"WE WHO LOVED PSA MAKE SOUTHWEST NO. 1"

As we talk about a new airport we need to ask what the customers want, both the airlines and their passengers. It can be fun finding out, for the answers are loaded with surprises. 

When hot pants and happy smiles made the San Diego-based jets of PSA the darling of California commuters in the 1960s, San Diegans began flying to San Francisco for lunch or a tennis game.

A stockbroker named Bob Jackson sat beside me on such a PSA flight one morning, remembering sudenly that he had parked his car at Lindbergh in so great a rush that he'd forgotten to turn off his engine. He called the next day to say that when he got back to San Diego his gas tank was still three-quarters full.

In that era, PSA was an essential ingredient of the California style, of restless mobility and a putty culture.

In years when seeming sexy was rarely considered degrading, dirty or dangerous, PSA flight attendants, men and women, seemed the sexiest in the air and proud of it.

For these and more mundane reasons, PSA boarded many more passengers at Lindbergh Field in these years than any other airline.

Until near the end of its corporate life, PSA never pretended to be much more than a commuter airline, but was so good at it that all around the world airlines mimicked it, usually without success.

Then USAir took over PSA, painted the PSA smile off its fuselages and made commuter flights more businesslike, and, in time, passenger traffic on those routes went into decline. In the most recent six-month period, USAir embarked only 3.23 percent of departing San Diego passengers.