The Fare Was Set, So Everything Else Was Sold
For about seventeen years, the airline competed on color because the law would not let it compete on price. It stopped flying in 1982.
The Orange Airplane at the Gate
The airplane was orange.
Not a stripe along the windows. Not a logo on the nose. The whole body of the plane, the color of a traffic cone.
The one at the next gate was turquoise. The one behind it was lemon yellow.
The hostesses wore bright printed outfits that looked like they belonged in an Italian boutique. In the early years, some came off in layers as the flight went on.
You could pick that airline out from the parking lot.
It was Braniff.
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The Price Was Already Decided
Braniff began in Oklahoma City in 1928, when the brothers Paul and Tom Braniff started flying passengers to Tulsa. By the 1960s it was based in Dallas and flew across the Southwest and into South America.
What it could not do was set its own prices.
For about forty years, a federal agency called the Civil Aeronautics Board decided what a ticket cost and which routes each airline could fly. A seat between two cities cost the same on every carrier that served them.
That left the customer one question. Not which airline was cheaper. Which one felt better.
In 1965 a new chief executive, Harding Lawrence, brought in an advertising team led by Mary Wells. The campaign was called The End of the Plain Plane. The designer Alexander Girard painted the jets in seven solid colors. Emilio Pucci dressed the crews.
It looked like vanity. It was the opposite.
The paint was the only discount the law allowed.
Style Paid While Price Stood Still
Under fixed fares, the math was forgiving. When costs rose, regulated fares were generally set to cover them.
So money spent on design did not have to beat a rival's price. It only had to beat a rival's beige.
A traveler who flew Dallas to Houston every week could not pay less on anyone. He could choose the brighter cabin and the better drink.
Then the rules loosened. Congress passed the Airline Deregulation Act in October 1978, and routes became available to carriers that asked for them.
On December 15, 1978, the company added 16 cities and 32 routes in one day. It called this the largest single-day expansion in airline history.
By the end of 1979 it flew 115 aircraft to 81 destinations. Revenue in 1980 passed $1.4 billion.
The Same Law Opened the Fare
The 1978 law did two things at once. It opened the map. It opened the price.
For four decades the airline had been built to win on everything except price. Now price was the first thing a traveler saw.
A turquoise jet and a plain white one sat at the same counter, and the plain one could charge less.
Costs moved the wrong way in the same years. Fuel costs rose 94 percent in 1979 and roughly doubled again in 1980.
The new routes needed planes, crews and gates in cities where few people knew the name.
The colors had been a way around the price rules. Without the rules, they were only a cost.
Grounded on a Wednesday
Operating losses ran about $38 million in 1979, about $107 million in 1980 and about $95 million in 1981. Lawrence resigned at the end of 1980. Long-term debt passed $700 million.
The airline stopped flying on May 12, 1982, and filed for bankruptcy the next day.
It had about 9,500 employees. All but a few hundred were let go.
It had been flying for fifty-four years. It became the first large airline casualty of the new rules.
The name returned later on much smaller carriers. None of them lasted.
What the Rulebook Left Behind
The mechanism survives wherever someone else sets the price.
When the price cannot move, companies compete on the carpet, the cup and the uniform. Hospitals paid on fixed government rates compete with atriums and pianos in the lobby.
Airlines learned the reverse lesson. The fare now competes in the open, and the comfort is sold back in pieces: the bag, the legroom, the seat by the window.
The government stopped setting the fare.
The orange stopped paying for itself.
