The Commuters

Fort Wayne, Ind., is a base for 19 important industries, but the visiting businessman who attempts to reach them by air often has a hard time--because Fort Wayne, in spite of its population of 162,000, does not generate sufficient air traffic to maintain a busy commercial schedule. TWA two years ago dropped it as a scheduled stop; United and Delta still serve the city, but outbound travelers have to scramble for seats on planes already filled before they reach the city's Baer Field. The result is that Fort Wayne, in an age when most businessmen jet-hop to business appointments, is hurting.

On to Chicago. This week a Fort Wayne businessman will attempt to help the hurt. Onetime Test Pilot George H. Bailey will start flying HUB Airlines, into which he is pouring $750,000. Using three Beech Queen Airliners, HUB will provide four round trips daily between Fort Wayne and Meigs Airport in downtown Chicago. Next month the service will be expanded to Cincinnati, and eventually HUB expects to be flying between Fort Wayne and Indianapolis, Detroit and Cleveland as well. HUB and a company called Altair Airlines, which begins Philadelphia-Albany service this week with interplant General Electric executives as its primary clientele, will become the 102nd and 103rd entries in the air-commuter industry, a fast-growing business that this year expects to haul no less than a million passengers between big and little U.S. cities.

Commuter airlines are a phenomenon; as recently as three years ago, only twelve were in existence. The industry's growth is due ironically to the arrival of the jet passenger plane on trunk lines and lately on the nation's 13 feeder or local airlines as well. The jets are expensive to fill, and airlines, as a result, are flying farther between touchdowns and slashing service to smaller cities. "The simple fact of the matter," says HUB'S Bailey, "is that the big carriers can't afford to run a $5,000,000 airplane for a 50-mile trip."

Without Coffee. The commuter lines can. The economical Beech planes that HUB will use need only 3.1 passengers to break even. The flight is generally more expensive than a similar flight on a jet, and there are no hostesses, coffee, tea or milk. What the commuter craft does is provide transport for businessmen anxious to negotiate deals.

Thus commuter lines have sprung up everywhere. Beginning service a year ago in Ames, Iowa, with two planes and eight employees, onetime B-26 Pilot Paul G. Delman has built his Commuter Airlines into a bustling business that today has a monthly haul of 3,500 passengers from such places as Ames and Sheboygan, Wis., to Chicago. Midstate Air Commuter Service in three years has built a profitable business linking the isolated paper-industry towns of Wisconsin to Chicago. Pilgrim Airlines of New London, Conn., which currently shuttles to Kennedy International Airport 74 times a week, in four years has raised its monthly passenger load from 60 people to 1,500.

The commuter companies get technical and marketing assistance from small-plane builders, such as Wichita's Beech Aircraft Corp., for whom the birth of the industry has been an unexpected boon. Beech, by modifying its executive Queen Air into a commuter airplane capable of carrying ten people, has sold 37 of them to commuter lines. Excited by such a potential market, Beech is rushing development of a plane presently known as Model 99, which will sell for $400,000, carry 17 people. The company already has 100 orders for it.

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