Airlines: Caught at the Crest

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As the biggest strike in U.S. airline history dragged through its first full week, disruptive effects large and small spread across the entire U.S. economy and throughout the everyday life of Americans. Thousands of vacationers canceled travel plans. Hotel bookings dropped sharply in such varied cities as Pittsburgh, Las Vegas and Honolulu. Miami Beach hotels, heavily dependent on package air tours for summer trade, laid off employees as occupancy rates shrank as much as 25% below normal.

Cut flowers wilted far from florist shops; live lobsters piled up awaiting shipment from Maine. Manufacturers dependent on air shipment of electronic parts suffered production delays. Traveling salesmen and executives resorted to circuitous odysseys, chartered air taxis—or stayed home and used a phone.

In all, five airlines were struck: TWA, United, Eastern, Northwest and National. Of all their operating heads, none had more at stake than TWA President Charles Tillinghast Jr., 55, who has been in the airline business just over five years but in that time has helped turn TWA from a floundering giant into one of the industry's highest flyers. The strike caught Tillinghast not only near the crest of TWA's comeback but also at a time when the line must fly if it is to prosper. TWA's income is greatly concentrated in the summer along its west-to-east routes, which span two thirds of the world from California to Thailand.

Still Tillinghast's individual and corporate problems were dwarfed by the real lesson of the strike—which was a dramatic demonstration of just how much jet transportation has come to mean to the U.S.

Frenetic Blessing. Neither the nation's business nor its social life could have assumed today's form without the airlines. "Of all the inventions, the alphabet and the printing press alone excepted," wrote English Historian Thomas Babington Macaulay in 1848, "those which abridge distance have done the most for the civilization of our species." The age of commercial jet travel, not yet eight years old, has not only shriveled distance to a degree far beyond Macaulay's vision, but has spread that frenetic blessing to hundreds of millions of people.

Businessmen, from chief executives to chief clerks, fly thousands of miles as casually as they once drove 50. Politicians and bureaucrats, professors and diplomats use the new mobility to solve problems, stir decisions, win accords more quickly. Industrial complexes, hotels, office buildings and even nests of nightclubs have sprung up around airports, just as cities grew around railroad terminals in the 19th century. Some affluent couples whisk from Washington to New York, or Detroit to Chicago, just for dinner and a show. Youngsters pack airline counters on weekends, asking for seats to any place that swings.