Now, this is not a denigration of PSA. But there were some very real reasons that PSA was for sale. Folks are overlooking these reasons.
I also need to set history straight just a little bit here.
#1 PSA had done some dumb things over the years that cost them some money.....the purchase of a radio station or two, rental car agency, and the L-1011s come to mind. They also had let their costs get away from them. Towards the end of their life cycle...they were just beginning to go head-to-head against Southwest with less than satisfactory results. PSA was taking WN on between ABQ and LAX and was absolutely, positively, getting their butt handed to them in a paper bag. PSA was a great airline, but management had given in at some critical times on wage demands and their ASM cost was already a cent or cent-and-a-half north of where Southwest's costs were.
#2 Everybody talks about a young lawyer from Southwest who learned everything he needed to know about running an airline by watching PSA and duplicated their success in Texas. This is fallacious for several reasons. First of all, that "young lawyer", namely Kelleher, had absolutely nothing to do.....nada zilch nothing.....to do with Southwest's operations until the early 80s. He lawyered and that was about it.
The real truth is Southwest did have some people out in California looking at the PSA operations, but the manuals were from other sources...the ground ops/reservations/stations operations manuals were TTa, the flight operations manuals were primarily American in tone (Don Ogden, VP Flight Operations...was ex-AA and hAAd been since C.R. Smith made them open the window on the DC-3 to stick the little flag on the nose of the plane as it taxiied to the terminal). maintenance manuals had a Braniff tone (Jack Vidal) and the inflight service manuals, if not pirated from Frontier, read an awful lot like Frontier's.
The reason PSA let Southwest take a look at their operations is they thought they were going to be able to sell some used planes to them. Actually, Southwest thought they were too...until Boeing made them an offer to sell 4 white tails that were parked for $4 Million apiece....a pretty good price on new airplanes.
When Southwest bought the new planes the exchange student business stopped pretty quick. They did adapt some of the PSA peculiarities to their operation (cash register tickets, tape recorded manifests). They also used the PSA one size-fits all-cheap fare approach until it almost bankrupted them, at which time Southwest introduced a peak/off peak pricing policy of $26/$13 on the Dallas-Houston run (San Antonio they went to half price on every flight).
Don't read "Nuts"...don't take a buddy's word for it...if you want to know how things actually transpired there in 1971, read Lamar Muse's "Southwest Passage."
I think the earlier poster nailed it on the head......trying to overlay Allegheny's "cool northern efficiency" on a genteel Southern carrier and a popular low fare California carrier did little more than create a high cost behemoth with multiple personality disorder (can we say "Sybil"?)
Southwest didn't run US out of California. Southwest has never really run anyone out of anywhere. What they do is create a revenue environment where higher cost carriers do not want to spend much time. Will that happen in PHL? Beats my pair of jacks. We'll wait and see, and it will be interestng to watch. Based on the doubling of the service pattern before service is inaugurated....another 14 flights after the first 60 days....I would surmise that WN is taking their PHL incursion very seriously and will stop at nothing to make sure it succeeds. And it will. The big question is can U figure out a way to succeed alongside the ugly planes?
One thing I don't think is the solution at this point is evisceration of employee wages. Your prez/CEO is fond of telling customers that flying Southwest..,.well, you get what you pay for. This is similarly true in terms of paying employees to a certain extent. The goal ought to be figuring out a way to reduce the fixed costs and overhead......the company's structure is broken. If he cant's see that, he shouldn't be entrusted with managing anything more difficult than a weinie wagon in New Orleans' French Quarter.
Best Regards
TxAg