Business: The Happy Gambler of the Air

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World Airways' $69.99 flights of fancy

Inflation-weary Americans last week set up sieges at travel bureaus and clogged telephone lines to get tickets for perhaps the best airline bargain ever: World Airways' $69.99 flights from the East to West coast, and from Los Angeles to Hawaii. The tiny airline (1979 revenues: $166 million), in a monthlong promotion offer from mid-April to mid-May, is undercutting existing rates across the continent by as much as $228.

The cheap fares are a carefully staged tactic to fill up World Airways' planes once again. A year ago, the line's cut-rate, $99 coast-to-coast flights were soaring at 80% capacity, when the grounding of all DC-10s after the American Airlines crash in Chicago idled its cross-country fleet. As soon as the DC-10s were again cleared for takeoff, the line was hit by a four-month strike of pilots, mechanics and stewardesses demanding higher pay. Since World finally got back in the air last January, an average of only 17% of its seats have been full. The airline decided that it needed some gimmick to win back the crowds and chose the $69.99 flight. But for all the carefully orchestrated hoopla, the cheap fare remains a gigantic gamble; just to break even, World must fill every single one of the 380 seats on each one of its twelve daily DC-10 flights.

Such a high-risk, odds-against wager is characteristic of World's buccaneering chairman, Edward Daly, 57. A combative Irishman who likes to arm-wrestle visitors, Daly has a reputation for making apparently unsound economic moves pay off. In 1950, at 27, and after a brief career as a semiprofessional boxer, Daly bought the two-year-old ailing World with $50,000 worth of poker winnings. The carrier was no prize. Its debts totaled $250,000, and its assets were only seven planes: two leased war-surplus transports and five unairworthy flying boats that later were sold for scrap.

In the mid-1950s World began to prosper when it was awarded military and passenger contracts serving the Far East.

A few years later, it won the right to fly charters everywhere outside North America. Its big growth, however, came in the mid-1960s, when World started to receive large military contracts to airlift personnel and supplies to Viet Nam.

Along the way, Daly legends sprouted. While rebuilding a newly bought but burned-out plane in London in 1956, the tightfisted entrepreneur saved cash by sleeping for more than a month in the same limousine that he used to visit bankers. In the last days of the Viet Nam War, Daly organized, paid for and flew on a World mercy flight into Danang hours before the North Vietnamese captured the city. The self-styled "old bastard" pistol-whipped and kicked mutinous South Vietnamese troops who tried to board the refugee flight.

Married, with one daughter, Daly drives a Lamborghini sports car, frequently wears mod clothes and takes pride in raising his Arabian horses. He also supports orphanages in the U.S. and abroad. Often tongue-tied in public, his main relaxation is flying around the world in his two private planes. One was owned by Howard Hughes when he was escorting Jane Russell; his other craft, a Convair 440, is painted 14 shades of green, with a shamrock on the tail and a leprechaun near the entry hatch. Daly calls it "the jolly green giant," but less respectful mechanics know it as "the green pickle."