Smooth Weather

When Donald William Nyrop was elected president of Northwest Airlines in 1954, he figured that he was in for a rough ride. Northwest had a long history of woes with its planes, pilots, presidents (two chiefs in two years) and with Pan American World Airways, which was lobbying hard to bump Northwest off the lucrative Seattle-Portland-Honolulu run. By last week Don Nyrop, 46, had piloted Northwest through all those storms. In 1958, said Nyrop, the line's operating revenues climbed from $83.4 million to a record $101 million, and profits through November rose 19.5% to $4,751,036.

The big reason for the spurt was Northwest's 15% jump in domestic passenger mileage, second highest increase in the industry (after Northeast, which rose 65% on the wings of its new Miami routes). Nyrop did it by selling off eight of the aged, unpressurized DC-3s in Northwest's fleet, bringing in 24 DC-6Bs and DC-7Cs in the past two years.

Financing for Jets. Last week Nyrop firmed up the financing for Northwest's $67 million jet fleet of ten Lockheed Electras, which go into service this year, and five Douglas DC-8s, due to arrive in 1960. Northwest has pinned down $84 million from 15 banks, twelve insurance companies and the sale of 457,873 shares of preferred stock (its common stock rose from a '58 low of 10 1/8 to 27 1/8 last week). The line will get more than $10 million by trading in its nine double-deck Boeing Stratocruisers to Lockheed and five DC-7s to Douglas. Though the used-plane market is glutted, Northwest swung the trade-in because it held back, was the last major U.S. line to place firm orders for jets, thus was courted energetically by the planemakers. By ordering late, Northwest figures to get more advanced jets.

Northwest was also helped by Nyrop's intimate acquaintance with official Washington, where he served as head of the Civil Aeronautics Administration (1950-51) and the Civil Aeronautics Board (1951-52). When President Eisenhower overturned a CAB decision in 1955 and ordered Northwest off the Seattle-Portland-Honolulu run in favor of Pan Am, scrappy Don Nyrop flew into Washington, rallied so much political support that Ike returned the route to Northwest, admitted that he had "made an error." Last month Northwest, whose domestic runs had been limited to Northern states, opened a fat Chicago-Florida route, worth $13.5 million a year.

Towels for Businessmen. Despite the buying sprees and the costs of opening new routes. Northwest has managed to hold down expenses. When Nyrop took over in 1954, operating costs per ton-mile were 31.2-c-, among the highest in the industry. By 1958 the figure dipped to 25.1-c-, more than 12% below the industry's average. Nyrop, who pared the CAA budget by $15 million and whittled CAB's mail payments by $13 million a year, cut costs at Northwest by poking into every detail. He turned up behind ticket counters, spent off-hours flying Northwest's 20,000-mile system to find tiny economies.

He also found that many a passenger grumbled about the offhand, grudging service Northwest gave its passengers. Nyrop played to the passengers' fancy with a host of new gimmicks that stress Northwest's "Orient" flavor. He put on Nisei and Chinese-American girls as stewardesses on domestic hops, decked first-class planes with flowers and gave passengers wintergreen-scented hot and cold towels (an old Oriental custom for soothing tired businessmen). Taken together, the changes did much to soothe Northwest Airlines.

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