Eastern Air Lines was once one of the largest airlines in the United States, with its origins dating back to the 1920s. The airline went bankrupt in early 1991 after a number of turbulent years of high debt and labour unrest.
It’s always a huge loss to the staff and travelling public when an iconic carrier goes bust. On the face of it, the story of Eastern’s demise seems pretty straightforward, but the seeds of decline were sowed long before the final years.
Eastern Air Lines Bankrupt Video
Bright Sun Films on YouTube create videos on bankrupt organisations or abandoned facilities. They have recently released a video on what happened to Eastern Air Lines.
This 20 minute presentation provides a decent history of the airline, touching accurately on all the salient points. When you consider today’s airlines with their nationwide coverage, seeing the route map with everything on one side of the country is interesting!
The introduction of the Airbus A300 was a great thing for the European manufacturer, but the debt added by that purchase right around US airline deregulation was arguably the beginning of the end. Of course, during the 1980s Frank Lorenzo entered the picture and it went downhill from there.
After strikes and various elements of mismanagement, the airline finally shut down. It was a sad end for what was once a beloved airline.
Overall Thoughts
I still think the blue on white Eastern livery is one of the most beautiful to ever grace an aircraft. The simplicity and clean lines are just really appealing to me.
While I never got to fly with the airline, I certainly know about them, as they left a legacy to the industry as a whole. Their support of the Lockheed L-1011 during the Rolls-Royce engine issues could well have saved that entire programme for example.
Did you ever fly with Eastern? What were they like? I’d love to hear your experiences. Thank you for reading and if you have any comments or questions, please leave them below.
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Featured image by Clinton Groves on AirlineFan.com via Wikimedia Commons.
I grew up in Miami and one of the neighborhood kids’ father was a corporate lawyer for Eastern so we got a little more insight than a lot of the general public. The rest I gathered through local news or my youthful years as a travel agent.
The video is pretty accurate and provides a fairly good context. It doesn’t really go into the competition aspect very much. A lot of Eastern’s bread-and-butter routes after deregulation were suddenly challenged by newcomers charging money-losing prices like $79 Miami – to LaGuardia. For an upstart with extremely low costs the situation was tenable for a while until business declined or debt killed the upstart; for Eastern, with legacy costs, matching these fares was a slow death sentence.
There were profitable portions of the company such as the shuttle and the hub in SJU. The Pan Am and Eastern Shuttles were solid moneymakers but Lorenzo, largely regarded as a soulless corporate raider (congress actually changed bankruptcy laws due to his abuses), sold the shuttle along with whatever else he could in the name of short term profit.
Another thing mentioned but didn’t get much detail is just how much the unions hated Lorenzo, and eventually Eastern itself. Charlie Bryan, the head of the IAM mechanics union swore to destroy Eastern and managed to keep his oath through unrelenting warfare.
As to the flying experience, I thought Eastern was just fine but not particularly remarkable unless you count the time they left my luggage behind on a long weekend to Jamaica where all I had was the suit I was wearing.
There is one part of Eastern that thrives to this day: SystemOne, their CRS that I learned to use because we were both based in Miami. Today many airlines use it as the backbone of the reservation system under the name Amadeus.
Quite true, the competition from airlines like Air Florida would certainly have hurt airlines like Eastern. Deregulation was certainly a massive shake-up for the industry as a whole in the United States.
The only reason I know how bad Lorenzo was and how much he was hated is because of online forums. Mention Eastern and invariably his name will come up and people still loathe him to this day and it’s decades after the fact.
Thanks for all of that – very good points all round. Nice little tip re SystemOne. I had a small look around online and it seems the CRS history is also a very tangled one in a lot of ways. Would make for a nice article one day if I could ever unravel it all!!
I was a frequent passenger on Eastern, and it was rare that I wasn’t happy with my dealings with them. There are many who will say how horrible the staff were towards the end, as well as the horrid state of their aircraft. I never found that to be true, and I flew with them until they went under.The Air Shuttle between BOS/LGA/DCA was well run, and when a second section for a flight was being staged using a Lockheed Electra, I opted for the slight delay to fly that amazing aircraft. I have only fond memories of the airline.
I’m really glad to hear all of that, because I had heard the same regarding how things were towards the end. It’s nice to hear the reality from someone who was actually there! I would have done the same as you regarding getting on the Electra when it was available. Thanks for that, I would have loved to have flown with them!