The Happy Gambler of the Air

World Airways' $69.99 flights of fancy

Inflation-weary Americans last week set up sieges at travel bureaus and clogged telephone lines to get tickets for perhaps the best airline bargain ever: World Airways' $69.99 flights from the East to West coast, and from Los Angeles to Hawaii. The tiny airline (1979 revenues: $166 million), in a monthlong promotion offer from mid-April to mid-May, is undercutting existing rates across the continent by as much as $228.

The cheap fares are a carefully staged tactic to fill up World Airways' planes once again. A year ago, the line's cut-rate, $99 coast-to-coast flights were soaring at 80% capacity, when the grounding of all DC-10s after the American Airlines crash in Chicago idled its cross-country fleet. As soon as the DC-10s were again cleared for takeoff, the line was hit by a four-month strike of pilots, mechanics and stewardesses demanding higher pay. Since World finally got back in the air last January, an average of only 17% of its seats have been full. The airline decided that it needed some gimmick to win back the crowds and chose the $69.99 flight. But for all the carefully orchestrated hoopla, the cheap fare remains a gigantic gamble; just to break even, World must fill every single one of the 380 seats on each one of its twelve daily DC-10 flights.

Such a high-risk, odds-against wager is characteristic of World's buccaneering chairman, Edward Daly, 57. A combative Irishman who likes to arm-wrestle visitors, Daly has a reputation for making apparently unsound economic moves pay off. In 1950, at 27, and after a brief career as a semiprofessional boxer, Daly bought the two-year-old ailing World with $50,000 worth of poker winnings. The carrier was no prize. Its debts totaled $250,000, and its assets were only seven planes: two leased war-surplus transports and five unairworthy flying boats that later were sold for scrap.

In the mid-1950s World began to prosper when it was awarded military and passenger contracts serving the Far East.

A few years later, it won the right to fly charters everywhere outside North America. Its big growth, however, came in the mid-1960s, when World started to receive large military contracts to airlift personnel and supplies to Viet Nam.

Along the way, Daly legends sprouted. While rebuilding a newly bought but burned-out plane in London in 1956, the tightfisted entrepreneur saved cash by sleeping for more than a month in the same limousine that he used to visit bankers. In the last days of the Viet Nam War, Daly organized, paid for and flew on a World mercy flight into Danang hours before the North Vietnamese captured the city. The self-styled "old bastard" pistol-whipped and kicked mutinous South Vietnamese troops who tried to board the refugee flight.

Married, with one daughter, Daly drives a Lamborghini sports car, frequently wears mod clothes and takes pride in raising his Arabian horses. He also supports orphanages in the U.S. and abroad. Often tongue-tied in public, his main relaxation is flying around the world in his two private planes. One was owned by Howard Hughes when he was escorting Jane Russell; his other craft, a Convair 440, is painted 14 shades of green, with a shamrock on the tail and a leprechaun near the entry hatch. Daly calls it "the jolly green giant," but less respectful mechanics know it as "the green pickle."

Despite the mobs of customers trying to buy the $69.99 tickets, World's splash promotion was off to a bumpy start last week. Many of the first flights into the air were only half-full because ticket offices had been so overwhelmed by the rush of customers and the company's malfunctioning computer reservation system showed that the planes were full. The colorful and controversial gambler in the air has spun the wheel again; passengers will decide if he comes up a winner. qed

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