CARRIERS: Reach to the South

• Share

Slick-haired William Allan Patterson, 39-year-old president of United Air Lines, likes to do things quietly. When he is in his Chicago office he shuttles smoothly back & forth between two heaped-up desks in a castered chair. When he is out on his line—which hauls him some 40,000 miles a year—he shuns casual acquaintanceships, likes to chin with pilots and stewardesses, peek at his aeronautical research projects (e.g., radio static eliminators, blind-landing systems) which have made United 'famed among U. S. airlines.

Fortnight ago W. A. Patterson made a characteristically casual announcement: United's transcontinental route, with Pacific Coast termini at Seattle and San Francisco, was going to reach down into the rich passenger market of southern California with new stops at Los Angeles, San Diego (already on United's Pacific Coast line south from Seattle). It was also taking over an established route between Salt Lake City and Great Falls,

Mont. All this was to be done by obtaining a majority interest (61% of 396,309 shares outstanding) of the stock of Western Air Express, which now hooks up with United at Salt Lake City.

Quick to say that the proposed sale was a complete surprise was Western Air's youthful President Alvin Adams, onetime Watt Street Journal reporter. Majority holders, including Denver Broker Charles Boettcher II, onetime kidnapping victim, had not let him in on the deal.

Quick to denounce it was Nevada's Senator Pat McCarran, author of the Civil Aeronautics Act and longtime friend of U. S. airlines. "The air transportation companies," he trumpeted, "will be well advised to avoid . . . broad plans which may appear to the public and to the Congress as a means of creating monopolies." United's transcontinental competitors, T. W. A. and American Airlines, both of which tap the southern Pacific Coast, kept discreetly silent.

Last word on Patterson's deal, biggest since the famed airmail purge of 1934, will be said by the Civil Aeronautics Authority. Approval may lead the way to other big airline consolidations. Disapproval would force U. S. airlines to hold to something like their present competitive system, with routes and stops limited.