In Delta's first losing year, three flight attendants started a fund to buy the company a brand-new Boeing 767. They raised thirty million dollars.
A Pirep featured story · KATL Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International, Atlanta, GA
On the headquarters side of the busiest airport on Earth, inside two curved-roof maintenance hangars from the 1940s, sits a wide-body jet that tells you something about an airline you cannot get from a balance sheet. The year was 1982. Deregulation had upended the industry, fuel was expensive, and Delta was in its first money-losing year after decades of profit. The expected reaction would have been layoffs and belt-tightening. What happened instead started with three flight attendants.
They called it Project 767. The idea was almost absurd: employees would raise the money to buy Delta a brand-new Boeing 767, not a model, the actual airplane, as a thank-you to a company that had not laid them off through hard times. Word spread through the ranks. Pilots, mechanics, gate agents, retirees, and their families chipped in. They raised thirty million dollars. In a ceremony at the Technical Operations Center that December, more than seven thousand people watched the employees hand their airline a jet they had bought for it. They named it the Spirit of Delta.
It still exists, and you can walk underneath it. The Spirit of Delta is the centerpiece of the Delta Flight Museum, parked in those original hangars beside Ship 41, the DC-3 that carried Delta's first passengers and the first aircraft ever to win a National Trust for Historic Preservation award. Two airplanes, two stories about the same thing: an airline that started as a crop-duster and the people who decided it was worth keeping.