The End of an Era

A US Air BAe-146 at the gate in San Francisco.

When you work for an airline, one of the events that marks the passage of time is when the company removes an aircraft from the fleet that you were trained on during your new hire training.  The BAC-111, BAe-146, Boeing 727, 737-200 and Douglas DC-9 were all aircraft that US Air owned and operated when I was hired in 1988, and which I worked at some point in my career.  Ten years later, US Air was no longer operating any of those aircraft, making me feel just a bit older.

But I only witnessed the retirement of one of those aircraft types in person, and that was the BAe-146.  Built by British Aerospace in the early 1980's, the planes were a commercial disaster for Pacific Southwest Airlines (P.S.A.) from the start.  They leaked oil, had problems with the cockpit windows, crammed 100 passengers into a fuselage that could only comfortably seat 80 and, most importantly, had four engines that were incredibly unreliable.

The planes were purchased by P.S.A. for their fuel efficiency, low noise rating and ability to serve smaller cities more effectively than its larger MD-80's.  The fuel savings touted by British Aerospace were negated when P.S.A. finally succumbed to passenger complaints and pulled a seat in each row of seats, drastically reducing their seating capacity.

The planes were ordered to serve smaller cities in the route network such as Stockton and Concord, California and Bend, Eugene and Medford, Oregon.  Stuck with planes with poor British engineering and reliability that never remotely lived up to expectations, P.S.A. tried to make the best of a bad situation.

They never could solve the engine reliability problem.  By the time P.S.A. had been purchased and merged with US Air in 1987, and I came on board in 1988, the employees joked the "BAe" in the plane's name stood for "Bring Another Engine."

The trips I flew on the 146 were invariably shorter "commuter" type flights of only an hour or so that would have as many as six "legs," or flights, in a day.  If I picked up a four day trip on the 146, I could just about count on a cancellation due to an  engine malfunction at some point during the trip.

After a couple of years of operation of the 27 BAe-146's that they had acquired in the purchase of P.S.A., US Airways management finally decided to retire the planes and take them offline in 1991.

By pure luck, I was flying a BAe-146 trip on its last day of operation.  By that time, there was a huge culture gap between the laid back former P.S.A. employees who made up the majority of the employees in US Air's West Coast operation and the hapless, button-down East Coast executives from US Air who claimed to know what was best in running an airline, and then proceeded to run the entire West Coast operation into the ground.

Never did I witness this East Coast/West Coast US Air/P.S.A. corporate culture clash more in evidence than working the 146 on its final day of operation.  I worked six flights that day and each flight was from SFO to a smaller city and then back.  Both the pilots working my trip had brought "For Sale" signs with them that they placed in the cockpit windows.

After we flew from SFO to Burbank for the first flight of the day, a group of former P.S.A. employees came out to take one last look at the old bird.  Two mechanics put some tape on it's front nose, made an outline of P.S.A.'s iconic "smile" on the front of its nose, and spray painted the smile back on the front of the plane.  The employees on the ramp all smiled, took pictures and waved as we departed.

A BAe-146 with PSA's trademark smile on the nose.

An hour later we flew back into SFO, and infuriated executives from US Air who were in California for the plane's retirement, ordered the smile removed from the plane's nose before it pushed back from the gate.  Once again, smiling former P.S.A. employees came out onto the ramp and took dozens of pictures before the smile was removed.

We flew down to Orange County and then back up to San Francisco; where we did the same dance all over again.  Former P.S.A employees, as they were doing at all the smaller stations that saw the 146 on her final day of service, came out to take pictures and give her a happy send-off.  A couple of mechanics again came over to the nose, placed some tape on the front to make the outline of the trademark smile, and then spray painted another smile on the nose, right over the one that had been removed in SFO an hour earlier.  The employees and passengers, all of whom preferred the old P.S.A. over the new US Air, loved it.

We took off for SFO once again and the US Air executives in suits and ties came out to meet our plane with frowns and long faces.  Apparently, each 146 on this final day that took off faceless from SFO or LAX returned with a fresh painted smile on the nose:  P.S.A. style.  The straight-laced, humorless suits from corporate in the East Coast were getting hotter and hotter.  They kept ordering the smiles to be removed, only to watch another 146 fly back into SFO or LAX with a new smile.

We did one last Burbank turn, one more painted smile on the nose and many pictures and waves, and then I walked off the plane in San Francisco for my final time.  I can't say I was going to miss the airplane itself.  It was cramped, ugly and mechanically unreliable.  The trips were long and tough to work.  But the pilots and flight attendants who worked the plane were typically young and fun, and the trips never left the Pacific time zone.

I didn't realize it at the time, but it was the end of an era.  The clueless, arrogant US Air executives from the East Coast, who were the first to boast they knew how to run an airline better anyone in California, would close all three crew bases in the largest state in the country, and discontinue every old P.S.A. route within a couple of years.  It was the first day of the good ol' days.

Where do old planes go when they are retired?  They wind up in airplane "graveyards" in the desert, mostly.  Arizona, Nevada and, like the BAe-146's, the Mojave desert in Southern California.  Where they all sit silently and wait.  For those of us old enough to remember the good old days to come back and catch their smile.

US Air's fleet of BAe-146's in the Mojave Desert.