Slicked Up

At Douglas Aircraft's plant in Santa Monica, workers this week put the finishing touches on the first DC-6A built for all-cargo operations. On the silver sides the pressurized, 325-m.p.h. plane was painted the owner's name: "Slick Airways Inc." Said 30-year-old Chairman Earl F. Slick: "For five years we didn't even know if we could stay alive. Now we can't grow fast enough."

Hard-driving Texan Slick was not merely talking Texas-style. Last week, he reported that in 1950 his all-freight airline finally got over the hump, had a $506,608 profit after taxes. It was the first year Slick had been out of the red since he and his fellow pilots from the Air Transport Command started the shoestring line in 1946 (TIME, Jan. 28, 1946). Moreover, they had hauled almost twice as much freight as the year before--45,318,000 ton-miles, 26% of all U.S. air cargo and far more than Slick's closest rival, huge American Airlines (36,606,771 ton-miles).

Out of the profits, Earl Slick is putting up $500,000 of the $1,000,000 cost of his first DC-6A; Manhattan's Bankers Trust Co. lent the balance. With 1951's business still gaining (February profit: $150,000 before taxes), Slick has made similar deals for two more DC-6As to be delivered later this year, for a total $3,500,000 expansion. The three new planes (payload: 30,000 Ibs. each) will boost his cargo capacity almost 50%.

Ground Loops. Slick and his hard-flying airmen had turned the corner none too soon. Though they had proved they could drum up a lot of freight business--from 11 million ton-miles in 1946 to 26.4 million in 1949--they had trouble proving they could make it pay. Several times they had edged into the black only to groundloop into operating losses that totaled $2,440,000. If Earl Slick had not been able to tap his family's Texas oil millions, the airline probably would have cracked up.

Slick lost heavily in a two-year rate war with American and other big scheduled airlines that ended in 1948 when CAB set up minimum rates based on Slick's costs. Slick got a bigger break in 1949 when CAB gave him a 52-city, transcontinental route tapping the major traffic centers. Thus, for the first time, he could fly regular, advertised schedules.

Calm Air. Slick drummed up new trade (textiles, television and auto parts) and opened up new markets, flying Christmas mistletoe from Dallas to Manhattan, Texas okra to Detroit's big colony of Southern workers. Last year, after complaining to CAB that airmail-subsidized American and the big boys were still harassing his unsubsidized line, Slick slapped a $30 million suit on them, charging antitrust violations. After that, he says, they let him alone.

By last spring Slick had enough business to get his loads above the break-even point (70%). Then the Korean war brought a rush of defense business, and the line's tonnage soared from 2,900,000 ton-miles in June to almost 6,000,000 in December. Slick knows there may be plenty of bumps ahead, but thinks he has weathered the worst. "This business is just in its infancy," says he. "All the U.S. domestic air freight hauled last year amounted to only 172,500,000 ton-miles, yet CAB itself estimates the potential at 1 billion."

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