How Did the Airlines Keep Track of Their Inventory Back in the 1930s?
With so much capital spread through out multiple destinations, how did the airlines know where the aircraft were systemwide? Before the days of computers, GPS, and real time digital data, there had to be a system and in this article we will explore such systems.
Until the 1950s, airlines used a manual system at centralized reservation centers, that consisted of people in groups in a room with physical index cards that represented the inventory, in this situation, airplane seats.
In the 1930s The leadership at American Airlines envisioned a day where the airline would have 1000 planes and looked for any way to eliminate inefficiencies within their system that may prohibit their expansion.
According to National Air and Space Museum / Smithsonian Section: The Need for Air Traffic Control, as the demand for air travel increased, the need for better air traffic control for the routes and especially near airports. Airlines began to create their own system of controlling their own traffic. However, accidents in the mid-1930s, including the crash of a Douglas DC-2 in which New Mexico Senator Bronson Cutting was killed emphasized the need for national system.
Data in those days took a different shape than the digital process it has become today. To elaborate further, the airlines had a system involving cards in a cabinet. The cards represented the inventory the airline had in terms of available seats and flights. The drawers represented the destinations. A customer would contact a sales agent. Then a call is received to the reservation center from the sales agent, the booking agent pulls the card from the drawer to determine the availability, then reports back to the sales agent. If there happen to be an available seat, they would simply checked off a box, inform the sales agent, and returned the card to the cabinet. Overbooked in those days was over 75% full.
Problems arose when the flight being sold reaches that 75% threshold. In this situation the booking agent would have to indicate to the sales agent that the flight is full. The sales agent would tell the customer and ask them if they would like to take another flight.
Ref: Reservisor, From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, last edited on 23 May 2022, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservisor
You would have to imagine that this was manual process of grabbing the index cards from cabinets at each request, and if you add other people to the mix it gets slow and complex.
Keep in mind that somewhere in this process, the airline had to have some idea as to where the aircraft were within the system. This information had to coincide with that ticket sales information. Additionally aircraft usage was determined by times and cycles. In addition there were parts of the aircraft that were time limited. Then there were the inspections for airworthiness requirements.
Then there were the crew requirements. Let’s face it if any part of the flight system is missing or the plane is unavailable, that would mean a canceled flight unless substitutes could be sourced quickly.
To run an airline in those days requires lots of people doing various jobs moving that information manually via index card. All this data in the 1930s was managed on index cards and paper reports.
The issue with this sort of a system is that it was a manual process and information was not readily available in real-time. It may have involved radio, and or telephone communication to brief the airline operations employees of any perinate data.
In the late 1950s, American Airlines felt that they needed a system to make possible real-time access to flight details in all offices, including the integration and automation of its booking and ticketing processes. In 1952, the Magnetronic Reservisor was introduced.
As this article seems to be getting fairly lengthy, we will continue discussing airline inventory as the tech advances through the ages. Be sure to stay tuned – bookmark this site – Share (sharing is caring).
