International airlines in trouble

Before we flew west this time, I was shuffling around in one of my desk drawers looking for my airplane tickets. My W. C. Fields filing system, I regret to say, extends even to my desk which has six drawers that extend so far back as to leave most of the stuff pushed in there out of reach for weeks, months and even years. The new entries act like a small tidal wave that washes what's already there to the distant shore of the back wall.

So it was not surprising the other day when I splayed my fingers like a rake and retrieved a haul of flotsam that included a newspaper cutting from the Truman administration, a golf score card three years old, book matches inscribed with the names of forgotten restaurants in Chicago and Florida and a note from a once close friend who's been dead these 10, 15 years – a contemporary of mine whom I met more than 40 years ago. For the record, he had been, way back there in the Thirties, my wife's first boyfriend.

He was the son of a wealthy mining engineer who, incidentally, was a friend of Herbert Hoover, once President of the United States but before that a distinguished engineer who translated Agricola. When my friend left college – he'd been at the University of Virginia – his father asked him, in the quaint fashion of the time, what he proposed to do with his life. He was not remotely academic. He loved boats. He was intensely practical about all the things that, to me, still add up to the mysteries of life, things like carpentering, repairing the ignition of cars, rewiring an electrical circuit and recognising by simply squinting into the sky the make and model of every sort of airplane.

Within a month or so after graduation, he astonished his father by saying that he thought he would go into aviation. In what capacity, the old man wanted to know. Well, he said, something like air express, international air express. The phrase meant absolutely nothing at the time but the old man, expressing scepticism and sarcasm in a single question, said, 'I suppose you intend to fly orchids in from Brazil for a New York débutante's coming-out party?' 'Something like that,' said the son. The matter was dropped as a bit of wild, youthful whimsy, but shortly afterwards the son came back and said, 'Dad, if you'll stake me to $400, I can rent a desk and a telephone in an office on 42nd Street and I think I can get going'. The old man was impressed. The idea would have sounded barmy coming from any other boy but his son was not a barmy sort.

He said, 'All right, but $400 is the limit.' Now, these, remember, were the Depression years, the Deep Depression years and although the old man could even then have staked him to $4,000 or more he belonged to that generation of the wealthy that, like the Rockefellers, did not indulge their young, but having sent them off to college, laid it down that they would have an allowance of $2 a week, no more, for what we then called 'walking around' money.

Well, somehow, don't ask me how, the son started making connections with airlines. Civil aviation was more developed in the United States then than anywhere, but it was still in its infancy. Transatlantic aviation had hardly begun, except for daredevils flying in the wake of such as Lindbergh. Anyway, this young man and his weird ambition progressed to the point where he thought that what was needed was air freight. He was not interested in flying passengers, but delivering in double-quick time goods and services that always came by the railroads.

The day did in fact come when he flew into New York, if not orchids from Brazil, then camellias from Alabama, where they bloom in great profusion in February. Sufficient to say that by the 1950s, his company, a pioneer in airfreight, had grown and prospered and by the late 1960s was a multi-million dollar business.

In the early days and along the way, he had his troubles but his father stuck firm to the resolution that he would advance nothing – and never did – beyond the original $400. The note I salvaged from the far shore of my drawer was written in the early 1960s when the jets were well in and already beginning to take a drastic toll of the transatlantic tourist ships. I don't know what provoked this note. It was plainly an answer to something I'd written or intended to write about the jets and their effect on tourism.

The note incorporated a warning. It said, 'I agree with you it's wonderful that they can now fly you 3,000 miles from New York to Los Angeles for a hundred dollars, but don't think they're making any profit. It cost them more than that in fuel per passenger.'

I think he went on, 'The airlines have gotten off to a very risky start. Their fares are way too low in order to attract a flying public and the way things are going, I suspect that pretty soon the airlines will become wards of the government. I mean they'll expect to be subsidised. Either that or sooner or later they'll get involved in a price war competing for low fares and then you'll get a rash of bankruptcies and maybe in the distant future, desperate mergers, with only one or two companies in the business. Anyway, all I want to say now is that they got off to a bad start by offering pie in the sky at bargain rates.'

Even though I'd forgotten all about this letter during the 20-odd years since it was written, I never forgot its message. It puts in a nutshell the present plight of the airlines. There was an intermediate time of crisis about ten years ago when everybody felt the crunch of the OPEC oil squeeze. At that time, airline fares ballooned alarmingly. Few people wondered why. But an airline pilot friend of mine, indeed, the stepson of my airfreight pioneer, told me at the time, 'Everybody goes on about the sudden doubling of the price of petrol, but aviation fuel has increased by four, five times.'

Well, as we know and never expected, the oil pinch turned into an oil glut and it was a strange sight driving through Los Angeles the other day to see petrol being sold at 89 cents a gallon. It was $1.30 last summer. Well, many years ago, the airlines formed their own trade association and set standard fares on all competitive routes so that it didn't matter whether you flew TWA to Europe or British Airways or Air India or whoever, the fare was the same.

Then came the crunch and then came Freddie Laker. And then came a protective move on the part of the big airlines to put an end to price cutting with the result dictated by the courts that if you had booked and paid for a Laker flight that never took off, you could apply for and get compensation. In the meantime, you may remember, came Ronald Reagan saying that there was too much government regulation in everything and airlines, like any other business, should start jousting with each other on the field of the cloth of gold, the field, that is of the free market.

So now any airline could set its own fares in competition with its colleagues or flying enemies. A rush of cut fares and much wonderful advertising, promising a ticket to everywhere at bargain-basement prices. This war was initiated, of course, by airlines flying more or less the same transcontinental and transoceanic routes and it got to the point – it's still at the point – where beating each other down on fares was evidently not sufficient inducement. So they all started special bonus offerings, whereby if you fly so many thousand miles on one airline, they give you, free, another one or two thousand miles or upgrade you, as the saying goes from economy to first-class.

My friend's ancient prophecy has come true so far as the bankruptcies go, except bankruptcy has taken a new form – you don't file in court, pay a fraction of your debts to your creditors and go home, you get taken over by an airline that's prospering, to the dizzy point where the whale absorbs Jonah's debts.

I stressed that the fare war, the big cut-throat battle, is on only between the giant companies that cover continents, including this one. The smaller companies, which fly between the states on shorter runs are doing fine. At least, they ought to be doing fine for their fares stay as high as they care to post them. With this puzzling result. I found my air tickets, the ones that were to take me from New York to California and back. The return round trip cost, $240. In other words, $120 for a 3,000-mile hike. Just like the early Sixties. But now look, I have some other tickets ready for my jaunt to Augusta, Georgia in April, for the Masters Golf Tournament. That's a hop of 500 miles. One way fare, $240. Twice as much as a 3,000 mile flight to California.

So, now there are more strikes and more substantial rumours of the demise or absorption of other giants. Where all this will end knows only God.

The mention of Augusta offers me the cue for a more soothing philosophical note. I was staying in Los Angeles with a man who has a sporting library – 99 per cent of it about horses – of 5,000 volumes. I staggered through all the stud books and the racing manuals and the Newmarket calendars going back, oh, to the beginning of the nineteenth century and then came on precious bit of wisdom in something called the Badminton Library.

No mention of badminton but, once a month, a piece on golf and now that the spring is about to burst, I offer you the following gem, written in November 1909 by the Honourable, also the Reverend, E. Littleton. It should bring consolation to all middle-aged and old golfers and be a strong deterrent to any man in the prime of life who thinks of taking up this ridiculous game.

This is it: 'Even if things go well, the most distressing fact for the middle-aged foozler, is that he must abandon all hope of brilliancy. If he learns to keep his temper, school his nerve, pick up tips from the right people and reject all advice which is perfectly true but wholly useless, he may acquire a fairly steady mediocrity.'

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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