AMERICAN AIRLINES
In terms of fleet size and the total number of
passengers transported, American Airlines is the largest
airline in the world. In terms of total operating profits,
American Airlines comes in second worldwide, right after Air
France-KLM.
The headquarters of American
Airlines is Fort Worth, Texas, and is located right next to
DFW; the Dallas / Fort Worth International Airport. This
airline carries out scheduled flights all around the United
States, as well as to Latin America, Canada, Western Europe,
the Caribbean, Western Europe, China, Japan and
India.
American Airlines has five
major hubs that include Dallas / Fort Worth, Chicago O’Hare,
St. Louis, Miami and San Juan. At American’s home base of
Dallas / Fort Worth, the airline operates about eighty-four
percent of all flights at the DFW airport.
American Airlines is very
strong in the transcontinental market. American Airlines
serves 172 cities and works with a
fleet of 709 aircraft, as of May 2006. More than any other
airline, American flies more passengers between Latin
America and the United States than any other
airline.
In 1930 American Airlines was
incorporated as a singular company that was originally made up
of 82 small airlines. These original 82 airlines were acquired
by American Airlines through reorganizations and acquisitions.
Originally, the term ‘American Airways’ was utilized as a
common branding by several independent air carriers.
In cooperation with IBM,
American Airlines started the first electronic ticket booking
system, called Sabre. Before this electronic ticket sales and
management system was
invented, American employed a manual system involving a
round and rotating file. It would take anywhere from 90
minutes up to three hours to look up a flight, book tickets
and make out the customer’s paper ticket. The manual file
system worked fine until growth
made the system obsolete.
In the 1980s American Airlines
changed their system to what’s known as a hub-and-spoke system.
The San Jose International Airport and Raleigh-Durham
International Airport were added to American Airlines
collection of hub airports to accommodate north-south travel in
the United States.
In 2005 American Airlines
suffered losses from both the merger with TWA as well as the
September 11 attacks. Then in July of 2005 the company
reported the first
quarterly profit in seventeen quarters. The company
continues to do well and showed the best recovery after the
9/11 incidents.
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