Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines has become the first U.S. airline to reach its 100th year. It’s the nation’s most profitable airline with sights set on being the most premium global passenger carrier.
But at its founding in 1925, it was a crop duster in Macon with its sights set on fighting the boll weevil beetle devastating American agriculture. The century since has not always been smooth.
The company that began as Huff Daland Dusters faltered financially its first year and moved to Louisiana. Its first attempt at U.S. passenger service failed in the 1930s; it struggled through nearly a decade of losses in the 1980s and 1990s; and went on to survive a 2005-2007 bankruptcy, a hostile takeover attempt, Sept. 11 and COVID-19.
Today, Delta has grown to become metro Atlanta’s largest private employer, and it promises 2025 will be its most profitable year ever.
From Macon to the Delta
Huff Daland Dusters was incorporated on March 2, 1925, and its biplanes soon began commercial work dusting insecticides on peach trees in Montezuma, Georgia.
But it didn’t work out in Macon: Personnel were “too inexperienced and the cotton fields too small,” Atlanta Constitution reporter David Morrison wrote on Delta’s 50th in 1979.
(Yes, 46 years ago, Delta celebrated its 50th anniversary from its first passenger flight in 1929. The company today is choosing to mark its centennial from Huff Daland’s 1925 incorporation.)
Crucially, the Macon crop duster did catch the eye of C.E. Woolman, an Illinois man who joined as chief entomologist. Now credited as Delta’s founder, he went on to shepherd it through a more than four-decade transformation.
Woolman’s vision for the company, in particular his insistence that Delta’s competitive advantage would be the quality of its customer service — and the happiness of the employees that provide it — remains upheld by leadership today as “the Delta difference” and key to its success.
“We go all the way back to Mr. Woolman, and we pay an enormous amount of respect to what he created here,” Delta CEO Ed Bastian told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution last month.
Credit: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Credit: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
But before he even served passengers, Woolman’s Macon crop dusting company opted to move to Louisiana and the Mississippi Delta’s more expansive fields. He also quickly led its first international expansion: to Peru in 1927 to capitalize on South America’s reverse growing seasons.
That same year the company rebranded as Delta Air Service, a nod to its home region.
In 1929, Woolman purchased Delta’s first five-passenger planes, hoping to break into the U.S. passenger market. In June 1929, its first passenger flight flew from Dallas to Jackson, Mississippi, with stops in Louisiana. (A round-trip fare was $90 or nearly $1,700 today.)
Elmer Rose was one of the company’s first pilots.
In a 1979 interview with the Constitution he recalled Woolman telling him: “‘Elmer, I want you to fly over every town along your route and, if you have time, circle above it. I want the people to get accustomed to looking up and seeing Delta airplanes above them.’”
Woolman’s ambitions would ultimately prove prescient, but not for a while.
That first attempt at passenger service wouldn’t last more than a year, because Delta failed to get a U.S. mail route contract that airlines needed to make the service profitable in a highly-regulated industry.
Delta returned to crop dusting until 1934 — when it bid again, successfully, on another mail contract.
Credit: Floyd Jillson
Credit: Floyd Jillson
Delta leaves the Delta
As it continued to win routes and expand east, Delta first moved operations and maintenance shops to Atlanta. By 1941, the company moved its entire headquarters to the hometown where it has remained since.
Delta went on to pioneer a “hub-and-spoke” model, with Atlanta as its connecting point. It’s a model that other airlines have since adopted — and a model that turned Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport into the world’s busiest.
But a few years after celebrating its 50th year, the airline industry and Delta hit a low point amid a weak economy, fuel prices and deregulation.
In 1982, the company posted its first loss in decades.
The moment resulted in what has become company lore: after still receiving a pay raise, a group of employees decided to show their appreciation by raising $30 million to buy their employer its first Boeing 767 jet, christened “The Spirit of Delta.”
Credit: AJC FILE
Credit: AJC FILE
Delta returned to profitability in 1994. But in 2005, in the wake of industry turmoil that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the company filed for bankruptcy, citing rising fuel costs and $20 billion in debt.
Two years later, it emerged from bankruptcy, fended off a hostile takeover attempt (thanks in part to a protest effort from the employees themselves) and relisted its stock.
“There is one plan at Delta, and that is to be profitable,” then-CEO Richard Anderson said at the time.
The next year the company acquired Northwest Airlines, making it temporarily the world’s largest airline and giving it the scale to become the major player in the industry it has remained since.
Today, depending on the metric, Delta is either the largest or second-largest U.S. airline. It has about 100,000 employees and serves more than 800 destinations in 190 countries and territories.
And in the next century, it has dreams of more.
“If there’s anything we’ve learned over the last 100 years, it’s that our mission isn’t just to move people around the world safely and comfortably. It really is the power to harness the power of travel,” Bastian said at Las Vegas’ Sphere in January.
“I firmly believe our next century of flight will be about connecting the world.”
Making Connections
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is launching a series of stories to mark the 100th anniversaries of both Delta Air Lines and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. This is the first story in the series.
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