A little airline History: How did it start?

This discussion is about the early airlines and how if left unmolested they may have done far better or worse than they did.  When Tony Jannus ran the first airline in history, the St. Petersburg-Tampa airboat line, he did it on what was essentially a charter by the local city fathers.  It was $5 one way across Tampa bay (a princely sum in 1914).  With one passenger and one pilot in a Benoist flying boat they could skim across the bay (often no higher than 5 feet) in 23 minutes as opposed to hours by train, boat or car.  The service was so popular that it continued on for over a month after the original contract had expired.  To this day we still have the Jannus award for contributions to the airline industry (my employer, JetBlue has won it twice).  But historical accolades aside for being first, the operation was essentially a promotion that was underwritten by the city.  The fact is that a real airline as we thinks of one today would need better routes, equipment, infrastructure and perhaps most of all vision.

The early crossing of the Atlantic by the US Navy NC-4s and the later circumnavigation of the globe by the army's Douglas World Cruisers showed vision but they were simply not practical routine endeavors.  In fact, they showed just how impractical they idea was given the current state of the art.  They did however serve to show what kind of infrastructure and support future airlines would need (prepositioned assets, maintenance facilities etc).  Alcock and Brown had shown that the crossing could be made in a more potentially profitable manner but even their flight was fraught with potential disaster as were airship services.  Airships had the range and payload abilities but the flammable hydrogen was always ready to burn if it ever met an ignition source.  In addition to this there were various and sundry efforts by local operators but these were mostly short range affairs doing charters in small biplanes.

In France however, industrialist Pierre-Georges Latécoère began building a true airmail Société des lignes Latécoère, an operation that, in the hands of a later owner, would eventually reach across the south Atlantic.  Latécoère had the support of the French government which would later prove a double edged sword.  He dealt with the international issues of crossing over and landing in foreign countries to serve France's far flung colonies.  He had to arrange for the logistics, airfields, maintenance, pilot hiring and navigation.  By the end of 1918, only months after the end of WW1, he had service from France to Spain underway (Toulouse-Barcelona).  By 1925 the airline had reached as far as Dakar, Senegal, a distance of 1,600 miles.

Latécoère used mostly surplus Breguet 14 biplanes.  There were old but rugged and simple to maintain.  But the hard work on old and primitive airplanes created many problems which resulted in numerous aircraft losses and a high rotation of pilots.  Latécoère decided to design and build his own mail plane, the Late 17.  The Late 17 could even carry a passenger, a logical next step.  Latécoère had built a working airline which and was even designing new planes when the operation was bought by a Frenchman in Brazil named Marcel Bouilloux-Lafont who renamed it Aeropostale.  Aeropostale began operating across the Atlantic and expanded across south America.  It was the largest French airline by the late 1920s.

 

Late' 17

By 1930 the wheels had come off of the wagon for Aeropostale.  A combination of the depression, bank failures, revolts in Brazil, an air mail scandal and jealousy of other French airlines with political connections, the airline was taken over by the French government and melded into what would become Air France.

Once the Treaty of Versailles restrictions had expired, the Germans began Deutsche Luft Hansa (D.H.L.) but their routes were determined by bilateral agreements with individual countries as opposed to the open ended multilateral agreements.  They also had airship service via DELAG which felt that airships were the way to go which is not surprising given that Germany made the best airships in the world.  German aircraft makers had turned to making metal airplanes which were very popular with airlines across the globe.

The British proceeded with extreme caution in airline building and virtually neglected their domestic markets in lieu of reaching out across the empire.  Imperial airways catered to upscale clients traveling internationally.  Their aircraft were older, more conservative British designs such as the Argosy tri-motor biplane and later the impressive if not slow H.P. 42/H.P. 45 four engine biplanes.
The United State focused mainly on air mail.  Whereas many pilots were barnstorming the countryside in surplus Jennys and Standards, the army had made the maiden airmail flights in similar machine but the post office was in charge.  The post office started using their own planes and pilots and helped to build up the airways by investing airway beacons and instrument rated planes and pilots.  in 1925 the post office began contracting out flying because to private airlines because of the Air Mail act of 1925.  This required the post office to contract out the air mail to the airlines instead of conducting their own flight operations.  The air Commerce act of 1926 put those airlines under the regulation of the Department of Commerce.  This would eventually lead to the development of the Civil Aeronautics Administration  or CAA (which in 1958 would  become the FAA of today).

All was well until the air mail scandal 1934.  A particularly despicable chapter in aviation history, the scandal would cost the lives of 12 army pilots and result in 66 crashes. The air act commerce had resulted in lucrative air mail contracts going to selected air carriers at fixed prices.  many operators were not allowed to bid or their bids were ignored.  The idea of the commerce department had been to help America to develop fewer but stronger airlines.  In what became known as the Spoils Conference, the DoC did just that.  In 1930 the postmaster and the airlines mapped out a plan to determine who got what.  When FDR was elected, he assigned a new Postmaster General who saw this as collusion and had president Roosevelt strip all airlines of their contracts.

To keep the mail flying, the US Army was ordered to carry the mail (a job for which they had neither the training nor the equipment).  The result was a disaster that exposed the poor state of military preparedness due in no small part to congressional parsimony.

Eventually the airlines were able to recover the contracts at somewhat lower rates if they divested themselves of other aviation businesses (many airlines owned airplane, radio and engine making operations).  The entire thing was a largely partisan political creation but it did have some positive outcomes.  The separation of industries from the airlines made their equipment available to all operators and manufacturers and the airlines focused on flying.  This bought down product cost through economy of scale and allowed best practices to flourish unencumbered by the competing interest of a parent company.