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PURCHASE
A PSA COMMEMORATIVE POSTER FOR CHARITY
Catch Our Smile -The Photo Gallery-
PSA Historical/Financial Highlights Detailed By Year
Sign Or View The CATCH OUR SMILE Guestbook
I spent the days of my early to late twenties as a proud employee of PSA. If you flew on PSA, I may have issued your ticket at the ticket counter, or maybe checked your bag. Maybe I checked you in for your flight, assigned you your favorite seat, or assisted you with special service offered at pre-boarding. On another day I may have carefully loaded your baggage in the belly of a 727, or maybe supervised the servicing of the aircraft parked at your departure gate. For me, the memories of my days at PSA are some of the best of my life.
The idea for the creation of this website came during the summer of 1999. In my capacity as a Corporate Travel Counselor with World Travel Partners based at Dallas, Texas, I had the opportunity to return to Los Angeles International Airport to tour the new United Airlines Terminal 6 facilities at invitation from United Airlines.
I was very much excited at the opportunity of returning to my old PSA stomping grounds at Terminal 1 and visiting old friends. During my days at PSA, the airline was the dominant carrier at Terminal 1. PSA was proud and strong. PSA ruled the west. The airline had gates 2-14 (even numbered), which was more than half the available gates at Terminal 1.
With great anticipation I walked across the parking lot at LAX from Terminal 6 to Terminal 1. What I found at Terminal 1 was unexpected and much a disappointment. The USAir ticket counter was a ghost town. One agent working, no customers in sight. The only activity was from the America West ticket counter next door. Feeling a bit numb, from the ticket counter, I walk up the escalator, through security, to the gate area. What I find is the same, empty gates, no old friends to say hello to. The remaining three USAir gates are a ghost town. Gates which once proudly displayed the name of PSA are now branded with America West Airlines and Southwest Airlines. The next USAir flight was not for 6 hours. The old terminal is full of activity with Southwest Airlines passengers coming and going. The Southwest Airlines gates are filled to capacity with frequent flights up and down the west coast. Southwest Airlines took the routes USAir gave them and ran with them; the new dominant carrier at Terminal 1.
I could not get over the feeling of sadness I felt. PSA's routes had been dismantled by USAir, it's planes shipped east. While USAir would fight to the death with any competitor back east, the carrier backed down to any competitor in the west. PSA did not only not exist any longer in name, it no longer existed in substance.
I walked back to the United terminal with a feeling of emptiness I could not overcome. Moments later I am touring the United terminal, and I am struck by their hourly departures between Los Angeles and San Francisco. United Airlines took the routes USAir gave them and ran with them.
I came home to Dallas determined to do what I could to ensure that the memory of PSA would never be forgotten. Many a young travel agent today looks at me with a blank expression when I mention the name of Pacific Southwest Airlines. Well, let me tell you a story...
In 1949 Pacific Southwest Airlines, born and bred in San Diego, charged onto the California scene proclaiming that flying could be safe, punctual, friendly, and affordable.
What was it that set PSA apart from the pack, delivered it from obscurity and ensured its place in the annals of U.S. airline history? Ask hundreds of passengers, hundreds of PSA employees, even competitors, and one simple word comes up again and again: FUN. The airline was fun to fly on, fun to be associated with, fun to work for. "Catch Our Smile" became the airlines maxim.
At a time when the rest of America was button down serious, PSA capitalized on its notion that flying could be enjoyable. While other airlines cloaked their planes and crews in somber shades of blue and beige, PSA planes wore stripes of fuchsia, orange and red with a big, bold smile painted under the nose. And PSA flight attendants, those legendary California golden girls, stepped out in hot pants and miniskirts, raising the pulse rate of many a bleary eyed commuter.
Over the years, PSA, which began life as a commercial airline running north from San Diego to Burbank and Oakland, eventually expanded its service over most of the Western states, servicing nearly a million passengers a month. Along the way PSA redefined the airline industry's corporate culture: innovation was the order of the day. This new culture truly was a shared philosophy, instilled by the airline's founders, perpetuated by senior management, and implemented by its employees to the day it ceased to exist.
PSA came to represent the quintessential California mindset: bold, brash, sexy, sometimes off the wall, but always friendly, always fun.
And one more thing: PSA had heart. This website is dedicated to the men and women who called themselves with overflowing pride employees of Pacific Southwest Airlines.
Truman was president, the jitterbug was the rage, and Kenny Friedkin had a love of flying that wouldn't quit. In 1946, Friedkin, who had already run a flight school for the Women's Auxiliary Service Pilots during the war, got together with his buddy Joe Plosser, and bought a war surplus Fairchild PT19 to do instrument training. The duo opened the Plosser-Friedkin school at San Diego's Lindbergh Field with a staff of three: instructor Joe Plosser Jr, ground school instructor Betty Lambert, and Eleanor "Fergie" Fulmer, instructor on the Link trainer-the forerunner of the flight simulator.
World War II had ended and business was good as veterans, who had discovered the exhilaration of flying during their military stints, used the G.I. bill to get their commercial pilot's ratings. Before long, additional hangar space was rented and more flight instructors were hired. J. Floyd "Andy" Andrews, Leo Leonard, Gordon Tinker, and Hugh Wood,all of who were to play major roles in the development of PSA.
The school quickly earned a national reputation, with more than two hundred students enrolled in courses at a time. Then, in 1947, Friedkin persuaded Victor Lundy, a San Diego mortgage broker, to buy out Plosser's share, before renaming the school Friedkin School of Aeronautics.
By the following year, the rush of G.I. bill applicants had slowed to a trickle and Friedkin brainstormed with this flight instructors to find a way to continue flying. The group's goal was simple, as Andrews, who was to become PSA's first operations manager, recalls: "We loved flying and we wanted to stay together." They decided to diversify into other aviation activities, and they began an aerial-banner-towing advertising service.
They also went into the cargo business, flying live mudsuckers from Mexico to the Colorado River. Now, a mudsucker is a small critter similar to a minnow and is considered the live bait of choice for the fishing camps along the river. It is difficult to imagine great fortunes being built on its piscine appeal, however. Nevertheless, Friedkin arranged to buy the bait in Mexico for $30 per 1,000 and sell them in Colorado for twice that amount, figuring he could make a tidy sum carrying 10,000 per flight. Leonard, who was to become PSA's first chief pilot, was pilot for this operation, and had to splash salt water on the fish midflight to keep them alive. Fortunately for the later PSA faithful, the mudsucker business flopped after just a few runs.
Not willing to accept defeat, Friedkin next launched an air charter service, Friedkin Airlines Charter Service. The fleet consisted of an old, war weary, twin engine Cessna and two light four seater aircraft.
Andrews recalls their first charter customer, a man who wanted to fly from El Centro to San Diego. "The fellow tried to pay the $20 fare with a $100 bill, but because I couldn't make change, I told him to pay on the return trip." It started raining during the day, and the customer, nervous about flying, decided to drive back to El Centro and send a check for the $20. Unfortunately, the man was killed in a car accident on the way home, and the first charter expedition for Friedkin Airlines was a non revenue one.
But there was at least one other charter customer, Andrews remembers. "A lady wanted to be taken from San Diego to Burbank. Only this lady was very pregnant. We didn't want to take her, but she told us she already had five children and she knew exactly when she was going to have this one."
"We put her on the airplane and didn't tell the pilot, because we were afraid he'd refuse to fly her. By the time they arrive in Burbank, the pilot has discovered her condition and is panicked. He calls for an ambulance to meet the plane at the runway. They land, the ambulance people rush up to her, and she says 'Just a minute, I know exactly when I'm going to have this baby, and I want a hamburger first.' So she goes into the little restaurant at Burbank airport, has a hamburger, hets into the ambulance, goes to the hospital and delivers her baby ten minutes later."
While these ventures make colorful reading, they all failed to provide much of a livelihood, so, as Andrews tellsit, "We were a little downcast and began kicking around what to do. I think it was Kenny who suggested starting an airline." That idea, he recalls, "scared everybody to death. A DC-3 is a big airplane and we'd all been flying these little airplanes. We had no idea how much it would cost or anything."
Undeterred, the group subscribed to the "think big" school of entrepreneurship. The next question confronting this early management strategy session was to decide where to fly to. "Somebody suggested San Francisco, and we thought that was a nice town, but we didn't know anything about it," says Andrews.
Friedkin and Andrews decided to take their hunch to the city by the Golden Gate for a little market study. they loaded their wives into one of their airplanes, and the foursome flew to San Francisco for what Andrews recalls was an "uproarious time" visiting nightclubs. Having talked seriously to one travel agent about their idea, the duo deemed their market study a success and flew home to San Diego. "We figured people just had to go to San Francisco to have a good time."
Could life have been so simple? "Yep, that was it," says Andrews. "We've said many times that if we'd known anything about the airline business, we'd have never succeeded and probably never got into it. But flying was something we knew and we wanted to give people a good service. We weren't out to make a million dollars apiece, we just wanted to all stay together and continue flying."
Thus was born Pacific Southwest Airlines, a scheduled airline, with a fleet of one: a DC-3 leased for $2,000 a month.
The first PSA flight, on May 6, 1949, which left San Diego's Lindbergh Field bound for Oakland via Burbank, carried almost a full load: twenty seven passengers who had each paid $15.60 for the privilege. Bud Plosser, from the flight school, piloted that inaugural expedition, with Andrews as copilot. Another flight school instructor, Gordon Tinker, soon became the first captain fully assigned to the airline.
Flying only on weekends and at low fare, PSA initially attracted such a large percentage of military personnel that its initials were said to stand for "Poor Sailors' Airline." Fergie Fulmer, the former flight school instructor, who was by now the new airline's office manager and treasurer, sums up Friedkin's intent: "Kenny felt that airline passengers could be diverted from buses and trains if the fares were kept at a competitive level." To accomplish this goal, Friedkin intended to run a plane out of Oakland (and eventually San Francisco) every thirty minutes, enabling commuters to catch a plane the way they grabbed a bus or train.
Early operations were basic. While most entrepreneurial startups these days seem to be launched from a garage, a la Steven Jobs and his Apple Computer corporation, PSA got its start in a military outhouse. Head of maintenance Doug Kelly had scrounged up an old marine corps latrine and set it adjacent to the terminal with a new paint job. Cost of the airlines first corporate headquarters: $3.80 for tow hours labor.
The rehabilitated latrine housed a set of bathroom scales for weighing passenger baggage, and was the site of the airline's first ticket counter, dispatch, flight control and reservations center. Everything but the cash, which went over to the flight school office.
Fulmer, from her office upstairs at the flight school, recalls watching Andrew's style with the cash. As treasurer, she had a special interest in the fledgling airline's finances. "He used to just sweep all the bills into a drawer; he didn't separate them by denominations into piles. It was kind of a mess."
But Andrews declares, with a twinkle in his eye, that this was for good effect. "Kenny, who was still running the flight school, was a little nervous about the airline business. He'd usually come into the office about four o'clock and ask how everything was going. So I'd whip open the cash drawer and all the bills I'd crammed in there all day would just pop out and fly all over the office. It looked impressive."
The camaraderie in those early days set the tone for PSA's corporate culture. Nobody said, "It's not my job." Flight attendants cleaned the aircraft after a flight. Pilots loaded baggage. And, yes, according to the old timers, everybody drew bathroom duty at least once.
Mike Bogle, who became chief pilot in 1967, remembers everyone's willingness to do the necessary. "When winter weather would hit all of a sudden and airplanes had to have their deicing boots put on the wings, it was a massive, all night job. Pilots, mechanics, baggage handlers-everybody would help put them on. There wasn't any extra pay involved." But the facts of life were basic then, he says; without the boots, the airplanes couldn't fly the next day.
PSA did not enjoy unchallenged preeminence on the California corridor run. The "non skeds", airlines that didn't fly until the plane filled to capacity, offered bargain basement fares along the same routes PSA was trying to serve. There were also the big boys who considered California their turf. United and Western Airlines, already well established with the Civil Aeronautics Board credentials.
And they were prepared to play hardball with PSA applied for permission from its regulatory body, the California Public Utilities Commission (in charge of all intrastate carriers), to fly into San Francisco. It could hardly be described as the friendly skies then, Andrews says, as United and Western successfully blocked PSA's first request.
"They utterly disregarded us for a long time because we were only flying a couple of airplanes," he says. "They were charging $33 to fly between Los Angeles and San Francisco, compared to our fare of $9.95, Burbank to Oakland." But when the big certified airlines decided to challenge upstart PSA by matching its bargain basement fares, they inadvertently solved one of its major handicaps. "People doubted we could do adequate maintenance if we were charging such low fares. They feared we weren't safe. Our biggest problem was establishing PSA as a legitimate safe airline. When United and Western came down to our fares, that did it. People recognized that we could fly with the same degree of safety."
Despite a year end profit of $11,984 in 1949, the airline's early days were decidedly lean ones. Bogle says there were days when the crew outnumbered the passengers. But even on a flight with one or two passengers, they were required to fly because PSA had only one airplane. "If we were in Oakland and only had three passengers, but had a good load leaving San Diego, we had no choice. It was was a real hand by your fingernails operation.