Hard Landing

by Thomas Petzinger, Jr.

  CHAPTER 2

  CHEAP THRILLS, LOW FARES

  This was why Herb Kelleher had left New Jersey.

  Kelleher was a lawyer in San Antonio. He had moved there in 1961, at the age of 30, because he could not stand the idea of spending another slushy winter in Newark—and because he was desperate to fìnd a little excitement in the practice of the law. He had been an appellate lawyer, as worthy a specialty as existed in the bar but entirely derivative. It was nothing but hand-me-down cases. There was no action, and to Kelleher that was as bad as sidewalk slush. Kelleher was a card, a party boy, a drinker, a smoker. He liked a good time and he loved politics. All these traits had drawn him to Texas, where his in-laws resided.

  Now, five years later, Kelleher knew he had made the right move.

  He was shooting the breeze over cocktails with his friend Rollin King, a client in whom Kelleher had a special interest. King was a pilot, and Kelleher had been infatuated with flying ever since he had hitchhiked his way to Newark Airport as a college student and climbed aboard a DC-3. But in addition to his pilot’s license Rollin King had an M.B.A. from Harvard. He had turned his love of flying into a business: ferrying hunting parties and business executives around Texas by air. King called his little charter company Air Southwest.

  On this particular day, as the drinks flowed, King was bubbling with enthusiasm. A friend of his, a banker, had just returned from California. During his trip there, the banker had flown on an outfit called Pacific Southwest Airlines. PSA was strictly a California airline, plying the dense corridor between Los Angeles and San Francisco with old, inexpensive airplanes at the unheard-of low price of about $10 a ticket. Because it did not fly over state lines, PSA could fly on any schedule it chose, with whatever airplanes it desired, charging any price it wished. The federal government had no jurisdiction over it.

  If California could support an airline within its borders, King told Kelleher, then Texas certainly could. Like California, Texas had big cities separated by long distances. Reaching for a cocktail napkin, King scratched three dots, representing Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. Connecting the dots, he formed a nearly perfect triangle. On such a route structure, Air Southwest, King said, could be turned from a little charter service into a real commercial airline.

  King recognized that two airlines, Braniff and Trans-Texas Airways, were deeply entrenched in the region, but their schedules were inadequate and their service poor. And so long as Air Southwest never stepped outside Texas, it could get a foot in the door by undercutting the established airlines, setting a fare below the official price established by the czars in Washington. A new airline could afford to do this, moreover, by flying inexpensive turboprop airplanes where the established airlines flew jets. A jet was a waste on a 200-mile flight.

  Kelleher was delirious with excitement. He had been waiting and hoping for precisely this—the chance to combine his law practice with a plunge into the business world, and best of all in aviation. It wouldn’t be easy, of course. People simply didn’t start airlines in the 1960s. But the challenge only excited Kelleher further.

  “Rollin, you’re crazy,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

  King and Kelleher launched the new Air Southwest Company without the slightest idea of the horrors awaiting them. Had it been almost anyone else at the controls, Air Southwest would have never gotten off the napkin, much less off the ground.

  Herbert David Kelleher, born on March 12, 1931, was an accidental baby. His mother became pregnant at age 38, a rarity for the time, particularly for a woman who already had a house full of schoolkids. Kelleher’s father urged her to consider an abortion. Her pregnancy was difficult, confining her to the hospital for six weeks, and the labor was traumatic. Herb learned his humility early in life. “She would look at me and say, ‘I wonder whether you were worth it,’ ” Kelleher would recall. One assumes she was joking.

  As Depression families went, the Kellehers lived comfortably in the Philadelphia suburb of Haddon Heights, New Jersey; Herb’s father worked for Campbell Soup, one of the few businesses flourishing in the era of the soup kitchen. But the Kelleher household was striking in other, less conventional ways. Herb’s mother was Irish Catholic and his father was Irish Protestant, and they insisted that their children make their own choices about religion. The four Kelleher kids split evenly, Herb choosing on the basis of the basketball court at a nearby Protestant church.

  While still a kid Herb watched World War II consume his entire family in one way or another, except for himself and his mother. His brother was killed in a U-boat attack at the war’s outbreak. His sister moved away to a wartime production job at RCA while his other brother was in the navy. His father soon died of a heart attack, when Herb was 12. Herb and his mother, left at home with a radio and a war raging in Europe, would sit up half the night discussing religion, business, morality, and ethics.

  His mother had drilled so much humility into her youngest son that when he had scored 29 points for the Haddon Heights Garnets and was on the threshold of breaking the basketball scoring record, he refused to take the shot lest he draw too much attention to himself from the team. The crowd cheered, his teammates egged him on, but still Kelleher kept passing the ball away. The coach finally called a time-out. “Dammit, would you shoot the ball?” he yelled, and with that encouragement Herb finally took his record-breaking shot.

  He headed for Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. He was voted the outstanding athlete. He was student body president. He was a frat rat. He wrote the yearbook and published a humor column in the Wesleyan Cardinal. Tall and wiry, he excelled at the shot put, an event that demanded speed more than strength. He was invited to try out with the Philadelphia Eagles of the National Football League but instead went to New York University Law School on a scholarship, ultimately landing a two-year clerkship with the New Jersey Supreme Court and, finally, a position at a prominent New Jersey law firm. Along the way he got married.

  It was on a winter day in 1961 that he left his office on Broad Street in Newark, stepped from the curb ankle-deep into icy slush, and resolved to reach Texas before the next winter. After arriving he had six months to kill while waiting for his Texas bar exam results (he ranked third in the state), so Kelleher joined his brother-in-law in backing President Kennedy’s navy secretary, a little-known Texan named John Connally, in a dark-horse race for governor. Though he began the race with polls giving him 4 percent of the vote, Connally won, principally on the strength of a massive outpouring in San Antonio. Kelleher had delivered the city’s North Side.

  Five years later, with a law practice devoted to pipeline cases and property disputes, Kelleher was watching Rollin King sketch the Texas Triangle on a cocktail napkin. Kelleher wasted no time incorporating Air Southwest as a commercial airline and readily obtained an operating certificate from the state. He drained his savings and borrowed more to put up the first $20,000 invested in the new Air Southwest.

  Then, he smacked headlong into the juggernaut of Braniff and Trans-Texas, “demonstrating the ancient truth,” as Texas Monthly noted at the time, “that with enough money to pay for enough good lawyers, a dedicated opponent can keep almost anything from happening for years and years.” Lawyers for the incumbent carriers chased Southwest from one Texas court to the next, mounting every argument they could muster against the state’s operating certificate. Kelleher won in the Texas Supreme Court in 1970 and the United States Supreme Court declined to hear the matter—yet the fighting had only begun.

  Braniff and Trans-Texas rushed to the CAB in Washington with the inventive claim that Southwest would, in fact, engage in interstate commerce even if its planes never left Texas airspace. After all, some Southwest passengers would no doubt buy tickets on connecting flights on other airlines that did fly outside the state. Kelleher was speechless. He had designed the legal architecture of Southwest Airlines specifically around the boundaries of federal jurisdiction, and suddenly he was being told that perhaps he was subjec
t to federal jurisdiction after all. Kelleher stepped from CAB headquarters along Connecticut Avenue and clenched his jaw in such fury that he split four molars at once, which drove him to his knees in pain.

  The CAB refused to protect the entrenched airlines. When the case went before the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, a judge wrote, “This litigation should have been terminated long ago; its undue prolongation approaches harassment.”

  Kelleher’s law partners, meanwhile, thought he was off his rocker. He had been devoting three quarters of his time to battling for Southwest. All of the seed money raised to launch the company had long ago been burned up in legal and consulting costs; Kelleher was now representing Southwest for free, to be compensated only if the company ever actually went into business and earned the money to pay his fee. He had to keep fighting if he had any hopes of getting paid—not to mention recovering any of the $20,000 he had put up in the beginning.

  And there was more than money involved. Kelleher was outraged. He would show those bastards at Braniff. He would show those yahoos at Trans-Texas.

  Air Southwest renamed itself Southwest Airlines and seemed ready at last to take to the skies. Veteran pilots were hired from a charter operation that was shutting down. Some of the stewardesses came from American Airlines, which had a policy of dismissing any over age 32. Unfortunately, in the years after Southwest had filed its original application for service in Texas, a couple of Lockheed Electras had lost their wings due to a severe vibration problem. Southwest, left with little choice but to go into business with the jet aircraft now in common use throughout the industry, bought three 737s and soon a fourth, all still in their coats of factory-white paint. In June 1971, with the maiden flight scheduled for the following day, Braniff and Trans-Texas once again got a court order halting operations on grounds that Southwest had departed from the plan on which its flying authority had been granted by the state.

  Kelleher jumped into a Southwest plane conducting its final proving flight and was dropped off at the Texas capital of Austin, where the members of the Texas Supreme Court were attending a cocktail party. They consented to hear his appeal the first thing the following morning. That night the Texas attorney general gave Kelleher the use of his library; all night Kelleher stayed up researching and writing. He went before the Supreme Court without a change of clothes, made his case, and won. The battle, for the time being, was over.

  “What do I do if the sheriff shows up tomorrow with another restraining order?” a Southwest executive asked when Kelleher assured him the company’s first flight with paying passengers could proceed.

  “Leave tire marks in his back,” Kelleher shot back.

  Kelleher was a born slob. En route to a speech before a church congregation in San Antonio he once spilled an entire Bloody Mary on his suit. (He made the speech anyway.) On another occasion, driving to a bank to plead for more money to keep Southwest alive, he accelerated too quickly in reverse and spilled a full cup of coffee on his clothes. (He still got the loan.) He could not bear to evict loiterers from his office. Ultimately his legal assistant, Colleen Barrett, made it her mission to impose a semblance of order on Kelleher’s life, taking control of his calendar, traveling with him, saying no to people to whom he would otherwise say yes. She once told him she intended to fill a fogger with stain remover to spray him when he returned from lunch.

  Southwest’s operation was born in similar chaos. The airplane hangar at its home base in Dallas was so encrusted with grit that it took two days to get the doors open the first time. The company had to borrow a jack to change aircraft tires, and its mechanics had to pump the air by hand. When a wing flap was damaged in a collision with a bird, Southwest’s mechanics broke through a locked fence protecting a 737 owned by LTV Corporation, stole the corresponding flap, and installed it on their own plane.

  Such resourcefulness came naturally to an upstart company whose culture consisted principally of the survival instinct. Employees were painfully aware that Braniff and Trans-Texas—the latter now having changed its name to Texas International—had done everything possible to keep the people at Southwest from ever starting their jobs. They knew that Herb Kelleher had been working largely gratis to keep the dream alive.

  From the beginning Southwest had another competitor as well: the automobile. Texans thought nothing of jumping into their cars or pickups for the 250-mile drive from Houston to Dallas, say, or a drive of roughly the same distance from Dallas to San Antonio. Southwest promoted its new service as an alternative to driving, showing a weary businessman yawning behind the wheel while another enjoyed a quick and relaxing flight aboard Southwest.

  But therein resided another of Southwest’s many legal travails—the matter of which airport it should serve in its headquarters city. As the company was fighting for its life, the U.S. government was filling a cow pasture with the world’s largest expanse of concrete to create Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport—DFW, by its federal airport code. The nearly 18,000 acres of airport property was as big as the island of Manhattan—big enough, certainly, to provide a home for a new airline with just three jets. The problem for Southwest was that DFW, in the interest of perfect compromise, was under construction in the middle of nowhere, precisely equidistant from the far-flung metropolises of Dallas and Fort Worth. Southwest’s reason for being would evaporate at DFW; how could it ever coax people from their cars for a 45-minute flight when the trip to the airport took at least that long? No, thank you, Kelleher said. While all the other airlines moved to the gleaming new DFW, Southwest would remain at the broken-down Dallas Love Field, which, though obsolescent, was conveniently situated on the perimeter of downtown Dallas.

  Once again the incumbent airlines saw an opportunity to torpedo Southwest. The municipal bonds used to finance the construction of DFW, it turned out, contained some fine print requiring all airlines to abandon Love Field. The Dallas City Council, reminded of these provisions, announced that Southwest would be thrown out and Love Field put in mothballs. Southwest could serve Dallas from DFW or not at all. The decision was a death sentence.

  Kelleher stared at the fatal provision in the bond issue. Then it hit him: The language specified that all “certificated” airlines had to leave Love Field. The only meaningful certificates in the legal world of the airlines were those once handed out by the CAB, and Southwest had never gotten that piece of paper because it was never subject to CAB jurisdiction. Southwest was an airline—no point in fooling anyone there—but not a certificated airline. Kelleher went all the way through the court system again, and once again he won.

  Remaining at Dallas Love Field was vital in another respect. It enabled Southwest Airlines to establish its marketing identity on a double entendre, to position itself around the eminently marketable concept of “love” and everything that the word might imply to a good-old-boy Texas businessman in the early 1970s.

  In-flight almonds were called “love bites.” The company’s stock symbol was LUV. Eventually the automatic ticket dispenser was called a “quickie machine.” But most conspicuously, flight attendants were made to dress in orange hot pants, clinging tops, white belts, and vinyl knee-high boots. “Our love service means having things around to make you happy,” a Southwest flight attendant cheerfully promised in a television ad, “like me!”

  Southwest offered no apologies for making sex so vital to its public image. This was, after all, 1971. To recruit flight attendants it ran advertisements seeking “Raquel Welch look-alikes.” Another television commercial, shot from behind and below, showed flight attendants in hot pants climbing a set of boarding stairs. A third promoted Southwest’s frequent service with a leggy flight attendant seated in an overstuffed chair asking, “How do we love you? Let us count the ways: eight-thirty … eleven o’clock … one-thirty … four o’clock …” And as her voice and image began to fade, an airplane slowly moved across the screen, its fuselage suggestively pointed into her lap. The approach was crude, but the passengers fol
lowed.

  The Southwest flight attendants were part of a long tradition, for the first women ever to work in an aircraft cabin were hired as part of a marketing gimmick. In 1930, a time when the public was still largely terrified of flying, a nurse named Ellen Church was denied a job as a pilot at Boeing Air Transport (within a year of Boeing’s affiliating with United Air Lines). But a shrewd official of the airline saw in her the potential for something else. “It strikes me,” he wrote in a memo to his boss, “that there would be a great psychological punch to having young women stewardesses.… Imagine the national publicity we could get from it.” He recommended hiring nurses, because they were trained to attend to the frightened and infirm and would undoubtedly be sufficiently mature besides. “I am not suggesting at all the flapper type of girl, or one that would go haywire. You know nurses as well as I do, and you know that they are not given to flightiness.” Nurses, he pointed out, have seen enough of men “not to be inclined to chase them around the block at every opportunity.” His four-page guidebook for flight attendants urged them to be “good girls.” It would be one of the last times that anyone would worry about the flight attendants making passes at the passengers rather than the other way around.

  As the years progressed, the ostensible reasons for hiring only women as flight attendants ranged from their purported comforting properties to the belief that they simply had a greater toleration for abuse. A report compiled at American in the early 1960s asserted that flight attendants married so quickly because “they learn a great deal of patience and tact in handling people—assets that prove invaluable in the give-and-take of marriage.” The average stewardess kept her job only two years, perhaps a few months longer. The airlines could have reduced the turnover rate by employing married women, but they steadfastly maintained no-marriage rules into the 1960s and beyond. It was claimed that the rigors of family life presented too many restrictions on the go-anywhere, go-anytime career of the stewardess. But one of the real reasons for the no-marriage policy emerged in a class action suit against United that dragged on for decades. In a deposition a company executive admitted that the policy was partly intended to create the impression that in the abstract, at least, male passengers had a chance with any flight attendant.