For many, Sunday is bittersweet; employees are excited to complete the integration, but some customers are not happy to see the beloved AirTran brand be switched to Southwest.
Over the last two decades, AirTran has had a long and significant presence in the U.S. airline industry as it dates back to the introduction of ValuJet. In this week’s FlashBack Friday, we take a look at ValuJet and AirTran.
When Eastern Air Lines went out of business in 1991, it left a void in the Southern travel market which was growing at a rapid pace, but Robert Priddy – the founder of Atlantic Southeast Airlines and Florida Gulf Airlines – started working on plans for ValuJet – which he helped co-found in 1992 – to help fill the void.
From the beginning, very few took ValuJet seriously; it had a cartoon character painted on the fuselage of its old DC-9s it acquired from Delta, and its orange and yellow all coach seats were not really eye candy. Plus, ValuJet based its operations in Atlanta where it would have to directly compete with Delta who had been dominating the Atlanta market since 1941.
Despite what people thought about ValuJet, it still continued to push that it offered low-fares and only flew full size jets, and passengers started jumping on the bandwagon.
On October 26, 1993, ValuJet flew its inaugural flight – ValuJet 901 – from Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport to Tampa with 105 customers. Shortly after the first flight, word started spreading quickly that ValuJet’s fares were much lower than Delta’s, and passengers really appreciated this.
Meanwhile, the airline became very profitable thanks to non-union crews, low fares, high aircraft utilization, and sub-contracting most operational functions, and the airline filed for an initial public offering (IPO) in 1994; it soon became one of the hottest trades on Wall Street.
Some saw what was going on at the airline as a recipe for disaster.
Two years after starting flights, ValuJet placed an order for 50 MD-95s which later became known as the 717 when Boeing bought McDonnell Douglas. This was the first time in history that an airline as young as ValuJet would become the launch customer of a new aircraft.
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