Eastern Air Lines, Inc. - Delaware

Beautifully engraved certificate from the Eastern Air Lines issued in 1989. This historic document was printed by the Security-Columbian United States Banknote Company and has an ornate border around it with a vignette of an allegorical woman with a plane and city skyline in the background. This stock certificate has the signatures of the Company's President, Frank Lorenzo and Secretary, Richard Margirro and is over 117 years old.




Certificate Vignette

Eastern Air Lines began life on April 19, 1926 as Pitcairn Aviation. Pitcairn won a government contract to fly the US Mail between New York City and Atlanta, Georgia, operating Mailwing single-engine aircraft. In 1929 Clement Keys, the owner of North American Aviation, purchased Pitcairn. In 1930 he changed the name to Eastern Air Transport, and it would soon be known as Eastern Airlines.

In 1938, the airline was purchased by World War I flying ace, Eddie Rickenbacker. Rickenbacker pushed Eastern into a period of prodigious growth. Throughout the 1940s, competitors were acquired, more advanced planes were purchased and international routes were opened. By the 1950s, Eastern's propellers were very prominent up and down the East coast of the United States.

In 1960 Eastern's first jets, Douglas DC-8s arrived, allowing Eastern to open non-stop service from New York City's Idlewild International Airport to LAX. The DC-8s were joined in 1962 by a regional airliner, the Boeing 727. Around this time, Eastern started changing their plane's livery colors to include the dark blue hockey stick design, iconic in the airline industry.

The 1970s brought dramatic changes in the configuration of Eastern Airlines. Internationalization began as Eastern opened routes to new markets such as Madrid, Mexico City, Santo Domingo, Nassau, Bahamas and London. Services from San Juan, Puerto Rico's Luis Munoz Marin International Airport were expanded, and Eastern bought the Lockheed L-1011 jet, which would become known in the Caribbean as El Grandote (the huge one).

Boeing 747s, leased from Pan Am, were also introduced for a short time during that period, and Eastern became the official airline of Walt Disney World. Eastern's official ride at Disney's Magic Kingdom park was If You Had Wings.

During the 1970s, Eastern Airlines flights suffered two crashes, one of which became a subject for a Hollywood movie. Eastern Airlines Flight 401 was preparing to land in Miami, Florida in 1972, when the flight crew became distracted by a non-functioning gear light. While pre-occupied with fixing the light, the autopilot was inadvertently disengaged, allowing the plane to drift far below its planned flight path. The flight crashed in the Everglades, near the same site of the ValuJet Flight 592 DC-9 crash 23 years later. In Eastern's flight 401 case, it was rumored that the ghost of the pilot who flew that night was later seen on some Eastern planes that carried parts of the doomed plane. While this was an unproven legend, it was the subject of the movie The Ghost Of Flight 401.

In 1975 Eastern Flight 66 (a Boeing 727) crashed on landing at JFK in New York City, killing 113 people. The official cause of the accident was wind shear, a phenomenon that affects the lifting capacity of an airplane's wing, and that can occur in severe weather conditions.

The Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 aggravated its position, forcing Eastern into a competitive low-fare environment in which its high cost of operation put the airline at a decided disadvantage. Its all-important Atlanta hub placed it in direct competition with Delta Air Lines, a more profitable company that avoided labor wars and built a far-reaching route system through the acquisition of other carriers.

Eastern was rolling along when the 1980s started, under its new president, former astronaut Frank Borman. In 1980, a Caribbean hub was inaugurated at San Juan, Puerto Rico (then still named Isla Verde International Airport). In 1982, Eastern acquired Braniff International's South American route network. During this era, Eastern's fleet was split between their "silver colored hockey stick" livery (the lack of paint reduced weight by a hundred pounds) and their "white colored hockey stick" livery (on its Airbus-manufactured planes, the metallurgy of which required paint to cover the aircraft's composite skin panels).

In 1983, Eastern became the launch customer of Boeing's new aircraft, the Boeing 757. Its low cost of operation would make it an invaluable asset to the airline in the years to come. In that same year, Eastern reintroduced service to Ponce, Puerto Rico, using Fairchild Swearinger planes under the name Eastern Metro Express. The Eastern Metro Express operation wasn't limited to Ponce, however, as, under that name, Eastern began services from its San Juan hub to Mayagüez and several other smaller Caribbean communities, from JFK to several northeastern cities, and from Miami to many cities around the South.

Eastern began losing money as it faced competition from no-frills airlines, such as People Express, which offered drastically reduced fares. In an attempt to differentiate itself from its bargain competitors, Eastern began a marketing campaign stressing its quality of service and its rank of highly experienced pilots. The public, however, just wanted cheap fares.

Unable to keep up, in 1986, Borman sold the airline to Frank Lorenzo. Under Lorenzo's tenure, Eastern was crippled by severe labor unrest. Asked to accept deep cuts in benefits, Eastern's machinists went on strike. Lorenzo sold Eastern's shuttle service to real estate magnate Donald Trump in 1989, under whom it became the Trump Shuttle, while selling other parts of Eastern to his Texas Air holding company and its major subsidiary, Continental Airlines, on disadvantageous terms to Eastern. The machinists were soon joined on the picket line by the pilots. Due to the strike, flights were cancelled, resulting in lost revenue for the airline. As a result of the strike and other financial problems, Eastern filed for bankruptcy protection on March 9.

July 2, 1988, Eastern Airlines employee timetableThe coup de grace for Eastern, it can be said, was the 1990 Gulf War. At a nice profit, Eastern sold its Central and South American route network to American Airlines and its transatlantic route network to Continental Airlines. With the higher oil prices and the public's fear of flying at the time, Eastern's sales kept suffering, and Eastern had its last flight in January 1991, officially shutting down on January 18.

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Francisco (Frank) A. Lorenzo was one of the most notorious players in the history of commercial aviation in the United States. Born in 1940, he was the son of Spanish immigrants in Queens in New York. He went to Columbia University and then received a business degree from Harvard Business School in 1963. He had an early interest in aviation that led him to take control of Texas International Airlines (TIA), a company that was on the verge of bankruptcy, in 1971. The Deregulation Act of 1978 allowed Lorenzo to expand his business dealings and he systematically began to acquire companies such as Continental Airlines, New York Air, Frontier Airlines, and Eastern Airlines, in his bid to compete with the new non-unionized airlines. By the mid-1980s, he had acquired a reputation for vicious business practices that were particularly unfair to the labor force. By filing for bankruptcy at different points in his career, he was able to bypass unionized labor and impose harsh working conditions on the employees of his various corporations. His rise to the top was finally thwarted when Eastern Airlines collapsed in 1991 and a U.S. bankruptcy court ruled that Lorenzo was unfit to run the company. Lorenzo left the debacle with a vast personal fortune and tried to found a new airline called Friendship in 1993, but the U.S. Department of Transportation did not grant him permission.



History from Wikipedia and OldCompanyResearch.com.