For a boy who grew up poor, Wolf acclimated himself easily to the badges of fortune.

But Southwest quickly realized that by exposing itself to even the rudiments of yield management, it could take its low fares so much lower that they practically disappeared—while the flights themselves remained profitable. Suddenly a passenger could fly anywhere on Southwest Airlines for $19. After American had beaten People Express at its game,

Inside the airline industry, however, everyone knew Southwest and only too well. It had never lost money, from the time it was fully established in business. And it had flourished while defying almost every success maxim of the post-deregulation world: it had no computer reservations system, offered no frequent-flier program, did not conduct yield

That was it. American could have its customers accumulate mileage instead of Green Stamps, earning free travel instead of household appliances. The concept was not unheard-of among the airlines. Southwest Airlines already had a program in which secretaries got free travel after booking so many trips for their bosses.

The union of devilish details and “godlike power,” as Lindbergh found in the act of flying, makes commercial aviation compelling for yet another reason: the anthropology of the executive suite. The men who run the airlines of America are an extreme type; calling them men of ego would be like calling Mount McKinley a rise in the landscape. Airlines

Braniff’s powerful hub vividly demonstrated another inviolate rule of the airline business: Whoever has the most flights from a city gets a disproportionate share of the passengers. Frequency enhanced convenience—the convenience of flying the day of your meeting, not the night before; the convenience of arriving just an hour before your business

His father soon died of a heart attack, when Herb was 12. Herb and his mother, left at home with a radio and a war raging in Europe, would sit up half the night discussing religion, business, morality, and ethics.

Increasing passenger traffic, Brown reasoned, was the one sure way to wean the airlines from postal subsidies. But public confidence could be inspired only by big, financially secure carriers committed to safety, maintenance, and training, not by the fly-by-night operators abounding at the time. Brown changed the rules so that the airlines received

Kelleher was a hero-worshiper and a reader of history and literature who could reel off couplets from Wordsworth, aphorisms from Clausewitz, and exchanges from Nixon’s 1950 debates with Helen Gahagan Douglas.