INTRODUCTION
The Historical
Development of Delta
Air Lines
Malcolm Fairweather
Department of Geography
State University of New York
Plattsburgh, New York 12901
22
In 1979, the last year for which
complete statistics are available, the
airlines of the United States carried
a record 317 million passengers over
262 billion passenger miles . Although gross revenues increased to
$27 billions that year, net earnings
plummeted from $1,197 millions in
1978 to $409 millions in 1979. Soaring fuel costs were the main culprit
for the earnings reduction. These increased by 89 percent in a single
year and accounted for $2.3 billions
in increased expenditures.' In spite
of a poor financial year, U.S. scheduled air carriers did provide 84.6
percent of intercity public passenger
miles generated in the nation. This
was up from 83.8 percent in 1978
and 76.0 percent in 1969. 2 Thus, the
airlines have become an increasingly important medium of public
transportation.
During the same year, 1979, Delta
Airlines recorded over 40 million enplanements and generated some 26.1
million revenue passenger miles .
These figures represented an annual
traffic increase of about 9 percent,
which was slightly higher than the
average for the domestic trunk airlines as a whole. 3 Such volumes of
traffic have made Delta the nation's
number two carrier in enplanements
and ranked it sixth in terms of the
revenue passenger miles generated.
It is widely considered to be one of
the best managed air carriers in the
country and its expansive vitality is
witnessed by the record-setting order it placed with the Boeing Air
Corporation in November 1980 for
60 B-757's, at a cost of $1.6 billion.4
The aim of this paper is to trace the
spatial development of Delta Airlines from a tiny crop dusting service in Louisiana to one of the
world's largest airline companies.
THE 1920's AND 1930's
The origins of Delta Airlines are
to be found in the mid-1920's
through the blending of two dissimilar activities-boll weevil eradication and military aircraft design. Fifty
years ago, Collett W. Woolman, a
Louisiana entrepreneur, was involved in research to develop an insecticide to stop the crop destruction caused by the boll weevil. He
determined that the use of calcium
arsenate could be an extremely effective controlling agent, especially
if an extensive crop dusting method
could be developed. Concurrently in
Ogdensburg, New York, the military
aircraft manufacturing company of
Huff Daland was attempting to
broaden its markets by developing
commercial models of its aircraft.
After a meeting with Woolman in
1923, Huff Daland saw the profit potential in the crop dusting business
and established the first such service in 1924. Woolman became the
Vice-President in charge of Huff Daland Dusters, Inc. a year later. In
1928, Woolman and a group of Louisiana businessmen purchased the
crop dusting operation from its parent organization and renamed it Delta
Air Service, Inc. Within a year Woolman added passenger service to the
crop dusting operations after purchasing the assets of the Flying Fox
Service, a small local passenger air
carrier. This transaction was a major
step forward for Delta at a time when
the air passenger industry was still
in its infancy. Furthermore, what
made Delta's service so unusual was
the fact that the company did not
have any government airmail contracts which were the financial backbone of most of the early airlines.
In June, 1929, Delta Air Service
initiated passenger transportation
with a flight from Dallas, Texas, to
Shreveport and Monroe, Louisiana,
terminating in Jackson, Mississippi.
By September, Birmingham, Alabama had been added to this route
(Figure 1), and in the following year
a link to Atlanta was added. These
early passenger routes lost money,
however, and had to be supported
by the crop dusting operations of
the company. To help the cash flow
problem, Woolman decided to submit a bid on one of the new airmail
contracts that was being let under
the McNary-Waters Act of 1930. Unfortunately Delta lost the bid to the
larger and more experienced American Aviation Corporation (AVCO),
the holding company that later became American Airlines. In October,
1930, Delta Air Service sold its passenger equipment and service to
AVCO. It reorganized later in the
year and was rechartered by the
state of Louisiana as Delta Air Corporation. Once more the company
concentrated its flying operations on
crop dusting.
At the national level problems
were emerging with the airmail delivery system. In 1933 Postmaster
Brown was charged with unfair
practices in awarding the 1930 airmail contracts. As a result of the
scandal, President Roosevelt cancelled all government airmail con23
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tracts, and after a brief but tragically
unsuccessful period with the Army
del ivering airmail , new contracts
were announced for bidding under
the Air Mail Act of 1934. This time,
Delta Air Corporation was the low
bidder for Airmail Route 24, a route
that offered deliveries to some of
the same cities that Delta had serviced in 1929. The new route ran
from Fort Worth to Dallas and on to
Shreveport, then Monroe, Jackson,
Meridian, Birmingham, Atlanta, Columbia and terminated in Charleston, South Carolina. On the more
extensive newer route, Delta proved
to be forward looking and within
two months had initiated a passenger service which carried some
1,464 people by the end of the year.6
For the remainder of the decade the
route system did not change (Figure
2). The airline did grow, however,
since it increased the number of
passengers that it conveyed, and as
early as 1935 added the 10 passenger Lockheed Electra to its fleet to
accommodate this increased demand for passenger travel.
During the 1930's, the airline industry began to realize that its future lay in passenger transportation
and not solely in the movement of
mail. In add ition , the airlines were
experiencing a period of sustained
growth and were becoming an accepted part of the life of the nation.
As a result, the federal government
felt that " it must have regulatory
power over the airline industry and
that it must regulate air commerce
in the same way that it regulated interstate and foreign commerce.,, 7 To
accomplish these goals, the Civil
Aeronautics Act was passed in 1938
and under this authority 16 major
domestic airlines received permanent "Certificates of Conveniences
and Necessity" for the routes they
operated . Under this so-called
" Grandfather Clause," Delta Air Corporation was the first airline to receive permanent certification in the
nation.
THE 1940's AND 1950's
The first real expansion of the
Delta route system came in 1941
with the acquisition of routes from
Atlanta to Savannah via Macon, and
from Atlanta to Cincinnati via Knoxville. In addition to the route expansion, Delta purchased the 21 seater
Douglas DC-3, the workhorse of the
pre-jet era . With Atlanta at the hub
of an enlarged route system Delta
moved its corporate headquarters
there from Macon, Georgia in 1941.
Throughout the 1940's Delta increased the number of passengers
on its flights and the company's assets grew correspondingly. Moreover, the company's route network
expanded, first with the award of
the Shreveport to New Orleans route
in 1943, and soon after with the
1,028 mile link from Chicago to
Miami, Florida, the longest single
route awarded by the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) to that time (Figure
3). In order to accommodate the
longer hauls and increased enplanements, Delta purchased several larger
aircraft; namely the DC-4 and the
DC-6 with carrying capacities of 48
and 67 passengers respectively.
By the end of the 1940's Delta Air
Lines, as the company was now
called, had little further successes
expanding its own route system into
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the urban markets of the North, although some growth did occur in
the southeastern region. In 1948 innovative agreements with Trans
World Airways and American Air
Lines did enable Delta to accomplish some unusual forms of route
expansion. Aircraft compatibility,
notably the use of DC-4's and DC6's, permitted Delta to initiate interchange agreements whereby TWA
personnel took over Delta planes in
Cincinnati for flights to Columbus,
Dayton, Toledo and Detroit, while
Delta crews flew TWA planes south
from Cincinnati to Dallas, Atlanta
and Miami. Under similar agreements with American Airlines, service between Fort Worth and the
west coast cities of San Francisco
and Los Angeles was introduced. s
Thus Delta was able to offer expanded service without having to
seek new route approvals from the
CAB.
The early 1950's was a period of
great route expansion for Delta and
it set the stage for the airline's move
into the jet era a few years later. As
mentioned earlier, the company attempted unsuccessfully to expand
its own route network into the industrial areas of the North to tap the
dense, large and affluent markets
there. Consequently, Delta undertook merger discussions with the
Chicago and Southern Airlines. The
heads of the two companies knew
each other well, had similar business philosophies and both recognized the advantages of expansion
through company mergers. Furthermore, the route networks of the two
airlines were compatible, being linked
at Chicago, Muncie, Shreveport,
Jackson and New Orleans. On May
1, 1953, the CAB approved the
merger, thus creating the fifth largest airline in the U.S.A. and adding
over 5,000 miles of new routes to
Delta's system, including service to
the Caribbean and Latin America. 9
Two years later an additional 1,000
miles of routes were added to the
Delta system when the CAB awarded
it the Atlantic-Charlotte-WashingtonBaltimore-Philadelphia-New York City
route. The latter award created a
10,500 mile route network that linked
the South, Midwest and Mid-Atlantic regions.'o The company now
turned its attention to acquiring the
newly developed jet aircraft as a
means of efficiently servicing its
longer haul routes between the larger
hubs in its greatly expanded route
system .
During the mid-1950's many of
the trunk airlines introduced turboprop aircraft to their fleets. Delta,
however, elected not to go through
this intermediate technological stage
but waited for the pure jets to arrive. This decision of Woolman's was
to work to the company's advantage, especially in competition with
its major rival, Eastern Airlines.
Eastern invested heavi Iy in tu rboprop Lockheed Electras that unfortunately developed structural weaknesses and were grounded for a
time or were permitted only to fly
at reduced speeds. These events allowed Delta to compete effectively
with its rival, while waiting for early
delivery of the DC-8's (September
1959) after which the airline was
able to capture a sizeable proportion
of the market on the medium-long
haul routes from Eastern." These
27
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gains over Eastern Airlines were important to Delta for they came at a
time when expenditures for the new
jets were great and there was a need
to generate as much revenue as
possible. "With its new routes to the
North and a new jet fleet, Delta by
the end of the fifties could no longer
be called a southern regional airline." 12
THE JET ERA
The acquisition of the jet engined
aircraft gave Delta the opportunity
to increase the speed and efficiency
of its operations over long haul
routes. Furthermore, the jets hastened the realization of Woolman's
goal of creating a transcontinental
airline, when in 1961 Delta was
awarded the Southern Transcontinental route with service to Las Vegas, San Francisco, Los Angeles and
San Diego.
By 1961 Delta's route network had
been extended to over 14,000 miles
(Figure 4) . Now the airline offered
service throughout much of the
southern U.S.A. and linked this region with the Midwest and the
Northeast. In addition, the route network offered passengers short hauls
from small and medium sized communities to the major air hubs out
of which the long distance trips were
generated. The strategy permitted
Delta to offset the higher per mile
cost of short hauls with the much
more profitable longer hauls. This
new concept in air passenger service, the feeder-hub system, was to
be a major route development strategy in the coming decades.
Throughout the 1960's the number of longer hauls continued to in-
crease, and in 1964, with an interchange agreement with Pan
American Airways, service from Atlanta to London, England was initiated. In the space of half a decade
Delta had emerged from being a regional trunk carrier to one with
transcontinental and transatlantic
links (Figure 5).
While Delta prospered during the
1960's another airline that was destined to play a role in its modern
day route system was having severe
fiscal problems. During the period
1961-1971 Northeast Airlines had
posted only one profitable year, 1966,
and executives of the airline feared
bankruptcy. Although described as
"a chronic money loser,,,13 Northeast did have the long distance air
routes between the northeastern
U.S.A. and Florida that Delta had
heretofore been unable to secure.
Thus, one of the top money makers
in the airline industry merged with
a money loser in August, 1972, adding some 10,000 miles of new routes
to Delta's system.
Soon after the merger with
Northeast Airlines, Delta changed its
route service policy. Since 1934, the
company had dropped very few
centers from its route network,14 but
in 1973, Delta petitioned the CAB for
permission to withdraw service from
18 New England cities. Stated as the
principal reason for the request were
losses averaging $112 per passenger carried on the routes serving
these communities. 15 Delta, however, had no plans to leave the region completely. Thus in a detailed
ruling, the CAB certified a new regional carrier, Air New England, to
take over air service to these smaller
29
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New England centers. Delta, therefore, was able to expand its operations into the New England region,
eliminate the less profitable routes
that had been flown by Northeast
Airlines and maintain service on the
most compatible ones for its jet
fleet-the longer haul, larger city
linkages.
While New England was being
added to the Delta route system, expansion was underway in the
Southwest with service being introduced to Tulsa, Reno, Denver, San
Antonio and Austin. Also, Delta was
planning its own links abroad, and
in 1978, service was initiated to London, England from Atlanta, with
flights to Frankfurt, West Germany
coming a year later. Delta was now
a truly transatlantic airline. The
mergers and new routes obtained
from the CAB, however, made it
necessary for Delta to streamline its
inventory of aircraft types, especially as the industry was going
through a period of reduced profitability. To improve its efficiency Delta
began to concentrate its equipment
inventories on DC-9-32's for small
markets and short hauls, Boeing 727200's for medium sized cities and
moderate length hauls, and Lockheed L-1 011's for linking the major
hubs over the longer hauls. 16
In 1978, the Airline Deregulation
Act was passed by Congress and
while many carriers rushed to establish a foothold on new routes, Delta's
approach was more guarded. The
airline has been "cautiously opposed" to the concept of deregulation, believing that the trunk and regional carrie"rs would terminate
service to smaller communities and
32
thus reduce the profitability of the
hub system concept that Delta had
developed. 17
It is difficult to examine thoroughly the impact of deregulation
upon Delta's route system . The early
part of 1979 saw the airline industry
faced with a critical fuel shortage
that caused air travel cancellations
and led Delta's Vice-President for
Finance to state in March 1979 that
"Right now we could not expand
our operations if we wanted to.,,18
As a result, they cut-back 18 flights
a day and had a first quarter earnings balance that was 61 percent
lower than for the same period of
1978.19
As critical fuel shortages diminished, Delta cautiously began to expand its route system again with relatively longer hauls (Figure 6). In
addition, Delta used provisions of
the Deregulation Act to discontinue
service to some 13 centers including
Caracas and Maracaibo in Venezuela, the Bahamas, Presque Isle,
Maine and Meridian, Mississippi.
Furthermore, Delta pushed forward
with its Atlanta-type air hub concept
by expanding its terminal facilities
in, and connections to, the Dallas/
Fort Worth airport. By establishing
long hauls to large urban centers
such as Chicago, Miami and Boston,
Delta now plans to increase the flow
of passengers through the Dallas/
Fort Worth hub to about 500,000
people a month, half the number
that presently pass through Atlanta.
CONCLUSION
Today, Delta operates an air carrier network linking some 86 cities
with over 50,000 miles of routes and
DELTA
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extending beyond the U.S.A. into
Canada, the Caribbean, Bermuda,
England and West Germany. Thus
the company that began life as a
crop dusting operation is ranked now
as one of the world's major airlines.
These developments have been accomplished by Delta's cautious approach to growth, exemplified most
recently by the determination not to
rush route expansion immediately
following the Deregulation Act of
1978. To prosper, however, the airline has had to be innovative and
introduction of the feeder-hub concept in the late 1960's illustrates well
the ability of the company to develop successfully new route strategies. Furthermore, among the Wall
Street financial community, Delta
enjoys the reputation of being the
best managed airline in the nation.
Although the fiscal and managerial
aspects of the company are beyond
the scope of this study, these phenomena have produced an airline
with an excellent profit record that
has facilitated the early introduction
of newer, faster and more efficient
aircraft in recent years. Thus with
$1.6 billion worth of orders placed
for Boeing 767's in 1980 alone, Delta
is planning for continued growth and
aims to be the nation's premier domestic air passenger carrier before
the end of the 1980'S.20
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The author wishes to express his
gratitude to Catherine M. Allen who
34
drafted the final copy of the maps
in this study. Cathy is a Geography
major and secretary of the Epsilon
Omega Chapter of G.T.U. at the State
University of New York-Plattsburgh.
FOOTNOTES
1. Air Transport Association. Air Transport 1980: Annual
Report of the U.S. Scheduled Airline Industry. Washington. D.C.• 1980. p. 1.
2. Ibid.• p. 5
3. Ibid.• pp. 14 and 15.
4. New York Times. November 12. 1980. pp. D 10 and 11 .
5. W. David Lewis and W. Phili p Newton. Delta : The History of an Airline. {Athens. Georg ia: University of Georgia Press. 19791. p. 30.
6. Ibid.. p. 5Q.
7. R. M. Kane and A. D. Vose. Air Transportation {Dubuque.
Iowa: Kendall Hunt Publishing Co .• 19751. p. 34.
8. Ibid.• pp. 128-9.
9. K. M. Field. ed .• From Travel Air to Tristar {M iami. Florida : Halsey Publish ing Co .• 19791. p. 12.
10. L. Sherman. ed .• Delta Airlines 50th Anniversary {Atlanta. Georg ia: Delta Air Lines. 19791. p. 23.
11 . Lewis and Newton. p. 271 .
12. Field. p. 12.
13. New York Times. October 27. 1971. p. 65.
14. Harold M. Elion. " A Historical Atlas of the Domestic
Trunk Airli nes of the United States : {unpublished M.A.
thesis. San Francisco State College. 19701. p. 95.
15. New York Times. November 12. 1980. p. D 10 and 11.
16. New York Times. November 12. 1980. p. D 11 .
17. Wall Street Journal. September 8. 1980. p. 17.
18. Wall Street Journal. March 6. 1979. p. 20.
19. Wall Street Journal. October 28. 1979. p. 28.
20. Wall Street Journal. September 8. 1980. p. 17.