Flying With Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA) In 1974

Above, yours truly about to board a "PSA Grinningbird" in San Jose.

This morning, I scanned some photos from April 1974 of the first airplane flight I took.

It was aboard a Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA) Boeing 737 or Boeing 727, I don't exactly remember which. Max Bettman, Mitch Geriminsky and I were returning to Los Angeles from a Republican State Central Committee Convention in San Jose in which then-Vice President Gerald R. Ford was the headliner.

Above, Max Bettman and your truly aboard the PSA jet.

In our Hawthorne High School alumni Facebook page, I started a discussion on PSA. I scanned the accompanying photos to post in the discussion. 

Above, Mitch Geriminsky. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

On PSA, according to Wikipedia:

Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA) was a United States airline headquartered in San Diego, California, that operated from 1949 to 1988. It was the first large discount airline in the United States. PSA called itself "The World's Friendliest Airline" and painted a smile on the nose of its airplanes, the PSA Grinningbirds. Opinion L.A. of the Los Angeles Times called PSA "practically the unofficial flag carrier airline of California for almost forty years."

The airline initially operated as an intrastate airline wholly within the state of California. This strategy which avoided the steep costs from federal regulation would later serve as the model for Southwest Airlines, doing in Texas what PSA had done in California. After the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, PSA expanded to cities in other western states, and eventually to several cities in Mexico.

In 1986 PSA became the first of two airlines that merged into the existing USAir, followed by Piedmont Airlines in 1987. The PSA acquisition was completed in 1988. USAir changed its name to US Airways in 1997. In 2005, after its second bankruptcy filing, America West Airlines acquired US Airways, continuing with the name until it merged with American Airlines in 2015.

Above, a shot of a PSA stewardess. Photo by Armand Vaquer.