Founder of Southwest Airways – Pacific Air Lines
In 1938, Maj. General Henry “Hap” Arnold, Chief of the US Army Air Corps, sensed that war with Germany and Japan was probably inevitable and recognized the need for more trained pilots for the military, but an isolationist Congress refused funding. As an alternative, Arnold established the Civilian Pilot Training Program, to establish privately funded and operated flying schools which could provide government-subsidized pilot training for up to 20,000 college students annually, to be mobilized in the event of war.
In 1940, in response to Arnold’s call to action, Leland Hayward, owner of a Hollywood talent agency, private pilot and member of the board of directors of TWA, John Connelly, a former Army pilot, and LIFE magazine photographer John Swope formed a partnership to build a flying school and fixed base operation in Arizona, which they called Southwest Airways (SWA). As we shall see, startup funding would not be a problem.
Leland Hayward (1902-1971), a Nebraska native with wealthy parents, attended The Hotchkiss School (Connecticut) and Princeton University, leaving before graduation to work as a newspaper reporter and press agent.
He moved to Hollywood to launch one of the first talent agencies devoted to handling movie stars; his first client was Fred Astaire. Eventually his client roster grew to over 150 names, including Henry Fonda, Judy Garland, Jimmy Stewart, Ernest Hemingway and producer/ director/ screenwriter William Wyler.
When the time came to raise cash for Southwest Airways, Hayward was able to recruit Astaire, Stewart, Fonda, Cary Grant, Hoagy Carmichael, Robert Taylor, Ginger Rogers, Margaret Sullavan (Hayward’s actress wife) and others as initial investors.
SWA ultimately built three training centers in the Phoenix area, which with the onset of the war were sold to the government and operated by SWA under contract: Thunderbird I in Glendale; Thunderbird II in Scottsdale; and Falcon Field in Mesa. A fourth training center at Sky Harbor Airport was retained by SWA for civilian pilot training.
The Thunderbirds were used to train American and foreign pilot cadets, while Falcon Field was assigned to Britain’s Royal Air Force to train pilots for the RAF. Reports vary, but between 15,000 and 20,000 pilots were trained at the four SWA facilities during the war.
Southwest also operated, under contract to the US Army Air Transport Command, a cargo division, using Waco C-72 aircraft. With cargo bases in Phoenix and San Bernadino, Calif., SWA hauled priority military freight throughout the west.
Drawing on its experience with the cargo division, Southwest applied to the Civil Aeronautics Board for passenger routes as a feeder airline in 1942, and the proposal was modified in 1944 to request authority to serve 252 (!) destinations in California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Arizona. Ultimately, SWA was awarded a route between Los Angeles and San Francisco with nine intermediate stops, and two routes between San Francisco and Medford, Oregon—a coastal route with five intermediate stops and an inland route with nine! Hayward sold his talent agency and was thus able to focus on SWA and a new career as a producer/director of Broadway shows and Hollywood films.
Again, raising money was not a problem; financed by investments from several of his actor-clients, Hayward and SWA acquired 8 war surplus C-47A aircraft and the contract airmail route AM-76. SWA began passenger service on Dec. 2, 1946.
Leland Hayward’s show business career continued through the 1950s; he produced such films such as “The Spirit of St Louis”(1957) and “The Old Man and the Sea”(1958), as well as the Broadway musicals “South Pacific” (1949), “Gypsy”(1959) and “The Sound of Music”(1959). After suffering a series of strokes, he died in 1971.
Leland Hayward’s granddaughter, Marin Hopper (daughter of actor Dennis Hopper and Brooke Hayward), heads a fashion accessory company named Hayward Luxury, which in 2016 began producing amenity kits for JetBlue’s premium class, called JetBlue Mint. The kits for men are branded HAYWARD, as a tribute to the airline legacy of Leland Hayward, while the kits for women are labeled HOPPER.
