PSA made its 1949 mark with its low fares and efficient service, but there was a more dubious, if hilarious, distinction on the pages of that year: PSA became the first airline in history to be hijacked. Unlike subsequent hijackings, this one had comedic overtones from the outset. It all centered on the rental deal for the airline's first DC-3. As Andrews tells it, the planes owner believed it would be flying about 12 hours a month, and figured he had a good deal at $2,000 monthly. But in fact the airplane was being flown more like 150 hours a month. "After several months of this," says Andrews, who clearly relishes a good story, "the owner could stand it no longer. So we pull into Burbank one day with a load of passengers and I get a phone call from the captain: 'Somebody just came in and took our airplane and all of the passengers away.' Apparently a 250 pound maintenance guy, on behalf of the owner, had marched up to the cockpit, got in and said he was taking the airplane back."
PSA's attorney advised the captain to hit the guy in the nose, and then call in the police. But since our hero was five-foot-nine, 140 pounds and likely to injure himself with such fisticuffs, the plane was confiscated, and returned the next day after a renegotiation of the lease terms. Displaying the aplomb that saw him through many such scrapes, Andrews sums up the situation nicely, "a lot of funny things went on in 1949 with airlines."
By July 1951, PSA added a fourth destination with the initiation of service to San Francisco from San Diego and Burbank at fares of $17.25 and $11.70, respectively. But the airline wasn't just beefing up its routes; it began to actively cultivate an image of fun, innovation and personality.
Scott Newhall, formerly editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and an early PSA frequent flyer, pinpoints one word to describe PSA in its very earliest days: FRIENDLY. "Their business was to get you there feeling pretty good. Sometimes it was like a party, with a little band or guitar player. And they were on time and had good-looking girls."
PSA management actively encouraged crew-passenger interaction. By the sixties, flight attendants were collecting passenger tickets on the planes, in order to facilitate more contact. Carol Austin, a twenty-three year veteran, recalls those days, "We treated customers as if they were guests in our homes. We were never allowed to go into our work area and hide out, talking among ourselves." Flight crews were even given opening gambits to initiate conversation with passengers. And until the FAA ordered cockpit doors closed in 1972, PSA had a perpetual open-door policy.
So PSA could by now be dubbed "Personality Sells Airlines." But how does a faceless corporation, whose work centers on inanimate machinery, evolve a personality?
Len Gross, principal of Gross, Pera, and Rockey, the firm that became PSA's first ad agency, credits a management team that was relaxed and supportive.
"They were a young, growing airline and they had a lot of fun. Their competitors were big guys who were very stuffy, formal, terribly dignified. PSA was a bunch of gung-ho kids who wanted to build something."
It helped that the operation was small: 50 employees in 1949, doubled to 119 by 1951, and still only 1,899 in 1968. Former chief pilot Bogle says he knew the home telephone number of each and every crew member and often talked to each of his pilots nightly. "We thought we were big, but until 1968 we weren't really," he says now. "We were big in heart, though."
All agree that one of Kenny Friedkin's greatest legacies was his belief that flying should be fun. Andrews, who carried on as president after Friedkin's death in 1962, articulates that philosophy, "Life is tough enough. If we're not having fun, let's go do something else."
Longtime flight attendant Austin echoes this sentiment: "Our duty days were twelve hours and thirty minutes. That's six hundred hellos and goodbyes. We sought to make almost a sporting event of it by involving the passengers as well as crew members in the fun. The uniqueness of this airline? We got people to loosen up."
Added to this was Friedkin's regard for his employees-his extended family. Everyone, from clerks to senior managers, were on a first-name, sometimes even nickname basis. Bonnie Johnson, who joined the airline's accounting department right out of high school in 1960, recalls that the big boss never even wore a suit. "Kenny was one of us, and we were all working toward the success of PSA."
During the early fifties, Friedkin also began developing a certain PSA style, which impressed newspaperman Newhall. "In the back of the Electras," he explains, "there were these very nice Chinese panels. Decorated with mother-of-pearl or something. At the head of the passenger section there were these brass or bronze Chinese characters, about eight inches high; I guess they said 'good luck' or 'Fasten your seat belt.' I thought that showed a lot of style, for no reason at all. It was nonsensical for a commuter plane flying up and down to L.A. to have these beautiful Chinese panels."
In keeping with this sense of style, the airline also hosted an "alternative" wedding in 1951, long before sweet young things were getting married barefoot on the beach, when dispatcher Gary Golliber claimed stewardess Beverly Ann Knowles as his bride five thousand feet above San Diego. Mike Bogle, who commands an operatic voice to go with his leading-man good looks, flew the plane as well as serenading the happy couple, while Doug Kelly, chief of maintenance, played the organ.
That surfeit of style needed a more tangible expression. And expression it got. One day, ad man Gross was boarding a PSA airplane, and happened to glance up at the black radar dome on the front of the aircraft. "Gee, that looks like a nose," he thought. Then he remembers thinking that if the Flying Tiger outfit of World War II could paint sharks' teeth on their airplanes to stress their ferocity, why shouldn't PSA paint a smile on its aircraft to underscore its fun, friendly persona?
Thus, a smile was born.
But when Gross suggested the smile idea to Andrews, by now CEO, he hated it. Imagine the reaction of a World War II fighter jock who served with both the USAF and Britain's RAF, and was shot down twice over the channel. Here's a guy who personifies the "right stuff." It is no exaggeration to say that the notion of painting a silly little grin on an airplane was anathema to J. Floyd Andrews. As he puts it, "I thought flying an airplane with a great big smile would be a put down to the captain. It just wasn't right."
Everyone else loved it, so Andrews agreed to a compromise: the airline's ads could show a smile painted on the aircraft. In 1970 the smiles were painted on the planes, and from 1971 the smile became the central identifying artwork in all advertising, whether it was a smiling plane or just a smile.
The print ads and all collateral materials, from brochures to ticket folders, featured some play on this smile. A 1976 ad proclaimed, "California is all smiles." When PSA began flying interstate, "Catch Our Smile to Portland" and "Smile to Phoenix" made an appearance in 1978 and 1979. When the airline became the official airline of Disneyland, PSA offered "magical smiles." When the British Aerospace 146-200 jets joined the fleet in 1984, they were christened "Smiliners." And still later, when the USAir merger was announced in 1986, the smile theme was front and center with the advertising tag line, "Now our smile is even wider."
A few years after Gross's original presentation, Andrews consented to a trail run. A smile was taped under the nose of one of the planes. Andrews explains this change of heart, "I thought when we had proved ourselves, when people felt safe with us, when they wouldn't think we were too damn frivolous, then we could put the smile on the plane."
Passenger reaction to the smile ranged from Newhall's terse, "I thought it was crappy," to the lady who wrote to Gross to tell him she felt safer about flying because of the plane's grin. Indeed, the majority of the flying public loved the smiling planes.
And so did employees. The smile came to be so closely identified with the airline that it became almost a symbol of the magical aura and lightheartedness of PSA. Russell L. Ray, Jr., named president and chief operating officer in 1985, says that when the USAir merger was announced, "PSA people had two questions: 'What's going to happen to me?' and 'What's going to happen to the smile?' Not necessarily in that order. It's the darnest thing. I cant explain why the smile is so important, but it is."
Before the smile campaign was initiated, another significant ad campaign grew out of a slice of real life. Andrews told Gross that he'd been running late one morning and his own airline didn't wait for him. "We thought this would make a wonderful way to stress PSA's terrific on-time record," says Gross. The eventual ad pictured a disgruntled looking Andrews, briefcase sitting on the tarmac, as a PSA jet took off. The headline: "We don't even wait for the president."
PSA's rigorous on-time performance combined with the frequency of service, drew accolades. Gross recalls a very successful TV ad featuring comedian Ronnie Schell (who hammed it up in PSA ads from 1966 to 1976). "The shot opened with Ronnie sitting on a tall ladder in a PSA hanger, wearing a mechanic's uniform. He's swinging this big clock on a chain back and forth, saying to the airplane, 'You will fly every hour on the hour between San Francisco and Los Angeles,' as if to hypnotize the airplane. Then he snaps his fingers and we cut to a shot of the airplane taking off." Innocent stuff, right? "NBC advised us they had a policy against using TV to hypnotize and that we couldn't use it." (Gross says that when he threatened to pull all his advertising from the network, NBC relented.)
Even PSA employees got in to the act. "A guy who drove a gas truck for PSA at Lindbergh Field said he'd been looking up at the 727 and noticed it had a nice high tail, and suggested an ad idea," recalls Gross. The resulting ad pictured PSA's colorful tail letters from an appropriate angle with an invitation to passengers to "High tail it to San Francisco."
In those dizzying days, most male passengers wore smiles of their own. Ask people what they remember about PSA, and anyone over thirty, male or female, will mention the flight attendants in hot pants and miniskirts. Those outfits, introduced in the midst of the swinging sixties, were featured in print ads announcing "PSA gives you a lift." Lift? Some passengers almost had to be tethered.
An equally bold ad announced that the aisle seats were the best on the airplane. Remember that it was before Ms. Magazine was even a twinkle in Gloria Steinem's eye. "I flew back and forth a lot and I noticed that all guys watched the stewardesses walk up and down," says Gross. "So we advertised that the aisle seats were the best seats on the plane at $13.50." A funny aside, he says, is that because of the ad's wording, some people thought the price of aisle seats had been raised to $13.50, when in fact all seats were that price, and had been for some time.
People were getting the message and flying PSA in droves. Profits were rolling in and PSA management could smile all the way to the bank.
As the sixties dawned, PSA brass concentrated on building a fleet of aircraft to match expansion plans that called for more destinations and additional passengers. The carrier reached a milestone when three Lockheed Electra propjets were introduced into the fleet in 1959, contributing to a banner year for the airline's growth.
Some 355,099 passengers flew with PSA that year (compared to 15,011 ten years earlier), and for the first time the total miles flown exceeded the 10-million mark. Payroll for 300 employees exceeded the $1-million level for the first time.
With the advent of the new decade, PSA's fleet consisted of three Electras and one DC-6. With PSA flying to four destinations-Los Angeles, Burbank, San Diego, and San Francisco-fares remained at 1958 levels, and the airline finished 1960 just barely in the black with a measly profit of $499.
In 1962, the total number of passengers surpassed the one-million mark for the first time as PSA enjoyed its best year to date: $1,368,770 in profits.
The following year, on February 13, PSA, the small family-centered airline went public, selling 100,000 shares of common stock for $17.40 apiece.
That move signaled PSA's giant leap into the jet age, enabling it to purchase five Boeing 727-100s. With the introduction of jet equipment into its fleet, PSA boosted its capacity and carried 1,863,088 passengers, turning a tidy profit of some $2-million. In June 1965 the airline was listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
In just fifteen short years, the little airline that could had evolved into the West's wonder carrier, serving California with a fleet of eleven aircraft. No longer an upstart or the new kid on the block, Pacific Southwest Airlines could now hold its own among the big boys.
With TWA, United, and Western all flying the same four hundred mile corridor between San Francisco and Los Angeles, how had PSA, the comparatively small intrastate airline, garnered a 50 percent market share? They all had the same type of aircraft, and the same schedule, and by this point, the same fare structure. What accounted for PSA's unprecedented success?
In a word: stewardesses.
Every airline in the country had female flight attendants, but PSA was known nationally for its sun-kissed beauties. Not only were they melt-your-heart pretty, agreed the flying public, they were also warm, intelligent, friendly and funny.
