DELTA AIRLINE SAFETY RECORD

Delta airline safety record

Delta Airlines began operations as Huff Deland Duster a crop dusting corporation. The company was based in Monroe Louisiana and during the winter it did crop dusting in Peru. In 1927 it received a contract to carry airmail between Peru and Ecuador. Huff Deland Manufacturing the airlines owner sold its crop dosing subsidiary to a Monroe businessman. He renamed the company Delta Air. The company began passenger service between Dallas Texas and Jackson Mississippi. In 1934 Delta won its first air mail contract. In 1941 Delta moved its offices from Monroe to Atlanta. In 1953 Delta merged with Chicago and Southern Airlines. In 1972 it acquired Northeast Airlines and in 1987 it acquired Western Airlines. In 1991 Delta acquired many of the assets of bankrupt Pan American, including its European routes, its shuttle and many of the aircraft to fly on those routes. Delta struggled by the beginning of the 21st century to compete with low cost carriers. Delta started a low cost subsidiary Song. Rapidly rising fuel cost pushed Delta into bankruptcy in September 2005(Delta, 2010).

Delta Air Lines' long history of service actually began in agriculture, when the company was founded in 1924 as the world's first aerial crop dusting organization -- Huff Deland Dusters. In fact, if the boll weevil had not marched out of Mexico prior to the turn of this century to devastate the cotton fields of the South, there might not have been a Delta Air Lines. When the weevil's relentless destruction reached the Mississippi Valley, such a serious economic threat faced the South that the Bureau of Entomology operated a laboratory in Tallulah, Louisiana, as the base for an intensified cotton insect investigation. Directing the activities at the laboratory was Dr. B. R. Extension Department of Coda, assisted by a young district agent with the Louisiana State University, C. E. Wolman. Wolman, an agricultural engineering graduate of the University of Illinois, was also an aviation enthusiast. Since the airplane was little more than a novelty with an uncertain future then, Wolman settled for the more certain future of agriculture. By 1916, Dr. Coda and Wolman had their first promising weapon -- lead arsenate, a dry powder. What was needed was a method of application that would be faster and more effective than hand sprinkling. Application by air seemed most practical, and Dr. Coda obtained a small appropriation from Congress to pursue this experiment. For more long years, Coda's entomologists and Wolman worked with two Army-furnished Jennies, experimenting and perfecting dusting procedures(Norwood, 2002).

In 1923, fate gave the experiments a new future. George Post, an executive of an Ogdensburg, New York, airplane manufacturer, was forced down in Tallulah when his plane developed mechanical problems. Post was so enthusiastic about the aerial crop dusting activities he discovered while in Tallulah that he convinced his company's management to form a separate division -- the Huff Deland Dusters. Huff Deland Dusters started operations in 1924 at Macon, Georgia, but a lack of

Experience and the ...