Executives: Final Flight

Delta Air Lines, fifth largest U.S.

air carrier, with 14,119 miles of route and 10% of the business, was a one-man show for 41 years. The man was Collett Everman Woolman. Old-fash ioned where finances were involved, “C. E.” was progressive about his equip ment. Nothing pleased him so much as the fact that the airline he founded was the first to fly the Convair 880, the DC-8, and last year the DC-9. Delta was also scheduled to be first with the Lockheed L-100, a civilian model of the Air Force Hercules cargo plane. But when the occasion came last week, it was a sad one. Flying from Houston to Atlanta, Delta’s first L-100 bore home the body of C. E. Woolman, who had died at 76 of a heart attack.

Woolman long insisted that he would never retire. A little less than a year ago, he promoted himself from president to board chairman of the com pany. For president, he hand-picked Charles H. Dolson, 60, a former pilot who first flew for Delta in 1934. The day after Woolman’s funeral last week in Atlanta, Delta’s board of directors carried out C. E.’s wishes by naming Dolson chief executive officer.

Boll-Weevil Beginning. Dolson inherits a company built on small beginnings. Woolman got hipped on airplanes as a student at the University of Illinois. He learned to fly in a wood and cloth-covered Jenny, worked his way across the Atlantic on a cattle boat in 1910 to watch one of the world’s first air shows at Rheims, France. Out of school, he became a plantation manager in the Mississippi Delta, turned naturally enough to airplanes as the best way to dust boll weevils off his cotton. When others sought the service, Woolman forsook cotton growing for crop-dusting.

C.E. gradually expanded into the passenger business, but Delta—a name from the old cotton days—remained a Southern airline until 1948. In that year it landed a route to Chicago, followed this with stretches to the Caribbean, New York City and, five years ago, the West Coast. Wherever he spread, Woolman stressed courtesy. He liked to say that “this airline is my own baby; I started the thing. But I have tried to make everybody at Delta think this is their airline.”

Like Whales. Unlike Eastern’s Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, his longtime competition, Woolman skipped propjet airplanes and waited for the pure jets to arrive. When they did, he refused to float convertible debentures to finance them, instead used Delta’s retained earnings and some modest bank loans. He also ordered a conservative ten-year depreciation schedule instead of the twelve to 16 years that most airlines use. Woolman took the advent of newer, faster, larger airplanes in stride. “I remember when I thought the DC-3 was the biggest plane I’d ever see,” he would say. “They all look like whales when you first see them, but you soon get used to bigger and bigger ones.”

Woolman’s successor, except for devotion to Delta, is an opposite. Charles Dolson is brusque where C.E. was affable, reserved where Woolman was outgoing. St. Louis-born, Dolson earned a civil-engineering degree at Washington University (’28), then became a Navy carrier pilot. Switching to commercial aviation, he eventually became Delta’s chief pilot, was promoted and simultaneously grounded to be operations manager. With earnings and revenues increasing steadily and Delta’s growth consistently exceeding industry averages, Dolson is not apt to change many of C.E.’s policies. Nor will he have to worry about morale. Convinced that Delta does indeed belong to them, 1,100 Delta employees turned up at Woolman’s funeral last week in 23 chartered buses to pay final respects.