Just as an aside...

I was Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA, the giant smile on the radome)
employee #521. Best college job a kid could have, four years with an
airline. Sold my car, used my savings bonds, bought all the stock I could
get my hands on at the employee sale the day before the stock went public.
Bought my first airplane AND house with the profits from that little deal.
(And that, boys and girls, is why RST Engineering's first product was called
the RST-521.)

Some years later at a banquet I happened to be sitting next to the Southwest
VP-Ops. We got to chatting and I found out that he had bagged a set of the
business documents when PSA went belly-up and sold out to US Air, who
promptly trashed the purchase. Seems that Southwest was built on the PSA
model, right down to the decision to have ONE airplane type in the fleet and
know that airplane inside and out.

Sure, PSA made a ton of money by putting butts in chairs; that's what paid
the kerosene bills. Sure, we packed the old Electras and 3-holers as tight
as we could, but we had fun doing it. We had stews (no, dammit, in the '60s
they were STEWARDESSES, not flight attendants) who would play guitar and
lead the whole danged airplane singing from SanFran to SanDiego, we had a
couple who were caricature artists, some who took on all comers in chess,
anything to have FUN flying.

Southwest still reminds me a lot of those days. If you don't like
cattle-call airlines, there are a lot of old stodgy companies still doing it
the old way. Reno Air (now gone), Southwest, a handful of other little
startups are doing it the way I think it should be done.

Jim





"Blueskies" wrote in message
m...

Southwest leads the pack for good reason. I have not had a good experience
on any of the 'majors' for a very long time