Fallen flags of the airline industry

When I was a child they called it Friendship airport. What a nice name, though it came from the pre-existing name of the area rather than any spirit of amity. In the early 1970s someone decided to rename it Baltimore-Washington International to remind airline planners that Baltimore's airport was no farther from Washington, D.C., than the then-new Dulles International on the other side of the Potomac. More recently it was named for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, but since I live in Hawaii now I don't know how many Baltimoreans actually call it that. For me BWI will always be Friendship airport, and it carries some interesting memories. Like many airports built in the 1950s it has two main runways that cross each other. Overlooking the crossing from higher ground, and still intact so far as I know, is Friendship Cemetery. My paternal grandparents are buried there. A long road leads to it from the south. The gate is probably locked all the time now for security. In the old days it was routinely left open on Sunday for people to pay their respects. The first time I drove a car on a public road was when Dad pulled the VW bus over on this road and said, "Howard, you take us the rest of the way." I remember thinking at the time that there was some mischief in Dad offering me my first chance at driving on a road to a graveyard with the entire family watching, but Dad is more straightforward then that and probably was just thinking it would be easier for me to do this on a road with no other traffic. I managed the trip without mishap. Soon we were staring at the headstone of Fletcher Aaron and Hazel Dennis Dicus. And soon after that, we kids did what we spent most of our time doing on these cemetery visits -- watching the jets take off and land. There were dozens of airlines in the 1960s, all striving for top-of-mind awareness with distinctive warpaint on their jets. American, Delta, United and Continental are the few that still exist under their original names, now that Delta is retiring the Northwest brand. In those days it was Northwest Orient. What today is US Airways was then Allegheny and Piedmont, both small regional carriers with lots of Friendship flights that went mostly to cities in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. (When they merged there was a local joke that US Air stood for "Unfortunately Still Allegheny in Reality.") The biggest carriers back then were Pan Am and TWA, for years the only two airlines with flights circumnavigating the globe. Another big carrier was Eastern, inventor of the hourly shuttles to New York. These are all fallen flags now, along with Braniff and Western Pacific and others I can't even remember any more. It surprises people who know about all my model airplanes but I'm a railroad buff at heart and the same thing has happened in the railroad industry, which had 50 storied railroads through the 1960s. Today four rail giants cover almost the whole country. In the East, CSX Transportation encompasses the former Chesapeake & Ohio, Baltimore & Ohio, Atlantic Coast Line, Seaboard Air Line, Louisville & Nashville and others. Norfolk Southern encompasses the former Norfolk & Western, Southern, Wabash, Nickel Plate, and others. In the West, Burlington Northern encompasses the former Great Northern, Northern Pacific, Burlington Route, Santa Fe, and others. Union Pacific, the only original name that survives, now also includes Southern Pacific and many others. For people, especially kids, who get into this sort of thing, it is like losing friends to see companies you learned about ceasing to exist. Effective Monday, Northwest employees will all begin wearing Delta uniforms.

Comments

[Stan]

And thus the grinding sound of progress goes on...in the airline industry now as it was in the railroad industry then.