PSA Offering Intercompany Mail Service

Pacific Southwest Airlines on Wednesday said that it has begun a same-day mail pickup and delivery service that will serve companies with operations in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

“This will be a mailroom-to-mailroom kind of service,” PSA spokesman Bill Hastings said. “Several times each day, we’ll come to (a) mail room to pick up mail and deliver it to (a) mail room in the other city. We guarantee same-day service.”

“As far as I know, this is a unique idea,” said Richard Davis, a Nashville, Tenn.-based industry analyst with Equitable Securities. “It’s an interesting concept if they have the fleet of trucks to do (pickups and deliveries). You obviously can’t just fly in and pick it up.”

PSA’s Inter-Mail service will utilize an independent fleet of trucks, which the airline had previously contracted to operate an existing package delivery service in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Intra-company mail will be carried on PSA flights that leave the two cities every half hour between 6:30 a.m. and 8 p.m.

The Inter-Mail program might later be expanded to PSA’s other markets, Hastings said.

“I’m sure other people must have thought about this kind of service in a high-frequency corridor like California, but I don’t know that it’s ever been done,” said Davis, who has followed the growth of overnight delivery leader Federal Express Corp. “This sounds like a different extension of the small package business.”