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    Braniff Airways: Flying Colors
    Braniff Airways: Flying Colors
    Braniff Airways: Flying Colors
    Ebook152 pages1 hour

    Braniff Airways: Flying Colors

    By Richard Benjamin Cass

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    About this ebook

    Braniff Airways: Flying Colors takes readers on a magical flight through the history of Braniff International Airways, beginning with its small-town Oklahoma roots to its high-flying and stylish span of the globe. Braniff brought together the mystery of aviation with the glamorous fields of fashion, art, and design, and taught the flying world how to fly with style and beauty. It is this remarkable joining of forces that has made Braniff as popular today as it was when flying in style across the Atlantic and Pacific.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateDec 14, 2015
    ISBN9781439654231
    Braniff Airways: Flying Colors
    Author

    Richard Benjamin Cass

    Richard Benjamin Cass, a retired airline pilot, has over 30 years experience in aviation. He saw his first Braniff jet at Dallas Love Field in 1972, and his passion for the airline began. His Braniff Flying Colors Collection, which contains his lifelong collection of Braniff historical items, is one of the largest groupings of Braniff collectibles known to exist. His career and interests have been solely devoted to aviation endeavors, and he has founded several successful aviation businesses. Cass is a native of Dallas, Texas, where he currently lives.

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      Book preview

      Braniff Airways - Richard Benjamin Cass

      Braniff.

      INTRODUCTION

      Two brothers, a dreamer and a pragmatist, joined forces to create one of the world’s leading airlines, Braniff Airways. From humble beginnings as an aero club in Oklahoma City in 1927, Braniff grew to become a multinational corporation that flew throughout the continental United States, Canada, and Mexico, from the US mainland to South America, and across both the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans. Those brothers, Paul Revere Braniff, the dreamer and aviator, and Thomas Elmer Braniff, the pragmatist who had already created a burgeoning insurance empire, had the courage and foresight to become early pioneers in America’s fledgling aviation industry.

      Their first operating venture, Paul R. Braniff, Inc., formed in the spring of 1928, took to the air on its maiden flight on June 20, 1928, with a five-passenger single-engine Stinson Detroiter. The new airline flew oil-company executives between Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, where Braniff was based, to Tulsa, Oklahoma, the heart of the Oklahoma oil boom. The airline was completely dependent on passenger fares for its existence. A large aviation holding company that was hoping to build an air and rail network from coast to coast purchased Paul R. Braniff, Inc., in 1929, and in 1930 the company was absorbed by the predecessor of American Airlines.

      The brothers, now with aviation in their blood, once again joined together to create the airline company that would eventually span the globe, Braniff Airways, Inc., in November 1930. Once again, the new company was dependent on passenger fares for its continued operation, and with the country in the throes of the Great Depression, finding passengers with money to fill their Lockheed Vega aircraft was not a small task. The airline was close to collapse when in 1934 it was awarded its first airmail contract between Chicago and Oklahoma City. Government corruption brought a saving grace to Braniff and the rest of the fledgling airlines that traversed the United States. Braniff Airways now had the support of not only passenger fares but also guaranteed airmail payments that virtually guaranteed its existence.

      The company began a steady growth while becoming the surviving carrier after merging with two small airlines that further increased the size of its route system while strengthening its airmail payments by adding new postal routes. By 1940, the carrier had upgraded to the ubiquitous 21-passenger Douglas DC-3 twin-engine airliner that revolutionized the entire airline industry and overnight made it a safe and reliable method of transportation. By the summer of 1942, the airline moved its headquarters to Dallas Love Field, which had become the central terminus of its core operations and linked the Great Lakes to Texas. Braniff’s growth, along with the rest of the industry, was slowed by the global war, which required the assets of nearly every company in the United States, and that specifically included the troop-carrying capacity of passenger aircraft.

      After World War II, Braniff’s fortunes would only explode, with the company receiving approval to operate between the US mainland and Central America, Cuba, and deep into the South American continent. Large four-engine Douglas DC-4 and DC-6 airliners were added to the fleet and specifically purchased for operation over the company’s 7,000-mile route system south of the border. International script was added to the corporate masthead in 1946. Service began from Dallas to Cuba, Central America, and South America on June 4, 1948, and with that, little Braniff Airways became an international airline of sizable measure. Strangely, Braniff would not be authorized to serve Mexico until the 1960s, although Tom Braniff had operated a small Mexican airline, Aerovias Braniff, during 1945. Because of intergovernmental disagreements stemming from Aerovias Braniff, Braniff Airways was denied the chance to link the United States with its closest neighbor to the south.

      Braniff continued to expand its South American route system into the early 1950s, but costs caused the need for greater subsidy to ensure the airline was not losing money, which could affect its domestic operations. The Latin American division, or LAD, did not officially make a cent until 1965. The airline grew again by merger with a small Midwestern carrier, Mid-Continent Airlines, based in Kansas City, in August 1952. The untimely loss of Braniff’s president, Tom Braniff, in a private plane crash in January 1954 saw the first change in management since 1935, when Paul Braniff left the company to pursue other ventures. An able manager, Charles Edmund Beard was hired as his replacement, with Beard assuming most of Paul’s duties. It was Charles Beard who stepped forward to graciously accept the helm in January 1954, now that the company’s cherished cofounder was gone.

      Beard successfully flew Braniff into the jet-powered age in 1959 with the introduction of the Lockheed L-188 Electra four-engine turboprop followed by the pure jet Boeing 707 in December of that year. The airline had expanded operations across

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