US Airways

» see usairways.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The company was founded in 1939 in Pittsburgh as All American Aviation and its first business was not carrying people. It picked up mail sacks from small towns in the Ohio valley using a hook and a cable strung between two poles, so the aircraft never had to land. Passengers came later, and in 1953 the name changed to Allegheny Airlines.

Deregulation is what turned a regional operator into a national one. The Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 removed the rules that had kept Allegheny inside its own part of the map, and on 28 October 1979 it started flying as USAir. Through the late 1980s it bought Pacific Southwest Airlines and then Piedmont Airlines, picking up the west coast plus the southeast in about eighteen months. On 27 February 1997 the name changed once more to US Airways. That is the one most people remember.

The 2000s went badly. It filed for Chapter 11 in August 2002. It came out in March 2003 and filed again in September 2004. What happened next is the strange part: America West, a much smaller airline out of Phoenix, carried out a reverse merger. It bought the assets and then took the bigger company's branding instead of its own, and the America West executives ended up running the result from Tempe, Arizona. The airline that came out the other side had the old name on the tails and new people in the offices.

Doug Parker, who had arrived at America West nine days before 11 September 2001, spent the next eight years trying to merge US Airways with somebody. United said no twice. Delta said no. American Airlines went into Chapter 11 in November 2011 and said no as well, until its own creditors decided they preferred Parker's plan to the one their management had written.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the deregulation years ~

For most of the 1990s this was a large airline with a bad cost structure. It had the highest unit costs of any major American carrier, a hub at Pittsburgh that existed mainly because the company had always been there, and a route map dense with short flights up and down the eastern seaboard where Southwest was about to arrive. The shuttle between Washington and New York and Boston was genuinely good and genuinely small.

It also had the misfortune of a run of accidents in the middle of that decade. Flight 427 went down near Pittsburgh on 8 September 1994 after a rudder hardover and killed everyone aboard. The investigation that followed ran five years and rewrote how the Boeing 737 rudder system works. The fix was industry-wide. The reputation damage stayed local to one airline.

~ flight 1939 ~

The merger with American was announced in February 2013 and closed on 9 December that year, and after that the US Airways brand was on a timetable. The two airlines got a single operating certificate from the FAA in April 2015 and spent the rest of the year moving reservations onto one system.

The last one was numbered for the year the company started. US Airways 1939 left Philadelphia on 16 October 2015 and flew to Charlotte, then Phoenix, then San Francisco, before turning around to come back across the country overnight. It landed at Philadelphia just before six in the morning on 17 October with crew on board who had flown for Allegheny. The reservation cutover happened while the aircraft was in the air. By the time the door opened there was no way left to buy a ticket on it.

~ what American kept ~

From Turkey the brand was reachable for six years through a frequent flyer table. Turkish Airlines joined Star Alliance on 1 April 2008 and US Airways was already in it. A Miles and Smiles member could credit a Philadelphia to Charlotte leg to a Turkish account without ever thinking about whose aircraft it was. That ended on 30 March 2014 when US Airways left Star Alliance for oneworld ahead of the American integration. Six years is a long enough window that the name sits in a lot of Turkish mileage statements while almost nobody here would recognize the livery.

American kept the Charlotte hub, which is now one of its largest, and kept Philadelphia as its main transatlantic gateway on the east coast. Phoenix stayed. Pittsburgh had already been dismantled in 2004. The dividend miles balances were converted into AAdvantage in 2015, and the Tempe headquarters closed, with the combined airline run from Fort Worth. What is still in daily use is Charlotte itself. The ramp staff there and much of the flight crew base came over intact from the old company and stayed put.

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