Word: ludingtons
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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From the outset Ludington Line was watched with keen interest by the entire industry, since operations without mail contracts were supposedly doomed to failure. Ludington set a new low for fares, a new high for economy of operation, based its hope of success on its convenient schedules. It not only borrowed railroad tactics but got the Pennsylvania Railroad to handle its tickets and to admit Ludington buses to the Penn terminal in Manhattan. At the end of the first year Ludington had carried 66,000 passengers, showed a net profit of $8,073. Skeptics wondered if the Ludington books were...
...September 1930 the brothers Charles Townsend & Nicholas Saltus Ludington, Philadelphia socialites, started Ludington Air Lines, a plane-per-hour service between New York, Philadelphia & Washington-"most travelled stretch of territory in the world."* The Ludingtons put $1,000,000 into the company, kept most of the stock, sold none publicly. They declared themselves prepared to operate at a loss for five years. Last week they sold out to Eastern Air Transport, reputedly...
Three months later Ludington began to slip. It was getting stiff competition from the mail-subsidized Eastern Air Transport, which had begun a passenger service over the same route. A reorganization shook out Vice Presidents Vidal and Paul Collins, who had built the line with the Ludingtons' backing; shook in as president James M. Eaton, formerly of Pan American...
Meanwhile Postmaster General Brown, advocate of airline monopolies, had been urging E. A. T. to buy out Ludington. Negotiations last year got nowhere. Finally, the story goes, the Postmaster General threatened to give Ludington a mail contract unless E. A. T. bought. E. A. T. bought last week, announced it would maintain all Ludington schedules except Washington-Norfolk, which E. A. T. already served. Thus passed, as Cord's Century Lines passed a year ago, another of the "independents" into the Big Four of U. S. airlines...
American Airways 6,580 11,485 74% Eastern Air Transport 4,945 7,937 60% Ludington Air Lines 11,304 9,310 18% Northwest Airways 1,866 3,283 76% Pan American Airways 12,562 14,012 9% Transcontinental & Western Air 179 4,214 48% United Air Lines...