Airlines: Four Hours from Anywhere

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If executives at Wheeling Steel Corp. suspect that President Robert M. Mor ris is really a set of triplets masquerading as one businessman, much of the blame — or credit — for such a notion belongs to Executive Jet Aviation Inc.

One day recently, a small EJA jet picked up Morris at Wheeling, W. Va., at 8 a.m., flew him to a 90-minute meeting in Washington, then on to a 90-minute conference in Philadelphia, finally to a two-hour session in White Plains, N.Y. By 5 p.m. Morris was home, and EJA, which has the only all-jet, executive "lease contract" fleet in the U.S., had logged in another contented customer.

Playboys & Flyboys. Though it is only 17 months old, EJA counts 87 customers, and revenues are running at a yearly rate of almost $3,000,000. The company's first client, Norfolk and Western Railroad, last week signed a new contract calling for 235,000 miles on EJA's 16 six-seat Lear jets and three French-built, ten-passenger Falcons. Among other clients are Xerox, Mead Johnson, IBM, General Electric, White Motor Corp., Cincinnati Milling Machine and HMH Publishing Co., whose Playboy Publisher Hugh Hefner flies out to give campus lectures on the philosophy of sex, always jets back to his Chicago pad by bedtime.

EJA has some steady individual customers like Rocketeer Wernher von Braun and the folk-singing Brothers Four, occasionally takes spot orders from others. Last year one of its planes picked up Martin Luther King in Alabama during the Selma march, flew him to a Cleveland speaking engagement, then back to the march. When Trans World Airlines President Charles C. Tillinghast Jr. was unable to get a TWA flight from St. Louis to Washington for a dinner meeting with Lyndon Johnson, an EJA plane picked him up and got him there. EJA got a luminous letter of thanks from Tillinghast.

On the Alert. Founder and president is O. F. (for Olbert Fearing) Lassiter, 47, who retired two years ago as an Air Force brigadier general after a 30-year military career that took him from National Guard private to Strategic Air Command division commander. Lassiter obtained financing from a Pennsylvania Railroad subsidiary, signed up a board of directors that includes former Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis E. Le-May and Actor Jimmy Stewart, a reserve one-star general. Lassiter's 41 pilots were largely recruited among SAC veterans and former pilots of the Special Air Mission squadron in Washington; three have flown the presidential jet. "In our present group of pilots," boasts Lassiter, "we have the capability of flying any jet now in production."