Pacific Air Lines was a regional airline (known at the time as a "local service" air carrier) serving the West Coast of the United States which began operations during 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. 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 which subsequently became Hughes Airwest.
Read more about Pacific Air Lines: Pacific Air Lines Era (1958–1968), Merger, Destinations, Fleet, Notes and References
Famous quotes containing the words pacific, air and/or lines:
“I need not tell you of the inadequacy of the American shipping marine on the Pacific Coast.... For this reason it seems to me that there is no subject to which Congress can better devote its attention in the coming session than the passage of a bill which shall encourage our merchant marine in such a way as to establish American lines directly between New York and the eastern ports and South American ports, and both our Pacific Coast ports and the Orient and the Philippines.”
—William Howard Taft (18571930)
“Nor sequent centuries could hit
Orbit and sum of SHAKSPEAREs wit.
The men who lived with him became
Poets, for the air was fame.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)
“It is the Late city that first defies the land, contradicts Nature in the lines of its silhouette, denies all Nature. It wants to be something different from and higher than Nature. These high-pitched gables, these Baroque cupolas, spires, and pinnacles, neither are, nor desire to be, related with anything in Nature. And then begins the gigantic megalopolis, the city-as-world, which suffers nothing beside itself and sets about annihilating the country picture.”
—Oswald Spengler (18801936)