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Fast Resuffle. The passion for pilgrimage has made the airlines the fastest-growing industry in the U.S., expanding by an average 14% a year since 1950, as against 8.4% for the runner-up, electric utilities. The pell-mell pace is still accelerating: this year U.S. airlines plan to take delivery of 287 new jet and turbo-prop planes worth almost $1.5 billion, nearly twice as much as they spent on equipment in 1965. With that outlay, the industry will add as much seat-mile capacity as it had altogether in 1950. The airlines are already the nation's No. 1 public carrier. Last year they accounted for 57% of intercity travel, more than buses (27%) and railroads (16%) combined. Of U.S. travelers heading overseas, 83% now fly.
The strike by 35,400 members of the International Association of Machinists grounded carriers that fly 61½% of all U.S. airline passenger-miles, carry 70% of the nation's air mail, 73% of its air freight. At the behest of the Civil Aeronautics Board, six other trunk carriers and 13 regional airlines feverishly reshuffled schedules and added what extra flights they could to meet the demand for seats.
Though the strike caught the airlines at the seasonal peak of their biggest year ever, they still managed to plug a good many of the gaps in service to 231 cities. Pan American, for example, substituted cramped thrift-class seats for spacious first-class accommodations on all its New York-San Juan flights so as to squeeze aboard 200 more people a day each way. American halved service between New York, Syracuse and Rochester in order to add nine flights a day between New York, Cleveland and Washington. Mohawk Airlines stepped up its schedules where American cut back.
The strike heaped up confusion and distress, humor and heartbreak, unevenly. New York lost an estimated $500,000 a day in tourist trade, retail sales and entertainment spending, while in Chicago, 50,000 conventiongoers jammed hotel space. Air Force Reserve and Air National Guard pilots airlifted some 4,000 strike-stranded servicemen to their destinations, including 1,500 en route to or from Viet Nam. Yet some commercial flights went out as much as a quarter empty because overloaded phone lines deluded would-be passengers into thinking a trip to the airport would be useless.
Trumpet Player Chet Baker, still waiting at Los Angeles Airport at the hour his trio was due to perform in a nightclub near San Francisco, took his horn into a phone booth, piped his third of the music 350 miles north by wire and loudspeaker. A pretty young girl, pleading with a Chicago ticket clerk for a flight to a San Francisco wedding (her own), was surprised to hear the man in line behind her say: "Funny, I've got to get to San Francisco for a divorce—my own." Both got aboard.
Far Apart. In Washington, in a basement room at the Department of Labor, negotiations moved fretfully. At one .point, Chief I.A.M. Negotiator James Ramsey stomped out of a mediating session, held up all negotiations overnight because Northwest had warned its strikers in Tokyo that they must now pay rent in advance for their company-owned quarters. At week's end, Assistant Secretary of Labor James J. Reynolds, the chief mediator, reported that the settlement was "no nearer than a week ago."