aggressive competitor to PSA as the majors.

At the turn of the decade, two PUC actions signaled the end of PSA's favored status with the PUC. The first came when PSA applied to open up service from Long Beach to San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, Sacramento, and San Diego. This came about as a result of consumer demand that was getting increasingly irritated about the airport congestion at LAX. The PUC approved temporary service between Long Beach and San Francisco, but dragged its feet on the other cities and when it did finally approve, it was well after the Christmas holiday travel rush.

Not long after, PSA made a move to eliminate Air California from the market by buying the smaller airline outright. PSA stood poised to take a 79% ownership stake in Air California subject to PUC approval, but again, as was previously the case, foot-dragging by the PUC led to PSA cancelling the proposed buyout.

Now I had mentioned on the airport congestion issue at LAX above. Gate space was the biggest problem for PSA and back then, the majors weren't about the relinquish any gates to the very airline that was effectively driving them from the California market. Gate space also became an issue at San Francisco as well. In June of 1969 PSA inaugurated "every hour on the hour" service between LAX and San Francisco and "every hour on the half-hour" service between San Diego and LAX. Outside of Eastern's shuttle operation on the East Coast and the Ponte Aerea in Brazil, this was the first time a scheduled airline offered service that didn't require a timetable. It was a hit with passengers and load factors soared on the flights out of LAX to San Francisco and San Diego. With certain times being more popular than others, PSA wanted to put 2 Boeing 727-200s on certain time slots, but lacked the gate space at both LAX and San Francisco.

Enter the L-1011.

PSA president Andy Andrews met with the executives at Lockheed several times during 1969-1970 to discuss the possibilities of adding the new Tristar 300-seat widebody to the PSA fleet to solve the gate space problem at LAX and San Francisco as well as place a much larger and comfortable aircraft in service that would trump the Electras and DC-9s of Air California and the 737s and 727s of United and Western. In addition, the performance of the Tristar was such that the PSA board investigated service beyond California (Hawaii being one distinct possibility).

On August 31, 1970, Andy Andrews announced to the local press and to the PSA employees at the San Diego headquarters that PSA had signed orders for two Lockheed L-1011 Tristars with a letter of intent for three more delivery positions. The contract was worth $100 million with a delivery date of 1972. And impressively enough, the Tristar could operate from every airport in the PSA network, even Burbank! The venture, however, would be short lived and is subject for a future posting!

Source: Poor Sailors' Airline: The Story of Kenny Friedkin's Pacific Southwest Airlines by Gary Kissel. Palawdr Press, 2002.

How the Spirit of Pacific Southwest Airlines Lives on at Southwest

When Herb Kelleher and Rollin King sketched out their idea for Southwest Airlines on a cocktail napkin, they both knew they were facing tremendous odds against the large airlines that operated in Texas already like Braniff, American, and Texas International. One of their weaknesses was a lack of airline experience which they solved by bringing aboard veteran industry executive Lamar Muse who started out in 1948 at Trans-Texas and worked at American, Continental, Southern, among others and most notably was president of Fort Worth-based Central Airlines before it was bought up by Frontier in 1967.

With the nascent Southwest still fighting legal battles to win the rights to start service in Dallas, Rollin King and Lamar Muse visited Pacific Southwest Airlines' San Diego headquarters in 1969 to meet with the president of PSA, J. Floyd Andrews and the airline's management. King and Muse put it to Andrews bluntly- PSA was a successful intrastate airline for 20 years and they felt that they had an analogous situation in Texas as PSA did in California- large cities separated by a distance that could make for a profitable airline flight. They needed PSA's help in learning the tricks of the trade to become a successful intrastate carrier against the stiff competition of the incumbents, much as PSA managed to carve out a niche in California against United and Western.

Andrews was flattered by Lamar Muse and Rollin King's request and asked his management to cooperate with Southwest completely and not hold back on any of the tricks PSA learned to become successful with a loyal customer base. Between court hearings to get Southwest airborne, Herb Kelleher himself made several trips to San Diego to examine the operations of PSA.

PSA's management was so enamored with the ambitious Texans that they even sold them pilot uniforms, transition training on the Boeing 737 (when it became clear that the 737-200 would be Southwest's aircraft) along with training for the customer service personnel for Southwest. Flight attendant training was observed, inflight practices and procedures were shared, and even station operations were explained to the nascent Southwest operation. Even the financing and marketing departments of PSA welcomed Southwest's personnel for training sessions. The training sessions for Southwest's personnel began in 1970 and Andrews even let Southwest's representatives fly the jumpseat to observe PSA flights. They would carry notebooks in which they noted everything the pilots and cabin crew did that was unique, from funny announcements to inflight contests. Southwest's first marketing people sat in PSA boarding lounges throughout California observing the service levels and the humor PSA's gate agents used on a regular basis.

The head of PSA's computer reservations department even spent time in Dallas helping Southwest get its own system up and running! Andrews even had all of PSA's training and service manuals reprinted for Southwest to use in its early days, removing "Pacific" from "Pacific Southwest Airlines" and substituting "Texas" for "California".

When Southwest inaugurated its first flight on 18 June 1971 from Dallas Love Field, they started out with 22 years of airline operations thanks to the tutelage and generosity of the everyone at PSA. Even though PSA disappeared into history in 1986 when it was bought by USAir, much of what made PSA successful in its first quarter century lives on today at Southwest Airlines.

Source: Poor Sailors' Airline: The Story of Kenny Friedkin's Pacific Southwest Airlines by Gary Kissel. Palawdr Press, 2002, p171-172.

The Legend of Half Moon Bay

It's a travel nightmare. Weather delays and closures at airports during peak travel seasons. It was no different in the past than it is now with air travel when we're at the mercy of the weather despite the advances in technology since the end of the Second World War ushered in unprecedented growth in air travel. Picture in your mind it's the start of the 1962 Christmas holiday travel season and one of the primary airports on the US West Coast, San Francisco, is socked in with fog so thick that anything more than ball toss away fades into the murk. Fog at San Francisco International is nothing new, but this particular week in 1962 the fog stubbornly persisted throughout the holiday season. Flights were delayed or canceled and passengers were stranded at San Francisco International Airport. Unless, of course, you're booked on Pacific Southwest Airlines, PSA.

Several hours before San Francisco International became fog-bound, the PSA station manager called every airport in the Bay Area that could handle PSA's Lockheed L-188 Electra turboprops. Half Moon Bay Airport has long enough runways and sitting on the other side of the coastal ridge from the Bay Area, has clear weather. And fortuitously for PSA, Half Moon Bay's runways aren't thick enough to handle the big jets operated by the other airlines at San Francisco International. PSA employees were dispatched to Half Moon Bay to direct ground and station operations while a fleet of 32 buses are chartered to run a continuous shuttle between Half Moon Bay and San Francisco International.

As the tarmac at Half Moon Bay wasn't strong enough for the Electra, PSA's pilots turned just barely off the runway with only two engines on one side running while passengers disembarked to waiting buses to take them to San Francisco. Meanwhile new busloads of passengers from San Francisco queued up away from the disembarking passengers to begin boarding. Since Half Moon Bay didn't have a control tower, another PSA pilot with a radio was stationed on the roof of what became a makeshift terminal building using the company radio frequency to keep arriving and departing Electras apart.

San Mateo Country sheriff's deputies were called in to keep the curious clear of the flight operations and to direct the traffic as many ticketed PSA passengers began to show up at Half Moon Bay Airport itself. PSA ran radio commercials throughout the Bay Area that said "PSA will get you home for Christmas" as the Electra flights shuttled back and forth to the clear skies of Southern California. Some PSA employees would work 36 hour shifts and a small hotel was used for flight crews that timed out on their duty hours.

The unique Half Moon Bay Airport operation ran from 14 December 1962 all the way through Christmas, carrying over 40,000 passengers on 488 flights to Burbank, Los Angeles and San Diego. It was then that the aviation "Legend of Half Moon Bay" was born as PSA was inundated for weeks after the holidays with letters of thanks from passengers.

It's one of my favorite airline history stories and I count myself lucky to have been able to fly PSA before they were absorbed with great sorrow into USAir.

Source: Poor Sailors' Airline: The Story of Kenny Friedkin's Pacific Southwest Airlines by Gary Kissel. Palawdr Press, 2002, p97-100.