AIRLINE TRAVEL
SERVICES
Airlines are companies that
provide air transport services for freight, passengers or
chartered flights. Airlines own or lease
the aircraft that are
used to carry out one or more of the forementioned services. An
airline may also form an alliance or
partnership with
another airline or airlines to benefit mutually.
The demand and pricing for air travel
services depends on a number of factors,
including leisure passenger needs,
business passenger
needs, demand for business cargo shipments and all of these
are of course influenced by overall economic activity
of a given area or
region.
Overall, the demand for air
travel services has risen rather consistently. While annual
growth rates during the 80s and
90s ranged
between 5-6%, this was a drastic 15% in earlier days of
aviation during the 1950s and 1960s.
Growth rates are certainly not
consistent across the board and differ from area to area. In
areas where deregulation
provided greater
pricing independence and so competition, the results were
lower fares and sometimes very dramatic spikes in overall
growth.


After World War I the U.S. was
inundated with aviators. Many of these aviators opted to use
their war surplus planes to
perform various
barnstorming programs for passengers and
spectators.
In 1918 the United States Postal
Service began to use airplanes to experiment with air mail
service. They used aircraft gotten from
the United States Army.
After the Army flew many air mail missions, the Post Office
decided to start their own air mail network,
as the Army
proved to be unreliable.
Though the 1920s brought
passenger airlines, many of these companies still dealt
primarily with transporting mail. Then in the year
1925, Ford bought the Stout
Aircraft Company as well as started construction on an
all-metal aircraft that became the first
American passenger airliner.
Pan American World Airways was
the first American airline to go international, and was the
only U.S. airline to do so before the 1940s.
Even during the depression the
American airline industry was profitable for most airlines and
continued to be so until the start of World
War II, when the U.S. saw much
better airline profits than war-torn Europe. Around this time
the airline industry really took off
with advances in
technology as well as manufacturing of aircraft.
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