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This spring, Hughes stunned everybody by cashing in his chips—all 6,584,937 shares of TWA, for $546 million, six times his original $90 million investment. Still, Tillinghast has insisted that the suit against Hughes remain alive. "It's a corporate asset," says TWA's General Counsel Melvin Milligan.
Though rid of the Hughes incubus, Tillinghast and TWA do not lack for problems, thanks to the lively state of airline competition. "Our industry," says American's President Sadler, "can't compete on price, so we have to compete with gimmicks."
It certainly does. The first-class passenger is deluged with free cocktails, champagne and steak-filet meals, offered a concert on earphones as well as movies. The stewardesses even wake people up to give them eyeshades for sounder sleeping. To woo frequent business travelers, American has a club for businessmen's secretaries, buys them dinners and takes them to the movies. Eastern sends secretaries flowers and seed packets.
I I I Ways to Rome. In their battle to keep half a million seats a day filled, U.S. airlines also depend on a bewildering maze of cut-rate fares. An ordinary round-trip first-class seat, from New York to San Francisco costs $321.80, or 6.20 a mile, while the jet coach passenger pays only $290.20, or 5.60 a mile. But a 30-day excursion by jet coach, which requires the traveler to stay over at least one Saturday on the Coast, costs only $217.65, or 4.20 a mile.
There are family fares, allowing a third off for a wife and two-thirds off for additional members of the family aged two to 21 on coach flights; 25% off for all accompanying family members in first-class, except between Friday noon and midnight and from Sunday noon to Monday noon. There are night coach fares, which cost 15% to 20% less than day coach rates and are mostly available on north-south flights. Also available are propeller-driven-plane fares, group fares of several types, youth and military standby fares, and many more. An Alitalia executive recently calculated that a passenger from the interior of the U.S., journeying through New York to Rome and several other European cities before returning via London, could fly under 111 different fare combinations.
Yet a degree of reason underlies the apparent fare madness. Explains Tillinghast: "We're trying to bribe the public to go at non-peak times. If you had a single fare system, you would get an unwholesome peaking of traffic and an unhealthy number of empty seats."
That is a lesson the railroads never really applied, and the Civil Aeronautics Board means to see that the airlines do not repeat the error. Though some critics insist that airline fares should be slashed across the board, the CAB so far has settled for approving almost any cut-rate special fare, and the prospects that this policy will change look small. Grumbles Delta Chairman C. E. Woolman: "There's everything but a fare for left-handed people with large heads."