Hard Landing (Book)

Hard Landing - Thomas Petzinger

Snippets and Highlights

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.