LOSS BY AIRLINES

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 69, Issue 76, 10 January 1949, Page 4

LOSS BY AIRLINES

Attributed to Free Meals (By Ernest Heitmann.—Reuter’s Correspondent). (By Airmail) WASHINGTON. Why should the airlines operate the only overland transport system which provides free meals? That is the question which many United States operating companies have been > asking themselves recently—and at least one has not been able to find a satisfactory answer. Western Airlines has filed, a request with the Civil Aeronautics Board (C.A.A.) 'seeking its permission to eliminate as from January 1, “free meals on all flights and routes of its system and as a result reduce its fares by 5 per cent. If this permission is the airline which introduced the custom on May 26, 1928. is likely to be the first to 'decide that those who eat should pay. In data which the company lias submitted to the C.A.A. in support of its application, it is pointed out that the cost of supplying meals is added to the cost of all passenger tickets sold. But there the uniformity ends. About 46 per cent of the passengers carried on the Western Airline routes are served with meals, but about 25 per cent, of these people do not eat them. Thus two-thirds of Western’s passengers buy meals tor the one-third who eat them. During 1947 domestic airlines in the United States spent more than 10,000,000 dollars on supplying free meals to passengers. In the same year the industry lost approximately twice that amount. Assuming that the airlines would have carried the same number of passengers—and they suspect that the free .meal is no inducement to travel, by air the industry’s losses would have been halved. Of course, this assumes, also, that the C.A.A. would not have insisted upon a reduction in fares.

Cutting Frills to Flying

It is no secret that domestic airline operations in the United States is not a profitable business—and it is generally accepted that one of the basic reasons for this is that the cost of air transport is still beyond the means of a large section of the population. Western Airlines—and other operators are known to ho thinking along the same lines—believe that the time is ripe to <cut the frills from flying to decide, in effect, whether the main tent or the sideshows are going to support the circus. One operator summed it up recently: “To-day the frills in our business have reached such proportions that the qualifications for an airline sales manager demand that he know almost as much about the preparation and serving of a filet mignon at 20,000 'feet as he does about the flying time between any two cities on. the air map.” Free meals are a relic of the days when the public had to be offered extra inducements to increase passenger volume. As air transport progressed, more and more frills were added, often without much attention being given to the cost factor, until the airlines were offering a luxury service appealing to a class of patronage whose wallet rather than his need determined whether he should use the aeroplane in getting from place to place. To-day it is being argued, air travel must appear to a market considerably different from that of 20 years ago for the use of air transport has been realised hv a sufficient number of people to remove the necessity of offering bonuses to travellers. It is believed that Western Airline’s example will he followed by other operators. Nevertheless air travellers will not be expected to go hungry. On Western’s 4497 route mile system, the. average passenger’s journey lasts only a little more than an hour and a quarter. On longjer flights, the experiment is being tried of feeding passengers on the ground at airport restaurants while the plane is being loaded, serviced and fuelled. Express flights of several hours will probably maintain facilities for serving meals in the air. Competitors will be watching with keen interest whether. Western succeeds in its attempt to “get out of the restaurant business with all its attending headaches” or whether the testing of its theories will bring it even more severe “budgetary headaches.”