Dudes' Deal

Unlike topflight executives of other major U. S. airlines, 35-year-old Jack Frye of Transcontinental & Western Air and his 43-year-old executive vice president Paul Ernest Richter, are tough, practical airlines pilots. Burly Jack Frye bats up & down the line through all kinds of weather in his Northrop Gamma, usually testing new equipment as he flies. Wiry Paul Richter regularly gets into a captain's grey uniform and shoves a passenger-laden DC-3 over a scheduled run.

About the technical operation of well-run TWA, Frye and Richter today have few worries as they fly the line from San Francisco to Newark. But they never look at the instrument board on a line run without seeing on the compass card a sharp reminder of a TWA deficiency: all its routes run east and west. For TWA is, more strictly than its two coast-to-coast competitors (United and American), a transcontinental line, a long thin line with no feeders to bring in side traffic.

Last week Jack Frye, worried about his growing waistline, announced a deal that will fatten his airline: the purchase for $350,000 of Marquette Airlines which (when Civil Aeronautics Authority approves) will give TWA a closely knit 565-mile feeder system in the heart of rich midwest traffic territory.

Marquette was organized little more than a year ago, by another executive with an airline pilot's ticket in his pocket: convivial, pianoplaying, 33-year-old Winston Weidner Kratz. He ran it on a shoestring for months with outdated Stinson tri-motors. The line was a natural. From a TWA connection at St. Louis it ran to Cincinnati, crossed TWA again at Dayton, and continued north to Toledo and Detroit. But until CAA gave it a certificate of convenience and necessity it was not an airline entity, had no sales value. Loudest to shout against a certificate for Marquette was naturally Jack Frye's TWA which wanted no newcomer in the field it hoped eventually to develop. When it was granted TWA lost no time in demanding a rehearing from the CAA.

That was the beginning of a deal. While the airlines' lawyers were arguing before the CAA, opponents Frye and Kratz went hangar-flying over drinks in a nearby bar, became fast friends. A few weeks ago they met again on a New Mexico dude ranch at a meeting of Conquistadores del Cielo (Conquerors of the Sky), an airline executives' organization for making hoopla in ten-gallon hats and hair pants (see cut). Over the poker table where they played with steady hand for fat stakes, and on horseback trips where they rode for saddle-galls, the deal was made. The sale was for cash, in which Marquette's chief financial backer, Pittsburgh Capitalist John McKelvy, will have the chief share. It also included a job in TWA's executive line for shrewd "Wink" Kratz.

By its new feeders (including a new Detroit-Washington line which it hopes CAA will shortly authorize) TWA hopes to cash in on the present airline boom. For the first nine months of 1939 airline traffic was up 40% over 1938 to a record high level, and except for TWA the trans-continentals all operated handsomely in the black. TWA is still in the red for the year, but in the July-September quarter it turned a net profit of more than $100,000 which helped cut its estimated net loss for the nine months to less than $250,000, assured Jack Frye that the 1939 figures will look a lot better than the $773,263 loss of 1938.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.