Let's go to the CTO - Airlines And Their City Ticket Offices

11/13/24 • 20 min

Beginning in the 1930s, many airlines maintain large networks of City Ticket Offices to conduct business with their customers in high-traffic shopping, office and hotel neighborhoods, far removed from their own airport operations.
These in-town facilities become known as a City Ticket Office (or by the airline staff acronym “CTO”), to differentiate them from the Airport Ticket Office (or ATO) in each area.

Join me for this look at the rise of the once common airline City Ticket Office as a high visibility, splashy promotion of the airline, reflecting the carrier’s style and personality, while also becoming an important link to many of the airline’s most important customers.

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Previous Episode

Concorde, Collins & Live Aid 1985

Tens of thousands of airline flights operate daily around the world, but every now and then one stands out because it helps make history, even though it was just another flight, on just another day.
From 1976 until 2003, the supersonic Concorde airliner was frequently in the news, either for the noise it created, or the often famous people it carried.

Join me for a look at how a normally scheduled British Airways flight in July of 1985, operated by Concorde, played a crucial role in one of the largest rock concerts ever organized.

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Boeing 367-80: The Aerobatic Maneuver That Launches a Titan

The early 1950s is an exciting time in the airline business, and - more specifically - the airliner business.

Airliner manufacturers are developing new planes that fly faster, farther, and with more passengers and cargo, but from England a new airliner sound is being heard - the high, shrill scream of jet engines.
Most airlines are reluctant to embrace the new jet technology, both because it’s unlike the proven airliners they’re currently flying, but also because they’ve spent enormous sums of money buying those older planes, and are years away from paying them off.

But U.S. aircraft companies are gaining experience with jet engine technology through military programs, and are seeking ways to apply that learning to a new generation of airliners powered by jets.

Let's look at how one of those companies - Boeing of Seattle - makes the decision to move into a technologically advanced jet airliner family, and the role that a dramatic aerobatics maneuver in a very public setting has on that work.

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