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| Founded | 1941 | |||
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| Commenced operations | December 2, 1946 (renamed Pacific Air Lines, March 6, 1958) |
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| Ceased operations | 1968 (merged with Bonanza Air Lines and West Coast Airlines to form Air West) | |||
| Hubs | San Francisco International Airport | |||
| Fleet size | 40 | |||
| Destinations | ||||
| Headquarters | San Francisco International Airport[1] | |||
| Key people | John Howard Connelly Leland Hayward |
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Pacific Air Lines was a regional airline serving the West Coast of the United States that began operations in the 1940s under the name Southwest Airways. The company operated as a feeder airline, linking smaller communities primarily in California and Oregon with major cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Founded largely with money from wealthy investors from the Hollywood motion picture industry, the airline was noted for employing cost-saving operational procedures and safety practices that were innovative for the time.[2] The traveling public responded positively, and as passenger volume increased and more locations were served, a need for bigger and faster planes eventually resulted in adding modern aircraft to the fleet during the 1960s. However, the mid-60s were a troubled period for the company; a fatal crash in 1964 caused by a suicidal gunman was followed by a sharp decline in net income two years later, and in 1967 an unconventional ad campaign caused discord between stockholders and executives. The controversy subsided after a management shake-up, but the name Pacific Air Lines passed into history in 1968 when market conditions resulted in a merger with Bonanza Air Lines and West Coast Airlines, forming Air West.
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In early 1941 Air Service veteran John Howard "Jack" Connelly and noted Hollywood agent/producer Leland Hayward formed a business partnership that five years later would evolve into a scheduled commercial airline. Neither man was a stranger to aviation; Connelly was also a former test pilot, airplane salesman, Civil Aeronautics Administration instructor pilot, and inspector for the 1930s-era Soviet Union. Hayward was an active private pilot and was on the board of directors of Transcontinental and Western Airlines (TWA). The two men enlisted the support of commercial pilot and photographer John Swope to oversee the training of aviation cadets.[3] Together, they founded a maintenance depot for overhauling training aircraft, a wartime air cargo line, and a military pilot training complex consisting of Thunderbird Field No. 1, Thunderbird Field No. 2, and Falcon Field in Arizona.[4] By the end of World War II, Southwest Airways was the largest training contractor in the United States, and trained more than 20,000 pilots from over two dozen countries.[5]
After the war Connelly and Hayward raised $2,000,000 (in 1946 dollars) from investors, including Hollywood notables such as James Stewart and Darryl Zanuck, to expand Southwest into the airline business, pending government approval.[2] They were awarded a three-year experimental charter from the Civil Aeronautics Board on May 22, 1946 for their feeder service.[6]
Scheduled passenger service under the name Southwest Airways began on December 2, 1946, using plentiful and affordable war surplus C-47s, the military version of the Douglas DC-3, converted for civilian use.[7] The initial routes were situated along the Los Angeles to San Francisco corridor, including stops in Santa Barbara, Paso Robles, Monterey, and San Jose, with Medford, Oregon added later.[6]
Connelly serves no food ("let them bring their own"), provides no chewing gum ("we never fly high enough to need it and besides it sticks to the floor") or magazines ("takes too long to unwrap them")
Connelly, president, and Hayward, board chairman, were the majority owners of the airline, and as such could hold sway on how the company would operate. Running on slim operating margins, Southwest Airways was a no-frills airline decades before low-cost carriers became common.
To increase revenue the airline optimized ground operations to the point where a DC-3 could discharge passengers, load new ones, and begin taxiing to take off again 90 seconds after coming to a stop (adding six more minutes if refueling is required).[2] In a cost-saving move, the airline had their own pilots do the refueling instead of paying airport personnel to do it.[2] Time on the ground was reduced by keeping one engine running while a male purser hurried passengers off the plane,[2] and the DC-3s were modified to include an 'airstair', a door that doubled as a staircase for the passengers.[8] The airstair eliminated waiting for a ground crew to roll a wheeled staircase up to the plane.
The airline's innovative spirit extended into air safety as well; in December 1947 a Southwest Airways DC-3 flying into the coastal town of Arcata, California made the world's first blind landing on a scheduled commercial airliner using Ground-Controlled Approach (GCA) radar, Instrument Landing System (ILS) devices and Fog Investigation and Dispersal Operation (FIDO) oil-burning units adjacent to the runway.[2] By the following year the airline had made 1,200 routine instrument landings at the often fog-shrouded Arcata airport.[2]
Southwest had a fleet of ten planes by 1948, all of them DC-3s, flying between 24 California and Oregon small towns, becoming the second biggest feeder airline in the United States.[2]
The airline flew without any fatal mishaps until the evening of April 6, 1951, when Southwest Airways Flight 7 crashed, killing all 19 passengers and 3 crew members aboard,[9] including 12 military personnel.[10] The DC-3 was flying a 20-minute route between Santa Maria, California and Santa Barbara. It was flying too low and struck a ridge in the Refugio Pass region of the Santa Ynez Mountains at a height of 2,740 ft (835 m), far below the minimum nighttime altitude of 4,000 ft (1,219 m) prescribed for the plane's route over that rugged stretch of mountains. An investigation by the Civil Aeronautics Board was unable to determine why the plane's altitude was too low.[11]
To handle the post-war increase in passenger travel, by late 1952 the airline's inventory had grown to include include eight secondhand piston-engined Martin 2-0-2s, which were faster and carried more passengers than the DC-3,[12] and also had airstairs.[note 1] In the 1950s the airline's literature stated it was serving 33 California locales (i.e. about 24 airports), and flight timetables published by the company in the mid-1950s boasted that Southwest Airways "serves more California cities than any other scheduled airline."[13]
To better reflect the coastal territory overflown by the majority of their flights, and having called themselves "the Pacific Air Line" for many years, the company name was changed to Pacific Air Lines on March 6, 1958.[6] The corporate logo was also changed at this time from an earth-toned Thunderbird reminiscent of a Navajo sandpainting to a simpler, modernized design with bright colors. In a move possibly designed to prevent the flying public from confusing the newly named Pacific Air Lines for a brand-new airline, company timetables published in 1959[14] asserted that the company was in its "17th year of scheduled service".[note 2]
Before the advent of the 1960s, the company had made San Francisco International Airport their corporate headquarters and hub of operations, and at about this time operations outside of California were resumed, with flights to Nevada added to the schedule.
In 1959 the fleet of airplanes was increased with the addition of the first of fourteen secondhand pressurized Martin 4-0-4 airliners,[12] and Pacific's first non-piston-engined aircraft, the turboprop-powered Fairchild F-27 (a U.S.-built version of the Fokker F27 Friendship.). The reliable but slow and unpressurized DC-3s were increasingly obsolete so in 1960 a gradual phase-out of the venerable planes began; the last of thirteen operated were gone from Pacific's fleet by mid-1964,[15] and the last Martin 2-0-2s were retired in March 1964.[16][17]
The first U.S. skyjacking attempt was aboard a Pacific Air Lines plane on the ground at the Chico, CA airport on July 31, 1961. The pilot and a ticket agent were shot, however the assailant was overpowered by the copilot and passengers while the plane was still on the ground.[18]
On May 7, 1964 Pacific Air Lines Flight 773 crashed near San Ramon, California. All 44 aboard the Fairchild F-27 were killed when the aircraft dove into a hillside at a nearly 90 degree angle.[19] Investigators found a gun in the wreckage, and the FBI determined that a suicidal passenger shot both of the pilots, and then himself, causing the plane to dive out of control.[20]
On September 13, 1965, Pacific Air Lines announced that it would acquire six Boeing jets, leasing two immediately and placing orders for the remainder, to be delivered in early 1968.[21] The jets were ordered during a prosperous time for the airline, but by 1966 the West Coast market was contested by seven other airlines, and net income for Pacific dropped from $700,337 in 1965 to $150,716,[22] chiefly because the three-engined Boeing 727 was uneconomical for Pacific's short routes. Two of the jets were removed from Pacific's flight schedule and temporarily leased to National Airlines.[23]
In 1967 the airline embarked on a controversial advertisement campaign, including a full-page ad in the New York Times on April 28, 1967, that highlighted the fear of flying, a subject rarely emphasized by the commercial aviation industry. The airline had hired award-winning advertising executive and comedian Stan Freberg for the ad campaign,[24] knowing that unconventional ideas were his forté. Under his direction print advertisements stated::
| “ | Hey there! You with the sweat in your palms. It's about time an airline faced up to something: Most people are scared witless of flying. Deep down inside, every time that big plane lifts off that runway, they wonder if this is it, right? You want to know something, fella? So does the pilot, deep down inside.[24] | ” |
The copy from another ad said:
| “ | Hey there, you with the sweat in your palms. Do you wish the pilot would knock off all that jazz about 'That's Crater Lake on the left, ladies and gentlemen,' and tell you instead what the devil that funny noise was you just heard?[25] | ” |
To complement the ad campaign flight attendants handed out "survival kits" featuring hot-pink lunch pails containing a small security blanket,[22] a "lucky" rabbit's foot, the best-selling book The Power of Positive Thinking, and a fortune cookie containing the slogan "It could be worse. The pilot could be whistling "The High and the Mighty."[26] The attendants were also encouraged to exclaim "We made it! How about that!" upon landing.[24] Freberg had unfulfilled plans to paint a Pacific Boeing 727 to resemble a locomotive, with wheels on the fuselage and a cowcatcher on the nose.[22] Inside the cabin, passengers would have heard a recording of a steam locomotive over the loudspeakers.[22]
Matthew E. McCarthy, Pacific's chief executive and biggest shareholder, explained the campaign: "It's basically honest. We spoof the passengers' concern, but at least we admit they have it."[22] Philip H. Dougherty, writing in the Business and Finance section of the May 1 edition of The New York Times, described the advertisements as "rather shocking".[27] Objections to the unorthodox campaign were raised at a May 1967 stockholders meeting, and two Pacific Air Lines executives resigned in the wake of the controversy.[28]
When the Boeing jet order was optimistically announced by the airline in 1965, it was unforeseen that a change in the business climate was on the horizon, and economic realities would dictate that some of the jets would not actually end up flying under the Pacific Air Lines banner. Stiff competition from large rival Pacific Southwest Airlines was a factor in Pacific Air Lines joining forces with Bonanza Air Lines and West Coast Airlines in a three-way merger, forming Air West in 1968. Air West, later Hughes Airwest, merged into Republic Airlines in 1980, which became part of Northwest Airlines in 1987, and finally part of Delta Airlines in 2008. At the time of the Air West merger, Pacific's fleet included 11 of their workhorse Fairchild F-27s, five Martin 4-0-4s,[12] and three Boeing 727s, one of which was still leased-out but returned to Air West in late 1968.[17] The last of the increasingly obsolete Martins were not carried forward into the Air West fleet and were disposed of in August 1968.[12][29]
The two co-founders of Southwest Airways died within nine months of each other in 1971. John Connelly was 71,[30] and Leland Hayward was 68.
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