C&O Air Force: How a railway became a corporate aviation pioneet, The

Today - not quite 100 years after the first powered, manned, heavierthan-air flight - the technology, safety, and accessibility of flying are very much taken for granted. Business travel in particular is an airborne exercise, as time and inclination rarely permit the indulgence of a long-distance train trip. Commercial airlines battle for business travelers' attention with loyalty programs and on-board amenities, while private business jets that not so long ago seemed exotic have become almost commonplace at airports large and small.

Commercial airline hubs such as Chicago's O'Hare Airport have long been congested beyond the point of saturation. Missed connections and canceled flights are expensive, unproductive, and all-too-frequent burdens with which scheduled airline passengers must cope. Over the last half century or so, American businesses of all stripes have embraced the private aircraft as a costeffective and prudent use of company time. Whether propeller-driven or jet-powered, leased or owned outright, rare is the Fortune 500 company not making use of corporate aircraft.

Even America's railroads, the largest of which are increasingly far-flung and detached from their holding company headquarters, have come to depend upon the "company jet" as a vital link in their business. Union Pacific, Norfolk Southern, Burlington Northern Santa Fe, and Kansas City Southern - to name just a few - all have at least one business jet registered in their names.

C&O For Progress

The claim to the largest current fleet of railroad-registered corporate aircraft in the United States rests with CSX Transportation and its parent company, CSX Corporation. This is an appropriate distinction, since CSX predecessor Chesapeake & Ohio Railway (C&O) pioneered the widespread use of corporate aircraft by an American railroad back in the mid-1950s.

As that decade reached its mid-point, the rapid ascent of the airlines still had not quite skimmed the cream from surface modes of mass transportation in the United States. The times, however, were clearly changing - and not in the railroads' favor. With old prewar competitive scars slow to heal and new airborne threats to rail traffic materializing regularly, it took a strongminded railroad management to look to the skies and embrace the "enemy? in the mid-1950s.

Those were the days when America's railroads, the C&O included, looked skyward with a mixture of trepidation and resentment. The railroads still operated topnotch fleets of long-distance passenger trains - and passengers, albeit in steadily declining numbers, still chose to ride them. Highways were improving, but the Interstate System was still over the horizon.

It was when, for a couple more years at least, more people still crossed the North Atlantic aboard ocean liners than in airliners, and they traveled to and from the liners' U. S. ports aboard those same passenger trains. It was a time when railroad officers and executives traveled on company business over company rails in a company "office car" - a sometimes opulent but invariably functional open-platformed vehicle offering transportation, office, meeting room, hotel, and restaurant in microcosm.

The fact that the C&O made the quantum step from steel rail to aluminum wing was due in no small measure to the company's postwar mindset. A legacy of Chairman Robert R. Young's sometimes misdirected enthusiasm, it was summed up by the "C&O For Progress" motto that appeared after the war on everything from menus and timetables to freight cars and experimental steam-turbine locomotives to - perhaps most progressive of all at the time - a Douglas DC-3.

Off We Go..

In order to appreciate just how significant the C&O's adoption of corporate aircraft was in the mid-1950s, it is necessary to look -back almost three decades earlier and understand how the aforementioned "competitive scars" were inflicted upon the U.S. railroad industry.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s a handful of North American railroads, the C&O among them, were quick to recognize the potential threat posed to their passenger revenues by the emergence of commercial aviation. These railroads took steps to embrace the fledgling airline industry and mitigate its impact as direct competition. As public acceptance of commercial aviation grew through the 1930s, more railroads positioned themselves as both airline partners and airline owners.

One of the earliest and farthest-flung of these alliances was Transcontinental Air Transport (TAT). With Charles A. Lindbergh among its backers, TAT was a joint venture inaugurated in 1929 which saw cross-country first-class travelers airborne in Ford Tri-Motors during the day. At night, when the lack of navigational aids precluded safe flight over mountainous areas in the East and desert Southwest, passengers were ensconced aboard Pullman sleeping cars in trains of the Pennsylvania and Santa Fe railroads. This slashed the previous-best cross-country trip in half- to just 48 hours - but the advent of reliable night flying had doomed the venture by 1932.