Harding Lawrence, 81; Led Braniff Airways
Harding L. Lawrence, an airline industry maverick whose unorthodox strategies took Braniff Airways out of obscurity in the 1970s and into bankruptcy in the 1980s, died of pancreatic cancer Wednesday at his home on the Caribbean island of Mustique. He was 81.
Lawrence became president and chief executive of Braniff in 1965, when it operated routes in the Midwest and Southwest. He had spent the previous 10 years at Continental Airlines, where he built a reputation for daring and flamboyance.
During his 15 years at the helm of Braniff, it became the eighth-largest airline in North America. For 11 of those 15 years, Dallas-based Braniff led the industry in its rate of traffic growth and nearly doubled its share of the passenger market.
Emboldened by federal deregulation of the industry, Lawrence led Braniff in a major expansion in 1978 and 1979, grabbing up routes that had been dormant. He added 16 cities in one day alone. He increased service to 22 other destinations and began flying to Europe, the Pacific and the Far East.
Braniff became the first U.S. airline to fly the Concorde, in 1979, when it covered the domestic leg of the Dallas-Washington-Paris-London run.
While the rest of the industry was going to wide-bodied jets, Lawrence converted Braniff’s fleet to the narrower Boeing 727s. He put leather seats in first class and turned his cabin attendants into fashion plates, dressing them in multilayered uniforms by designer Emilio Pucci. By shedding layers, the flight attendants-mainly women-changed costume as many as six times a flight, a feat Lawrence teasingly called the “air strip.’
He hired renowned artist Alexander Calder to turn two jets into flying artworks by painting abstract multicolored designs on them. He had been counseled by New York advertising executive Mary Wells, who urged him to scrap Braniff’s stodgy colors in favor of planes decked out in psychedelic purples, oranges and yellows. The transformation was heralded in a successful campaign conceived by Wells called “The End of the Plain Plane.” Wells later became Mrs. Harding Lawrence.
Lawrence’s unconventional tactics succeeded for awhile. In 1979, Fortune magazine reported that Braniff had the highest percentage of business travelers-70%-and was nearly unrivaled in the size and consistency of its operating margins.
‘There’s not madness in what we’re doing,” he told the Washington Post in 1979. “It’s very calculated, very thought-out. Admittedly, it’s ambitious, but I think we will make it successful.’
He soon had to eat those words.
Analysts said Lawrence had taken Braniff too far too fast. Challenged by spiraling fuel prices and a slowdown in the economy, Braniff began to fall apart. By late 1979, its losses reached $44 million. By 1980, it was retrenching at home and abroad, cutting back domestic flights by 20% and retreating from the Pacific, the Far East and some parts of Europe. The Calder jets were painted over in traditional Braniff colors.
Just before Christmas in 1980 the airline’s senior lenders forced Lawrence to step down.
Braniff ceased operations in 1982, buried under $1 billion in debt.
Born in Oklahoma and raised in Texas, Lawrence started in aviation as assistant director of the No. 1 British Flying Training School in Terrell, Texas, in 1942. In 1946, he joined Pioneer Air Lines in Houston as an assistant vice president. When Continental merged with Pioneer in 1955 he became Continental’s vice president of traffic and sales.
Lawrence is survived by his wife, five children and seven grandchildren.
