Hubs and hubris: commercial aviation has been a lift to Tar Heel business--and caused turbulence for some of the state's airports.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: Feature

Flight 1050 backs away from the terminal and turns onto a taxiway, tires thumping softly on seams in the tarmac as it rolls. The jetliner pauses at the end of a runway. "We're third in line to take off," the pilot announces, with almost a yawn in his voice. "Once we get going, we should have a smooth ride. We'll have 73 degrees and light rain when we get down to New Orleans." The jet begins rolling again, its nose pointed down the centerline of the runway. It accelerates. When it reaches 150 knots -- more than 170 mph -- the pilot pulls back on the yoke in front of him. The plane's nose rotates -- lifts -- and in minutes, it breaks through the clouds and into a golden sunset. Charlotte/Douglas International Airport logs another takeoff.

Nothing distinguishes Flight 1050 from roughly 500 others that depart daily from Charlotte. But airline analysts, historians and some fliers say it and the 146 passengers in its blue-and-maroon seats are writing a chapter in Tar Heel aviation that once would have seemed fiction: The transition of a recently rural state -- only in 1996 did the population balance swing to urban-dwellers -- into an aviation powerhouse. In addition to three major airports, more than 70 smaller ones serve commercial or business aviation or both.

"North Carolina has been blessed with a set of lucky circumstances," says David Hartgen, director of transportation studies at UNC Charlotte. "We've had basically flatland locations in lightly developed areas that were not hemmed in by development. We've had geography -- we're well positioned to serve as hub locations for the East Coast. We've had local leverage -- boosterism -- and the ability to convert that to action. Other states might have had one or two factors, but not all."

A century after the first flight -- Orville Wright's 120-foot hop was almost exactly the length of the New Orleans-bound 737-400 -- Charlotte/Douglas is the world's 16th-busiest airport, measured by its more than 461,000 annual takeoffs and landings of airliners, military planes and private and cargo flights. It is busier than airports in Toronto, Rome, Amsterdam and Frankfurt.

In Charlotte, at Piedmont Triad International Airport in Greensboro and at Raleigh-Durham International, 35.7 million passengers got on and off planes last year. That works out to more than four flights for each of the state's 8.1 million residents. In addition, the National Business Aviation Association says about 450 Tar Heel companies operate more than 800 airplanes.

Compare the recent flying past with the aviation environment today. In 1962, it took Hartgen eight hours and three stops to fly from his home in Bangor, Maine, to Durham, with stops in Boston, Newark, N.J., and Baltimore. "North Carolina was a hop on the hippity-hop system of air travel," he says. Now the trip takes four hours and one stop.

A 10-minute drive from Piedmont International, Syngenta Crop Protection's approximately 500 jobs would be nearly impossible at the pace of Hartgen's 1962 travels. "To sell our product, we absolutely have to sit down and talk to people," says Pamela Edmond, travel manager. The company had $5.9 billion in worldwide sales last year. In 2001, employees in Greensboro and at Syngenta Biotechnology in Research Triangle Park, near Raleigh-Durham International, made more than 4,500 flights, including 634 to headquarters in Zurich.

The rise of commercial aviation in North Carolina has been striking but not always smooth. The roots of many airports go back to the turmoil of wartime and early military aviation, during and shortly after World War I. In peacetime, the airports have survived the competitive battles of carriers and airline bankruptcies and mergers. Hub hubris left scars. That was the push by airlines in the '80s and '90s to boost profits by funneling passengers from feeder airports onto their larger planes at hubs.

A Piedmont Airlines hub, which later became part of USAir and today's US Airways, triggered the meteoric growth of Charlotte / Douglas in the '80s. But at Piedmont Triad and Raleigh-Durham, competitive pressures and airline miscues doomed Continental Airlines and American Airlines hubs. Both airports recovered and are remaking themselves - Piedmont Triad as a major cargo hub, RDU as a low-cost nonhub drawing passengers not only from the Triangle but much of Eastern North Carolina.

Maybe the visionaries foresaw such roles for Tar Heel airports, but probably not. In the 1930s, World War I fighter ace Eddie Rickenbacker, then president of Eastern Air Lines, was among those pushing for an airport near the state capital. Within a few years, Army engineers began bulldozing a military airstrip through the pines southwest of town. The first commercial flight -- an Eastern Air Lines DC-3 -- landed in May 1943.

In Charlotte and Greensboro, aviation was barely out of its biplane era when airports began taking shape. In April 1930, the first mail plane touched down at what is now Charlotte / Douglas. Thousands greeted it. "First there was rail, then highways, then air," says Dan Morrill, a Charlotte historian. Adds Al Stuart, UNC Charlotte geographer and author, "In the whole environment of Southern boosterism, airports become a metaphor for status, progress, the cutting edge."

Through the '50s and '60s, the three airports grew steadily, adding their second-generation passenger terminals. But in 1978, Congress changed commercial aviation when it deregulated the airline industry. North Carolina airports were in the right place at the right time.

As the the muffled roar of afternoon jets filters through thick windows into his office, John Brantley, who joined the RDU staff in 1977 -- he has been director since 1982 -- leans across a conference table. "Until 1978, regulation had meant that communities like Raleigh-Durham couldn't get the service we needed or even could support. Deregulation took the shackles off routes, pricing, everything."

In Charlotte, Aviation Director Jerry Orr began working at the airport as a private surveyor in the '60s. He joined the airport staff in 1975. "In states like Georgia...