When you picture a garage sale, you might think of your neighbor’s driveway down the street, not an aviation workshop in the shadow of the world’s busiest airport, where Delta Air Lines holds their monthly surplus sale.
Delta fans came from as far as Michigan and even Korea to buy the stuff the airline no longer needs, from seats to engine parts. It’s a chance, these folks say, to own a piece of airline history. And how would they get the stuff home? “We actually flew down with empty bags,” said one man.
Sarah Zeis came in search of a particular piece of Delta history: a well-used beverage cart. “I actually need a bar cart in my apartment of these exact dimensions,” she said.
Getting it home will be a journey all its own.
Proceeds from the sale go right across the parking lot, to the Delta Flight Museum, now celebrating the airline’s 100th year – a first for an American carrier.
It’s a century of service that started without beverage carts … or passengers!
According to archives director Marie Force, Delta owes its existence to a tiny pest: the boll weevil. “It is the most unique beginning of a U.S. airline, I think,” she said. “It’s the only airline that started as a crop-dusting company”
Before Delta, there was Huff-Daland Dusters, started in 1925 in Macon, Georgia. Force said, “After the first growing season, they realized that most of the center of the business was in the Mississippi Delta region. And so, that’s where the name Delta comes from.”
And in 1929, Delta Air Lines’ founder C.E. Woolman expanded the company from pest control to people. Its first passenger flight was from Dallas, Texas, to Jackson, Mississippi, with two stops in Louisiana along the way. A ticket cost $90 round trip – about $1,700 today. Expensive, and not for everyone. Force said, “At that time, about 80% of Delta’s passengers were businessmen” – people trying to speed up a trip that took 12 hours by train to a five-hour flight.
Nearly a century after that first flight, Delta now has more than 5,000 flights a day. The airline has survived mergers, recessions, and bankruptcy, growing from that single route to a nationwide carrier, and the global force we know today.
“Glamour personified”
If you’ve flown Delta lately, you’ve seen flight attendant Susan Slater in the pre-flight safety video. If you’ve flown Delta in the last 60 years, you may have shared a cabin with either Slater (who started with the airline on March 2, 1964) or Kay Carpenter (who started in January 1966). It was the “Golden Age” of air travel, that romanticized era of flights with exceptional service, extravagant meals, and everyone dressed to the nines.
Back then, said Slater, “You had to be unmarried. Your hair couldn’t touch your collar. You had a weight restriction. Back then I think I weighed 103 pounds and I was 5 foot 2-and-a-half. I’m five feet now, barely, and not 103!”
I asked, “What was it about the job that you think spoke to you so much?”
“All I knew was that this was glamour personified,” Slater replied.
Atmosphere Research Group’s Henry Harteveldt, an airline industry analyst, says there is no need to be so quite so nostalgic: “We certainly had a so-called Golden Age of flying back in the early 1960s,” he said. “But it was less convenient. There were fewer flights. You often had to connect. And it certainly wasn’t as reliable and safe as it is today.
“We’re in the new type of Golden Age now, where flying is a lot more accessible,” he said. “You can either buy or create a much nice journey for yourself. You can buy an extra leg room seat. You can pay for priority boarding. And by the way, if you don’t need or value those things or perhaps can’t afford it, you’re not being charged for services that you don’t want.”
Ed Bastian, the CEO of Delta Air Lines, said, “Air travel is one of the great bargains. If you think about the average fare today versus where it was 30, 40 years ago, it’s less than half of what you pay in real dollars.”
While low fares are sought after by some fliers, Delta has built its business around a premium experience, according to Bastian: “The single biggest reason why people chose an airline was fare; whoever had the lowest cost won. And Delta, well, yes, we have a product to compete on the lower end. [But] the majority of our revenue comes from higher-end tickets.”
Their 100th summer is about to take flight, amid clouds of uncertainty … worries about a slowing economy and aviation safety. But Bastian says it could still be their busiest ever, as he looks to the future.
So, what does he see for Delta’s next hundred years? “When you think in the United States, you know, air travel is relatively ubiquitous – you jump on a plane almost any hour of the day and get to almost anywhere you want, you know, pretty, pretty easily,” Bastian said. “However, when you think about the world, and you realize that only one in five people in the world has even been on an airplane, it’s pretty remarkable. We need to figure out ways to make it accessible, to make it affordable, to make it sustainable.”
I said, “Part of that legacy is just how much the world has shrunk in those 100 years.”
“Yeah, that’s what we do,” Bastian said. “We make the world a more connected place, a smaller place. And that’s needed now more than ever.”
While Delta helped shrink the world in the 20th century, they hope their own growth continues, thanks to folks like Susan Slater and Kay Carpenter.
“It’s been a wonderful adventure,” Carpenter said. “I never dreamed that I would be here for this long. When I started, we had just small airplanes. We flew to small cities. And now we fly to six continents. So, I tell all these new hire flight attendants to always remember that one mile on a highway is going to take you exactly one mile. But a mile on a runway will take you anywhere.”
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Story produced by John Goodwin. Editor: Jason Schmidt.
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