Hard Landing (Book)

Hard Landing - Thomas Petzinger

Snippets and Highlights

If a plane is going to take off anyway—once the fuel is purchased and the pilot paid and the interest rendered on the money borrowed to buy the plane in the first place—any paying passenger or payload recruited to the flight is almost pure profit...

The airline business was a matter of “putting bums on seats,” as Rickenbacker described it.

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 was scheduled to begin. Frequency also preserved valuable flexibility: a business traveler could catch a later flight if his meeting ran over, or surprise the family by grabbing an early flight home.

Landing assignments—slots, as they were called—had turned out to be a finite natural resource: Oregon had the redwood forests, Texas had oil, and New York had slots.

Though costly to the government, airmail soon became smashingly popular, fostered in part by the spread of telephones and other instant communication devices, which pressured businesses to speed up their paperwork. A 23¢ airmail stamp made it possible to post a document in Peoria on Thursday afternoon and have it on someone’s desk in New York Friday morning. As the economy of the late 1920s swelled on a tide of credit, banks realized that airmail paid for itself many times over when shipping money drafts and other interest-sensitive instruments. Manufacturers and distributors found that sending samples by airmail drew more attention to their products.