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Frontier Airlines, Inc. Business Information, Profile, and History

12015 East 46th Ave.
Denver, Colorado 80239-3116
U.S.A.

Company Perspectives:

Frontier Airlines, Inc. is a low-fare, full-service airline based in Denver, Colorado. Principally serving markets abandoned by Continental Airlines during that carrier's downsizing of its Denver hub in 1993 and 1994, the Company currently operates routes linking its Denver hub to 14 cities in 11 states covering the western two-thirds of the United States. The Company's current route system extends from Denver to Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco, California; Chicago and Bloomington/Normal, Illinois; Seattle/Tacoma, Washington; Las Vegas, Nevada; Phoenix, Arizona; St. Louis, Missouri; Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota; Salt Lake City, Utah; Omaha, Nebraska; Albuquerque, New Mexico; and El Paso, Texas. At present, the Company utilizes four gates at Denver International Airport for approximately 54 daily flight departures and arrivals.

History of Frontier Airlines, Inc.

Frontier Airlines, Inc. was reborn in 1993, borrowing the name of the carrier that had previously served the Rockies and Midwest for nearly 50 years. The name was not merely a superficial brand: several of the new Frontier's executives and 75 percent of its starting work force had been associated with the original carrier. Frontier operated about a dozen 737s, competing as a low-fare carrier on several high-volume routes.

A Flock of Postwar Start-Ups

A merger of three small postwar carriers created the original Frontier Airlines on June 1, 1950. All three flew war surplus Douglas DC-3s (known as C-47s in the U.S. military) in their struggle to eke a living carrying whatever mail and passengers they could across the western sky. Monarch Air Lines began flying out of Denver in 1947. Future partner Challenger Airlines began serving Denver from its Salt Lake City base the next year, when the last of the three, Arizona Airways, began its flights to the Mexican border. Frontier's territory spanned 40 cities along the Rocky Mountains from Montana to the Mexican border. Challenger Airlines, which would merge with Frontier in 1967, was of the same generation, beginning operations in 1949. Monarch supplied Frontier's first president, Hal S. Darr.

Rapid Growth in the 1960s

Mines, dams, and national parks, and other developments diverted increasing streams of passengers through Frontier Airlines. By 1960, more than 30 new cities had been added, extending its routes east into the Dakotas and Missouri.

New low-cost fare plans spurred still more passengers to fly Frontier in the 1960s, making it the country's fastest growing regional carrier. The Vacationland Fare effectively gave passengers a 30-day pass for $100. The Standby Plan offered last-minute available seats for half price.

The company began flying the Convair 340, a popular replacement for the smaller DC-3, in 1959. These were replaced by still larger, faster Convair 580 turbojet aircraft within a few years. As impressive as the Convair 580 was, the five Boeing 727-100 airliners Frontier bought in 1965 for $55 million propelled the company into the age of modern jet travel. General Tire and Rubber Company bought a controlling interest in the airline through its subsidiary RKO General, Inc. The company's 1966 revenues were $1.74 million, resulting in its highest ever profits. Frontier's fleet included 20 planes, two of them 727s.

The company proved continuously successful in winning new routes from the Civil Aeronautics Board. After its merger with Fort Worth's Central Airlines in October 1967, Frontier served 114 cities with 56 planes.

A Bit of Turbulence Entering the 1970s

The entry into Kansas City and St. Louis brought Frontier into direct competition--vigorous competition--with Trans World Airlines. In 1969, Frontier replaced its first five 727s with Boeing 737s. It also opened its combination headquarters and maintenance center in Denver. In spite of the optimistic additions, the airline failed to turn a profit in 1970. Al Feldman had assumed the company's leadership in 1971, and instituted a quick turnaround.

Frontier continued to offer new routes and set new records, serving its highest number of paying passengers in 1973 while receiving fewer complaints than any other regional airline. Its first international flight landed in Winnipeg in 1974. Four years later, Frontier crossed the border into Mexico.

A Dip in the 1980s

Although fuel costs rose and traffic fell, 1980 gave Frontier its highest profit to date: $23.2 million. The company had grown to employ 5,800 people and operated 60 aircraft, serving 86 cities. In 1982, the company phased out its turboprops and added the state-of-the-art McDonnell-Douglas MD-80. Reflecting its enormous strides, the company was reorganized, becoming a subsidiary of Frontier Holdings, Inc. on May 6, 1982.

A blizzard closed the Denver airport for two days around Christmas 1982, helping to smother the company's profits. After a terrific decade, Frontier lost about $45 million the next two years, placing the company in its most serious crisis.

After proposals to sell the company's shares to its employees and a bid by corporate raider Frank Lorenzo, People Express Airlines bought it in 1985. However, Frontier continued to falter and filed for bankruptcy in 1986. Its assets were sold off and many of its routes were taken over by Lorenzo's Continental Airlines.

The 1990s: A New Frontier

A $7.6 million initial public offering in May plus other venture capital funded the launch of a new Denver-based carrier in 1993. Unlike another new airline which had purchased the venerable name of a bankrupt carrier, Pan Am, at an auction, the new Frontier bore real resemblance to its former self. Its first CEO, Hank Lund, had been an executive at the original airline, and seven other former executives would join him. Samuel D. Addoms would become Frontier's CEO in January 1995. In addition, after digesting 5,000 resumes, the company filled 150 of 200 available slots with former Frontier employees.

On July 5, 1994, the reborn airline began flying between Denver and a handful of cities in North Dakota. Soon airports in Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, Nevada, and Texas again began receiving requests to land from jets with a name they had not heard in several years. Ironically, the carrier's old rival, Continental, helped provide space for Frontier when it scaled back its operations at the new $4 billion Denver International Airport. Frontier's rebirth had originally been conceived as a charter operation.

The company's early strategy paralleled that of the original: providing flights on underserved routes rather than striving for the low-prices of some of its contemporaries. However, just as with the original, price competition in major markets became part of Frontier's game plan.

United Airlines, which had more than a 70 percent market share at Denver International, refused to use the company for feeder flights. (United's employees had killed its bid for the old Frontier in the mid-1980s, protesting the absorption of Frontier employees.) Frontier's planes remained less than half full until late in 1995 when, like its predecessor, it began competing on a price basis in major markets. In fact, operations in its original eight markets were suspended so the planes could be deployed on higher volume routes. Eventually, Frontier would reach cooperative agreements with 65 airlines.

In September 1995, a secondary public offering brought in $7.3 million of needed capital. Additional stock worth $3 million had been sold in May.

Frontier's fleet was comprised of several used Boeing 737s, one of the industry's most reliable and most sought-after. The company's expansion plans were limited by the availability of these planes. Across the tail sections were plastered photographs of western wildlife, such as grazing bison, howling timberwolves, or fox kits. In 1996, Frontier opened a facility in Denver which allowed it to handle its own routine maintenance.

In 1997, Frontier accused "monopolist" United Airlines of dumping--intentionally operating a large number of flights in order to gain market share--and other antitrust violations. These were prompted, according to Frontier, by the company's second profitable quarter.

As a low-price Colorado airline, Western Pacific was often compared with the new Frontier. They both operated the Boeing 737; WestPac, based 100 miles south of Denver at Colorado Springs, operated 19, which would have made a combined fleet of 34 aircraft.

In June 1997, the two agreed to merge. However, the merger was called off at the end of September. Differences in culture and operating philosophy were cited as the prime factors. The next week, WestPac announced it was seeking Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection but planned to remain in the air. In spite of losses earlier in the year, Frontier seemed to be faring better, posting increases in summer traffic.

Besides meeting its ever-present needs for capital, future challenges for Frontier included retrofitting its fleet with hush kits (at $2 million per plane) to meet federal noise regulations; one runway at Denver International had already been closed to certain of its aircraft due to the airport's noise agreement with the city of Denver.

Although the reincarnated Frontier Airlines seemed to possess just a shadow of the original Frontier's might, Monarch Air Lines was small and struggling in its first few years as well. If the company could survive its confrontation with the world's largest airline, who knew what heights the new phoenix would reach?

Related information about Frontier

For all other terms, see Frontier (disambiguation)

United States

In the United States, the frontier was the term applied to the zone of unsettled land outside the region of existing settlements of Americans.

Throughout the history of both the United States and Canada, the expansion of settlement was largely from the east to the west, and thus the frontier is often identified with western areas of both countries. In New England, it moved north.

'Frontier' was borrowed into English from French in the 15th century with the meaning "borderland," the region of a country that fronts on another country (see also marches). (Compare the Australian "outback".)

Colonial frontier

See also: Colonial America, British colonization of the Americas, French colonization of the Americas

In the earliest days of European settlement of the Atlantic coast, the frontier was essentially any part of the forested interior of the continent beyond the fringe of existing settlements along the coast and the great rivers, such as the St. Lawrence, Connecticut, Hudson, Delaware, Susquehanna River and James.

English, French, Spanish and Dutch patterns of expansion and settlement were generally quite different. With some exceptions, notably in Acadia, French expansion into the continent in the colonial era was largely by fur traders, who often lived among the Native Americans with whom they did business. Such traders moved widely through the Great Lakes and Mississippi River watershed, as far as the Rocky Mountains. Actual French settlement in these areas, however, was limited to small villages on the lower Mississippi and in the Illinois Country. The immigrants who arrived at the New Amsterdam settlement seeking to settle on the land were tolerated by colonial officials as necessary to provide food and other services for the trading operations. These patterns developed because both the French and Dutch colonies relied mainly on the fur trade, which only needed small numbers of people but large amounts of wilderness and cooperation from the natives.

In contrast, the English agriculture based colonies generally pursued a more systematic policy of widespread settlement of the New World for cultivation and exploitation of the land, a practice that required the extension of European property rights to the new continent. Early frontier areas east of the Appalachian Mountains included the Connecticut river valley.

By the middle of the 18th century, some colonists began to expand settlement into Trans-Appalachia areas, such as the Ohio Country.

This pressure of settlement west of the Appalachians was a large cause of the French and Indian Wars in the middle 18th century. The result of the war was a complete victory for the British, who absorbed the claim to the French territory west of the Appalachians to the Mississippi River. Despite this victory, the British Crown, in part to preserve good relations with the Native Americans of the region, sought to keep the Trans-Appalachian frontier closed with the Proclamation of 1763, which defined a boundary line of allowed settlement along the Appalachians.

Despite the policy of the Crown, colonists began encroaching across the Appalachians into areas such the Ohio Country and the New River Valley. The attempts of the Crown to forbid such settlement is regarded by historians as a significant cause of the American Revolution in the following decade.

The U.S. frontier

Following the victory of the United States in the American Revolutionary War and the signing Treaty of Paris in 1783, the United States gained formal, if not actual, control of the British lands west of the Appalachians. The prohibition against settlement was rendered moot and the lands of the Ohio Country and in western Virginia (present-day West Virginia and Kentucky) were immediately available for new settlement. Some areas, such as the Virginia Military District and the Connecticut Western Reserve (both in the Ohio Country), were used by the states as rewards to veterans of the war. The issue of how to formally include these new frontier areas into the nation was an important issue in the early Congresses and was essentially resolved by the Northwest Ordinance (1787). The Southwest Territory saw a similar pattern of settlement pressure.

For the next century, the expansion of the nation into these areas, as well as the subsequently acquired Louisiana Purchase, Oregon Country, and Mexican Cession, would absorb much of the energy of the nation and largely define its politics and character, in particular its relations with Native Americans. The question of whether the American frontier would become "slave" or "free" was a spark of the American Civil War.

In the 19th century, the settlement of the west became progressively organized through acts of the federal government, most notably the Homestead Act of 1862. (Maps showing the frontier used the a line beyond which the population was under 2 persons per square mile).

The popular culture impact of the frontier was enormous, in dime novels, Wild West shows, and, after 1910, Western movies set on the frontier.

The American frontier was generally the most Western edge of settlement and typically more democratic and free-spirited in nature than the East because of its lack of social and political institutions. The idea that the frontier provided the core defining quality of the United States was elaborated by the great historian Frederick Jackson Turner, who built his Frontier Thesis in 1893 around this notion.

Recently Drs. Frank and Deborah Popper, originators of the Buffalo Commons proposal, have pointed out that several hundred counties of the American West still have fewer than 6 persons per square mile - the density standard Turner used to declare the Frontier "closed".

Canadian frontier

A Canadian frontier thesis was developed by Canadian historians Harold Adams Innis and J.

The pattern of settlement of the Canadian frontier was quite different from in the United States. This was after the best land had been taken in the United States and the Canadian frontier became known as the Last Best West.

Before settlers began to arrive, the North West Mounted Police was dispatched to the region. In a series of treaties, the basis for peaceful relations was established and the long wars with the Natives that occurred in the United States largely did not spread to Canada.

Note, however, that the Canadian political thinker Charles Blattberg has argued that such events ought to be seen as part of a process in which Canadians advanced a "border"-- as distinct from a "frontier"--from east to west. In practice, the western boundary was the peaks of the Appalachian Mountains, which divided French from British territories.

After the French and Indian War, Britain received the French territory East of the Mississippi river, but through the Proclamation of 1763, the new territory was closed to settlers, in effect returning to the old colonial boundaries. After the Treaty of Paris ending the American Revolution, the territory between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River returned to the newly independent states. The Articles of Confederation and the United States Constitution were silent on the matter (art. of any particular state"), but states were encouraged to resolve their conflict peacefully and to turn over "excess" western territory (over which they exercised no de facto control, since it was occupied by Indians) to the federal government, which in 1787 organized it into the Northwest Territory through the Northwest Ordinance. The television show Star Trek famously calls space the "final frontier." Others (e.g., Aldo Leopold, Gary Snyder, Stewart Brand) have seen the 'final frontier' as closer to home. In their view, there is a sort of frontier in the circumstances that challenge modern people to re-integrate themselves sustainably in a post-industrial circumstance here on Earth ?

Europe

In the European Union, the frontier is a term used to describe the region beyond the expanding borders of the European Union. The European Union has designated the countries surrounding it as part of the European Neighbourhood.

References

US History

Billington, Ray Allen. American Frontier and Western Issues: An Historiographical Review (1986) essays by 14 scholars
Paxson, Frederic, History of the American Frontier, 1763-1893 (1924)

Canada

Blattberg, Charles Shall We Dance?

Additional topics

Company HistoryAirlines & Air Transport

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