Airline Timeline

In: History US Economy

22 Sep 2011

The good people over at HistoryShots created this beautiful geneology of airline companies. It’s interesting to note how many airlines disappeared right around the time of industry de-regulation in the late 1970s.

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4 Responses to Airline Timeline

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Matt

September 22nd, 2011 at 4:03 pm

“airlines disappeared right around the time of industry de-regulation in the late 1970s”

WRONG. The chart is missing a bunch of airlines, mostly regional, but where’s Virgin America, Spirit?

I see this one is all over the West: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_Air

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Airlines_of_the_United_States for COMPLETE list.

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Dustin

September 26th, 2011 at 1:38 pm

Yeah, I noticed that Virgin and some of the others were missing too – but I let it slide because I figured the focus was on the early history. They could have been more consistent (Jet Blue is there as a “new” airline), or indicated in a footnote what they used as a cutoff.

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Josh

September 28th, 2011 at 1:24 am

But by leaving out lots of (big and small) airlines, the chart is extremely misleading. It makes it look like the number of airlines has been steadily decreasing, but only because it doesn’t show most of the new airlines.

Aside from the previously mentioned airlines, the chart is also missing Southwest, A major airline which is 40 years old and has acquired several others.

The text under the chart describes it as, “a full genealogy of over 100 US airlines from the major airlines to the small local service carriers. Folded into the genealogy is the relative market share of passenger traffic for each airline.” But it leaves out so much that I’m not sure it conveys anything useful.

Also, the vertical axis doesn’t seem to convey anything (other than showing mergers, obviously), so why do several of the lines seem to wander up and down randomly?

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Dustin

September 28th, 2011 at 3:25 pm

Southwest is on there…

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