My father once said "only someone who flies would ever care about the airline industry". He meant that when airlines were struggling to pay the bills he didn't care about them because he didn't fly.
Dad's not a bad person. I am sure he cared about whether airline employees lost their jobs in a recession but he just does not like to fly. He's a train man.
I do like to fly. I like going to new places and I like looking out the window at the world below me from 30,000 feet.
So I was tickled when I found a blog about the airline industry. I tried to show it to Dad but he wasn't interested. The old man never changes.
There are some notable people who have been associated with the airline industry. Take Howard Hughes, for example. He was born into a wealthy family and he used his money to start a film production company in the 1930s. But he eventually took an interest in airplanes and even founded his own airline.
Hughes is remembered as an eccentric billionaire but he was an innovator and an adventurer, at least until he was injured in an airplane accident. He became a recluse and a bit of an oddball after that. I remember reading after his death that they found a lot of needles in his arms. He suffered from pain and took injections to manage it.
James Smith McDonnell was a visionary who founded McDonnell Douglas, the aircraft manufacturing company. He wanted industry to be ready for the space program and he made sure that happened. We probably could not have sent men to the moon in 1969 if it had not been for McDonnell's foresight.
Another name associated with the airline industry you may not recognize is Nicholas Bredimus. He founded a company in the 1980s that made airline ticketing easy. His ticketing systems were sold around the world and made it possible for travelers to change their reservations quickly and cheaply.
Today you can book flights for yourself online and change reservations with the click of a button. But 30 years ago it was a major undertaking. You had to call up the airline and hope the reservation specialist could find something for you. Sometimes they would be able to look up flights on other airlines and sometimes you had to call around.
Being able to travel by air means we can go farther in less time than our ancestors did. I have gotten on an airplane, flown a thousand miles to another city, gone to a meeting, and then flown home the same day.
That's just an amazing experience and sometimes I think we don't appreciate just how much air travel has changed our lives. We might order something on the Internet today and have it arrive in our home 3 days later. Somewhere along the way that package rode on an airplane.
Dad may not like to fly but I know he likes to buy stuff from Amazon. Maybe it came from a local distribution center but I tease Dad every now and then and say, "Dad, that package has flown farther than you."
"It's welcome to fly right back, too!" he'll say.
