Airlines: Flying to Success Upside Down

Under Ted Baker, its penurious founder, National Airlines shielded the windows of its Miami headquarters from the sun with brown wrapping paper. When Lewis Maytag Jr., heir to a washing machine fortune, bought Baker out 15 months ago, the first thing he did was to invest in vertical blinds.

The change was an augury; National has been looking better ever since—and so have its books. For the year just ended, the earnings of the eighth largest U.S. domestic airline climbed to an estimated $6,500,000 from $4,300,000 last year. Only two years ago the line was deeply mired in losses.

“Bud” Maytag picked just the right time to take over. In 1961 the Civil Aeronautics Board awarded National the lucrative Southern transcontinental “rocket run” linking the aerospace centers of Cape Canaveral, Houston and the West Coast. Sensing a good opportunity, Maytag, who was then running the Rocky Mountains’ local Frontier Airlines, bought Baker’s 250,000 shares for $6,400,000 with family help.

Not Self-Made. At 36, Bud Maytag is younger by 15 years than any other major U.S. airline president. Grandson of the Maytag who started the washing machine empire, he is the first to admit: “I am not a self-made man.”

After attending Colorado College, he set up his own flying school in Colorado Springs, later bought control of Frontier. Maytag put money-losing Frontier into the black during his four years there, but ran into CAB opposition to his plan to discontinue service to half of the points served by Frontier. He concedes that his initial naivete about the airlines business cost him endless head aches. He sold Frontier to go National.

Maytag brought along his four-man executive team from Frontier to help run National, set out to shine up the line’s somewhat tarnished reputation. National executives, who had grown gun-shy under terrible-tempered Ted Baker, found themselves with freely delegated authority. Maytag modernized National’s fleet (now nine DC-8s, 17 Electras), eased the debt burden by arranging new financing, and prettied up the stewardesses with fuselage-hugging black sheaths by Oleg Cassini.

Maytag is easily the most outspoken chief executive in the airlines industry. He is against airline mergers because he feels that they weaken competition, ardently protests the Government’s tight regulation. “About the only thing left under the airlines’ control,” he says, “is schedules.” He is equally critical of his fellow airline presidents for not opposing Government intrusion and union demands more vigorously. “The heads of many airlines are living in the past,” he says. “The airline industry is now a sophisticated business, but too many of the guys running airlines are the same ones who started the open-cockpit mail runs.” He calmly took on Pan American President Juan Trippe, forcing him to return 390,000 shares that Pan Am had acquired in a swap during a 1958 merger maneuver that came to naught.

Mountain Retreat. Suntanned and crewcut, Maytag is a trim (175 Ibs.) six-footer with a calm, modulated voice and a quiet, determined air. He often works Saturdays, hates to give speeches (though he does), devotes most of his time to financial matters. A keen sportsman, he leaves his beachside house near Miami whenever possible for a 160-acre mountain retreat in Wyoming, where he is usually joined by his second wife and five children (four of them from her previous marriage; Maytag’s first wife has the three children from the first Maytag marriage). A self-styled “free enterpriser,” he strongly backs Barry Goldwater for the presidency. He is the only airline president who is checked out to fly jets (he never pilots passenger flights), but his favorite flying is weekend stunting in his 1940 vintage, open-cockpit PT-17 biplane. Painted boldly on its fuselage is the word NATIONAL —written upside down. Maytag wants it that way so that when he is showboating upside down, National will be right side up.