Papers presented by Joanna Grisinger since 2019

2025 Atlanta, Georgia

"Chasing the Youth Travel Market: Airline Executives and the Civil Aeronautics Board"

Abstract:

The central problem of the airline industry in the 1960s and 1970s was simple: too many seats, not enough passengers. In an era when airline travel was extremely expensive, airline executives scrambled to fill seats on their new jets and jumbo jets. One obvious solution was lowering fares, but airlines couldn't adjust their fares without the explicit permission of the Civil Aeronautics Board. The Board, established to prevent the industry from engaging in a dangerous race to the bottom, had traditionally been wary of lower prices. However, by the late 1960s, airline executives warned of looming financial disaster given all the money they’d invested buying planes that no one was flying. They fought for the ability to experiment with special fares for certain times, certain services, and certain passengers that would attract more traffic and help the airlines’ bottom line. These arguments based in financial need persuaded the Board to change its historically conservative approach. In the two decades before deregulation, airlines experimented with discounted excursion fares, off-peak fares, “Discover America” fares, family fares, military furlough fares, and youth fares. Airlines particularly targeted teens and young adults, a market that was large, growing, and flush with discretionary income. These promotional fares were remarkably successful in inducing many Americans to travel by air, and transitioning air travel from an elite activity to a mass market one.

2024 Providence, Rhode Island

"Airlines, Regulators, and “Unusual Hospitality” "

Abstract:

Throughout the period of strict airline regulation (1938-1984), during which the Civil Aeronautics Board was in charge of air routes and rates, airlines, CAB officials, and members of Congress were in constant contact. Such communications ran the gamut from necessary to unseemly, as airlines sought to ingratiate themselves with the people who controlled them. Airlines invited politicians and bureaucrats to join (invitation-only) airline clubs; gave special attention to their luggage and made sure they weren’t bumped from overbooked flights; and flew them (and their wives) abroad on all-expenses-paid vacations to Honolulu, Bermuda, Hong Kong, Paris, and Johannesburg. Although the CAB’s ethical rules barred Board officials from accepting “unusual hospitality,” most benefits fell squarely into the realm of the “usual” and were met with little more than raised eyebrows from observers. In the 1970s, however, criticism of these friendly relationships got noticeably louder, as consumer groups like Ralph Nader’s Aviation Consumer Action Project argued that close ties between airlines and airline regulators were contrary to the public interest that the CAB was supposed to be promoting. Most prominently, ACAP’s commitment to challenging—in the press, in the courts, and in Congress—favors accepted by CAB chairman Robert Timm in 1974 eventually led to Timm’s resignation, to an investigation into airlines’ illegal campaign contributions, and to congressional scrutiny by the Senate Subcommittee on Administrative Practice and Procedure. This paper, based on research in airline trade publications, CAB records, and the records of the Ford White House, brings together scholarship from business history, administrative legal history, and the development of the consumer movement, to examine why consumer critiques of the close relationship between regulators and regulated and demands for regulation in the public interest led instead to the deregulation of airlines and the end of the CAB.

2023 Detroit, MI, United States

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2022 Mexico City

"Access to the Air: Airline Safety and Disability Rights in the 1970s"

Abstract:

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, physically disabled people were increasingly frustrated about airlines’ failure to facilitate their travel and airline regulators’ failure to intervene. While airplane manufacturers had poured tremendous amounts of time and money into the passenger experience, air travel had not been designed with the protection of physically disabled travelers in mind. Travelers willing and able to navigate physical hurdles, however, often found themselves turned away by airline staff who were skeptical about physically disabled travelers’ ability to fly on their own (regardless of what the passengers themselves said about their own abilities). While airlines were heavily regulated by both the Civil Aeronautics Board and the Federal Aviation Administration, on safety matters they had broad discretion to turn away passengers. Like the airlines themselves, airline regulation had not been designed with the protection of physically disabled travelers in mind. In the early 1970s, such travelers drew on an increasingly common set of rights claims to challenge airlines’ decisionmaking. Physically disabled travelers argued that they had a right to travel, that airlines (as federally regulated entities) had a duty to carry all passengers, and that airlines’ failure to accommodate them was discriminatory. They demanded that the federal government promulgate clearer rules that would limit the discretion of airline employees and protect their own ability to travel. Their demands, airlines’ resistance, and agencies’ slow response demonstrate the costs of regulatory deference to business “expertise” and raise broader questions about public interest group mobilization against regulated businesses.

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