Up with Upward

El Al stands for "upward" in Hebrew and is an apt description of the 20-year-old Israeli airline that carries the name. The company has increased its sales elevenfold and managed to earn a profit for the past ten years--without outright government subsidies. From a pitiful $5,750,000 revenue in its first full year of operation, El Al moved up to $12 million by 1957, when it introduced transatlantic flights with turboprop Britannias, and then nearly tripled revenues in 1961 with jets. Despite the Six-Day War, the airline grossed over $63 million and made a record profit of $1.5 million in 1967.

This week El Al President Mordechai Ben-Ari is expected in Seattle to sign up for a second Boeing 747 jumbo jet. He already has options for two of their earliest SST's to be built, and hopes for permission to extend El Al's service to Miami, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles, in addition to New York.

The company now owns seven Boeing 707 jets and has paid off all but $12 million of their cost. Additional planes--two of them on lease--help out with the busy schedule: eleven weekly flights to New York, one to Johannesburg, plus others to 17 European cities. With its biggest expansion yet under way--the $90 million move into the jumbo jets--El Al expects to carry a million passengers by 1972.

National Instrument. The airline literally came out of the underground. Between scheduled flights to European capitals in the early years, its secondhand, U.S.-built C46 Commandos and Skymasters used to be outfitted with Cuban colors and repainted "Near East Airlines" overnight in order to evacuate 140,000 stranded Jews from Arab lands. More recently, during last summer's short but savage war, 60% of El Al crews were mobilized, while the rest moved military cargoes from Europe to Israel. "El Al is not only a national airline," explains President Ben-Ari, a scarred veteran of the 1948 Israeli-Arab war. "It is a national instrument in time of emergency."

The vast majority of travelers to Israel--some 85%--are tourists and pilgrims to the Holy Land, almost two-thirds of them Jewish. They are served rabbinically supervised dishes along with a pamphlet explaining Jewish dietary laws and a copy of Tefillath Haderech, the traditional Jewish prayer for a safe journey.

Obeying Jewish religious laws means added expense. El Al loses 60 days a year by not operating in or out of Tel Aviv on Sabbath and religious holidays. Each plane must carry 400 lbs. of additional pots and plates for separate meat and dairy dishes. Soon, even a Torah scroll may be carried by each El Al plane. "We enjoy our Jewish-ness," says an airline official in Tel Aviv. "We are going to make the most of it."

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