Super Savings in the Skies

Hurry, hurry, hurry! Like almost everything else in the postholiday season, the skies themselves are on sale. The tailwinds are a bargain you can't afford to miss. With prices this low, staying at home is almost a crime, like being debt-free in a credit-card society. How can anyone resist these tags: Boston to Miami: was $99, now only $69. Dallas to Denver: was $95, now only $69. New York to Los Angeles: was $149, now only $99. Make your reservations immediately. Take the kids. Take Grandma and Grandpa. Buy your brother-in-law a oneway ticket to anywhere. But don't pass up the greatest deals ever. Operators are standing by.

Air travel, once an expensive way to go, is now discounted almost as fiercely as videocassette recorders and used cars. A new fleet of cut-rate carriers, launched over the past seven years by a wave of airline deregulation, has entered the big time by offering startlingly cheap fares from coast to coast and on hundreds of routes in between. The bargain tariffs have encouraged more people to take more flights to more places than at any other time in history. This week that wanderlust will receive another huge boost when a new round of fare wars erupts among the airlines, adding yet more commotion to the already crowded skies.

The spark for the latest skirmish is People Express, the fastest-growing airline in the annals of aviation. People is slashing most of its fares this week by 30% to 60%. Passengers can fly from the carrier's Newark base to Miami, Fort Lauderdale and other Florida cities for $69, to Los Angeles and San Francisco for $99, to Minneapolis for $49 and to Greensboro or Raleigh, N.C., for $29. By changing planes in Newark, People Express customers can fly from Chicago to Florida or from Boston to Houston for $99. People's biggest bargain of all is a nonstop flight from San Francisco to Brussels for $99.

Faced with such competition, other airlines are fighting back for all they are worth. Delta and Eastern are matching some of People's fares to Florida. Piedmont is offering the same low prices to North Carolina. Continental offers $99 "cheap frills" flights between New York and California and is letting senior citizens fly anywhere in the U.S. for an incredible $65. The first $65 tickets were sold to Susan Brunson, 115, and her "baby daughter" Mary McDaniel, 75, of Roosevelt, N.Y., who plan to fly to Miami or Los Angeles to visit relatives. All the largest airlines, including American, United, Delta and Northwest Orient, are offering discounts of up to 75% if passengers make their reservations 30 days in advance.

As the airlines battle it out, the only clear winners will be their customers. Ellen Farmer, a legal secretary in Elgin, Ill., plans to take a break from the cold weather later this month by boarding Midway Airlines' $99 flight from Chicago to Orlando. Says she: "I don't think Midway would have had such a low fare if People Express hadn't forced them."