Braniff International Airways

~ the goodbye ~

Braniff stopped flying on 12 May 1982 and filed for Chapter 11 the next morning. Sixty-two aircraft were recalled to Dallas and nine thousand people lost their jobs, with two hundred and twenty-five kept on to wind the estate down. Passengers holding Braniff tickets found out at the counter. It was the first major American carrier to fail after the Airline Deregulation Act, and everyone in the industry read it as a demonstration rather than an accident.

The airline had been running since 20 June 1928, when Paul and Tom Braniff flew a Lockheed Vega from Oklahoma City to Tulsa. It spent the regulated era as a solid second-tier trunk carrier with a good Latin American network, and it spent the 1960s and 1970s as the most conspicuous design object in American aviation. All of that ended about two years before I was born, in a country I had not been to, so what is here comes off the record rather than out of anything I saw.

The reason it is worth a grave anyway is that Braniff is where a corporation decided its aircraft were a canvas and then actually paid for the idea. Most airline branding of that era was a stripe and a tail logo. Braniff hired an architect to redesign every visible surface it owned and a couturier to dress the cabin crew, and then commissioned a major sculptor to paint two airplanes outright.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the end of the plain plane ~

Harding Lawrence took over in 1965 and brought in the advertising agency work of Mary Wells, who gave the program its name. The campaign said that Braniff had ended the plain plane, and it was not a slogan looking for a product. Alexander Girard, an architect from the Eames and Herman Miller circle, was given the whole company: seven solid jelly-bean colors for the aircraft exteriors, new terminal interiors, new cabin fabrics, new dishware, seventeen thousand items redesigned down to the playing cards.

Emilio Pucci did the uniforms, including the one that got written about for decades afterward, a layered outfit the stewardesses removed piece by piece as the flight progressed. It was sold as the Air Strip and it belongs to its decade in ways that do not survive reading now. The part that does survive is Calder. In 1973 he painted a DC-8 as Flying Colors of South America, and in 1975 a Boeing 727 as Flying Colors of the United States, dedicated by Betty Ford. A working airliner in scheduled service, painted by the man who invented the mobile.

~ the last flight ~

Deregulation passed in October 1978 and Lawrence responded within days, claiming dozens of new routes the moment they became available and ordering the aircraft to fly them. The theory was that the carrier that grabbed the map first would keep it. What arrived instead was a fuel price shock into a recession, with interest rates that put the airline's borrowing over twenty percent.

Lawrence was out by the end of 1980. Howard Putnam came from Southwest in September 1981 and spent eight months trying to find a floor. On 12 May 1982 the board voted to stop, and the last scheduled service, a 747 running as Flight 501 to Honolulu, finished its trip. The bankruptcy filing landed the following day.

~ the three braniffs ~

The name flew twice more and neither attempt is the same company. Braniff Inc. operated from 1984 to 1990 with Hyatt money behind it and went under. Braniff International Airlines ran for a matter of months across 1991 and 1992 and did the same. Sun Country, founded in 1983 by people who had worked at the original, is the only piece of the thing still in the air, under a different name and with no legal descent.

What actually survived is the design archive. The Girard color scheme turns up in every history of American corporate identity, the Calder aircraft are documented frame by frame, and the Pucci uniforms sit in museum collections. An airline that could not make the numbers work for fifty-three years is now studied mostly by people who have never bought a ticket from anyone.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »