Sixth Biggest

After eight months of deliberation, CAB last week approved a deal which will make Delta Air Lines the sixth biggest (in route mileage) in the U.S. Subject to stockholders' approval, Delta will swap $10 million in new, convertible debentures for all the outstanding common stock in Chicago & Southern. The merged company, to be known as Delta-Chicago & Southern, will have 6,474 miles of routes through the South and Midwest, plus another 3,034 (now owned by C. & S.) to Cuba, Puerto Rico, Jamaica and Venezuela.

For Delta's President Collett Everman Woolman, 63, who will boss the new line, the merger was the latest in a series of expansions that have boosted Delta from a small, crop-dusting outfit to a seat near the top. A lifelong aviation buff, Woolman, while a student at the University of Illinois, worked his way to France on a cattle boat to a world aviation meet in 1910.

Shortly after World War I, he learned to fly, formed a company of his own, along with Harold Harris, now president of Northwest Airlines, and took crop-dusting teams as far as South America. He landed an airmail contract and passenger route to Peru and Ecuador in 1928, later sold it to Pan American-Grace Airways. In 1929 he helped form Delta and started flying passengers from Dallas to Jackson, Miss. and other Southern cities. He has been rapidly expanding his routes ever since. In the last five years. Delta's net has jumped from $200,000 to $1,650,000. The deal with Chicago & Southern will give him a network stretching from Detroit, Chicago and Kansas City to New Orleans, Atlanta and Miami.

Woolman has another plan up for CAB approval--a merger with Northeast Airlines (TIME, Oct. 9, 1950). If approved, the merger will give him a route into New York, and a crack at the rich North-South traffic now enjoyed by Eddie Rickenbacker's Eastern Air Lines.

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