The World’s First Budget Airline Takes Off

HISTORY This Week

The HISTORY® Channel

History, Education, Society & Culture

4.6 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 1 May 2023

⏱️ 29 minutes

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Summary

May 6, 1949. On the runway at Lindbergh Field in San Diego, a scrappy upstart called Pacific Southwest Airlines, PSA, is about to take its first flight. PSA is a budget airline—the world’s first. Other jet age carriers will offer luxury in the sky, but PSA does not. It’s exploiting a loophole in the American flight system to do things very differently. How did PSA manage to offer flying to ordinary people at prices they could afford? And how did it force an entire industry to reimagine itself?

Special thanks to our guests: Mary Boies, former fellow on the Senate Commerce Committee, White House staffer, and general counsel to the Civil Aeronautics Board; Jim Patterson, early PSA employee, and eventually its vice president of operations; and Michael Roach, former lawyer at the Civil Aeronautics Board.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The History Channel, original podcast.
0:05.2	History this week, May 6, 1949.
0:10.7	I'm Sally Helm.
0:13.4	On the runway at Lindbergh Field in San Diego,
0:16.8	a little snub-nosed silver airplane sits ready for takeoff.
0:22.1	It's a DC-3.
0:23.8	It holds 28 passengers tops,
0:26.2	and it's the first plane to fly for a new upstart company
0:30.4	called Pacific Southwest Airlines, PSA.
0:35.5	It taxis down the runway and peaks off.
0:40.0	After a short flight, it successfully touches down in Northern California.
0:45.9	Some of these passengers have just gotten their first ever chance to fly.
0:51.3	PSA was started by a military veteran who fought in World War II.
0:57.3	And at this time, he is not the only person interested in getting regular people into the sky.
1:04.0	Across the ocean in England, engineers are tweaking World War II war planes
1:09.6	to create the first passenger jets.
1:12.1	Just a few months after that little snub-nosed plane takes off in San Diego,
1:17.2	one of those jets makes its first test flight.
1:20.8	And that will usher in what is known as the Jet Age.
1:24.8	Welcome aboard the spacious cabin,
1:27.6	attractively decorated air-conditioned bedraft-free.
1:33.3	Jet travel is swanky.
	...

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