United Airlines

United Airlines’ name came through the Black and Brown affair unscathed. This was because each of the airmail carrying lines operated in their own names, for example, Boeing Air Trans­port, Pacific Air Transport, and United Air Fines Transport Corporation. The chief oper­ating officers of the companies caught up in the Brown affair were banished. Thus, United’s Phil Johnson left the stage and the presidency of United Airlines was assumed by Pat Patterson, a 34-year-old former banker who came up through the ranks from Pacific Air Transport.

Patterson is credited with initiating the in­flight passenger service staffed by young women, initially nurses, in 1930. The United group was the strongest of the airlines of the 1930s. It was United’s lead that counted with the other airlines when Patterson decided to continue passenger and freight service in spite of the cancellation of the airmail contracts in 1934, as he said, “no matter what the losses.” United maintained its schedules but at tremendous cost. Even with the return of airmail contracts, given the reduced rate then paid and the losses suffered during the cancellation period, United lost more than two million dollars in 1934, and continued to struggle financially over the last years of the 1930s, fall­ing behind American Airlines with revenues less than half of American by 1938.

The United group, in their individual oper­ating names (Pacific Air Transport, Boeing Air Transport, etc.) had been the lone airline group to sue the government over the airmail cancella­tion decision in 1934. That litigation would drag on and not be finally resolved until 1942, when the decision of the U. S. Court of Claims was handed down.2 The court upheld the right of the government to cancel the contracts, but awarded damages to United for those sums representing United’s airmail carriage up to the date of cancel­lation. The language of the opinion is generally considered to be favorable to United and not in keeping with the tone of the Black investigation and the negative airline press it generated.

It can be argued that United’s difficulties beginning in 1934 were due to an unfriendly relationship between the Roosevelt Administra­tion (which would remain in office until 1945) and United due to the litigation, and exacerbated by a general anti-corporate attitude in certain government quarters. For example, the Inter­state Commerce Commission (ICC) had assumed responsibility for rates and mergers as a result of Black-McKellar. In 1936, the ICC refused to approve a merger between United and a money­making line serving New York-Washington. When the Civil Aeronautics Authority took over the ICC function in 1938, it denied pur­chase authority for United’s bid for Western Air Express (the split-off branch that did not merge with TAT to form TWA). United, with its 10-passenger Boeing Model 247s, was struggling to compete against the larger and faster DC-2s and DC-3s of the other lines.

In 1937, United still had its transcontinental route, but that was in heavy competition with the other routes awarded by Brown. It did not have the strength of the eastern lines that resulted from their consolidation of the shorter route struc­ture between cities of the more populous eastern United States. Not until the 1960s would United be once again the airline industry leader.