When Piedmont Airlines made our world a little larger

Editorial by Burlington Times-News, October 20, 2015.

US Airways passed silently into aviation history Saturday, completing a merger that absorbed it into American Airlines. It’s a once-thriving corporation folded and tucked into another at the end of a two-year transition process.

But for folks around here who remember, there’s a little more to it than that.

Some might recall that US Airways carried a germ of the late, great Piedmont Airlines. As the name implied, Piedmont Airlines started in Winston-Salem, then spread its wings to become a factor in East Coast air travel, but remained solidly based in our neighborhood. Hundreds from the Triad area were employed by Piedmont. Most, if not all, people of a certain generation probably had their first commercial airline flight via Piedmont out of either Winston-Salem or Greensboro.

Indeed, Piedmont was a plucky carrier in those days before deregulation with a strange collection of seemingly random flights. The first one took off from Wilmington and took passengers to Cincinnati, for example. That was on Feb. 20, 1948.

Piedmont actually began not as a carrier but as a repairer. Thomas Davis of Winston-Salem bought then-Camel City Flying Service in 1940 and changed the name to Piedmont Aviation. It largely specialized in aircraft maintenance and as a training school for pilots. Piedmont was granted the right to provide passenger service to the southeast in 1948.

From there, Piedmont offered passengers in small towns across the South access to air travel. It stopped in places like Kinston, Florence, S.C., Lynchburg, Va., and Roanoke, Va., and took people from those sites to New York or Chicago. In many ways, it made a previously small world so much larger.

As that world grew, so did Piedmont. It offered affordable jet service in 1967. As the 1970s turned into the 1980s, Piedmont expanded across the country, offering flights from Charlotte to San Francisco and Los Angeles.

In 1989, though, the little airline that could was swallowed by US Air, in what was then the largest merger in airline history. While a regional shuttle line still carries the “Piedmont” name, it’s hardly the same.

US Air later became US Airways and of course is now a part of American Airlines. The name will linger awhile as some old US Airways planes await repainting. Then it will fade away.

Managers promise economies of scale and greater efficiency, and indeed the price of airline tickets is down, along with the price of jet fuel.

Still, thoughts of Piedmont, and even US Air, will stir moments of nostalgia among old-time travelers from North Carolina and especially the Triad. We’re talking about those who remember Piedmont Triad International Airport when it was just called Greensboro Airport, and people used to get dressed up to go there and dine in its one relatively swanky restaurant and watch jets take off and land. There was a certain romance to it all.

Nowadays, of course, most everybody flies, and the adventure of it has turned more to dread as we trod from food court to food court in search of a Cinnabon.

Thanks to the wonders of computerized booking, there are almost never empty seats, and airlines — eager to economize — have packed more seats into the cabins. Instead of the vanished elegance one used to see in the old “Airport” movies, the flying experience often seems more like the cattle-car scene in “Doctor Zhivago” as people are steered into zones 2, 3 and, ugh, 4.

It makes one long for the days of the old Boeing 727 and Braniff’s party-colored jets.

They just don’t make airlines like Piedmont anymore.

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