RenoAir, otherwise styled as Reno Air, may not have been the largest airline in the world. It may not have even been the largest airline in the state, but it left an impact on the industry that few can forget!
Throughout its history, RenoAir competed with some of the world’s largest and most successful airlines, including Southwest Airlines and Morris Air, among others.
Pre-Formation
The 1970’s, 1980’s and 1990’s were marked by an almost unrivalled growth in air travel, both during and after what is now known as the Golden Age of Aviation. De-regulation of the industry had led to thousands of new airlines being created.
For the most part, this has been good on the airline industry today, however, often led to pre-existing airlines to collapse or perform large mergers in order to stay afloat.
In 1986, the original Frontier Airlines ceased operations, putting thousands of its employees out of work. This included a young pilot and entrepreneur called Joseph Lorenzo.
For much of his life, Joseph Lorenzo had a dream to start and run his own airline. In 1990, Joseph Lorenzo finally incorporated his airline with the help of former Midway Airlines executive Jeff Erikson.
The idea behind the airline was to begin operating on routes that had previously been served with the now defunct Frontier Airlines (no connection to the modern day airlines you may be familiar with).
Upon finally incorporating their new airline in June 1990, the pair applied to the CAB for an Air Operator’s Certificate. This was not granted until July 1992, when the airline commenced operations.
Formation And Early Years
The pair chose to have Reno-Tahoe International Airport, in Reno, Nevada, as their primary hub. This fact would be reflected in the airline’s legal name, Reno Air Inc. and in its operational name, RenoAir.
In order to cut down on costs, the airlines chose to lease gate space from another airline, rather than buy their own gate. Starting in 1992, the airline leased all of its gate slots from American Airlines.
By April 1993, Reno were operating hundreds of flights per week to every major city on the West coast, as well as to Ontario, Canada. Due to this expansion, the airline chose San Jose to be its secondary hub, also in 1983.
As with its other gates, Reno continued to lease gate slots from American Airlines in order to cut down on costs. By the end of 1993, the airline had added Burbank, California and Phoenix, Arizona to their list or routes.
For the airline’s entire history, it had served many of the gambling areas of America, including Las Vegas. In 1998, Reno Air turned Las Vegas into its third hub and second secondary hub.
Whilst most of the airline’s routes were connected to the main Western route network, the airline established a secondary route network. This served the Gulf of Mexico, primarily serving their major gambling centers.
Reno Air Express
Shortly after founding their secondary San Jose hub, Reno Air soon entered negotiations with Hawaiian low cost, regional airline Mid Pacific Air. At this time, Mid Pacific was one of the largest regional airlines on the West Coast, competing with Aloha Airlines.
In 1993, Reno and Mid Pacific announced that they’d be entering into a code sharing agreement. This saw Mid Pacific fly under the RenoAir livery under the name Reno Air Express.
The new airline flew connecting passenger flights between standard Mid Pacific and standard Reno Air flights. Here, RenoAir Express would fly a fleet of BAe Jetstream 31s instead of Reno’s standard MD-80 family.
Due to the airline’s intended purpose, it only ever operated to and from smaller airports such as: Chico, CA, Eureka, CA, Klamath Falls, OR, Medford, OR, Monterey, CA, Redding, CA and Santa Rosa, CA.
Here, RenoAir Express aircraft would often fly the same routes that airlines like American would fly. This placed them in direct competition for the first time, all whilst leasing American’s gates at the very same airports!
The Issue
Three years prior to RenoAir’s establishment in 1990, American Airlines had purchased AirCal (previously Air California). This expanded American’s network into California and its surrounding states.
At the exact same time, Delta Air Lines had done the same with Western Airlines, buying up their extensive route network. This expanded Deltas’ already considerable route network even more.
On top of that, the rise of low cost airlines such as Southwest Airlines, began to wreak havoc on the airline industry as a whole. By the early 1990’s, they had expanded their network westwards too.
By the late 1990’s, their networks were far more expansive than Reno’s were, with Southwest offering fares at a much cheaper rate. This essentially shut Reno out of its own primary market.
Reno simply didn’t have the financial resources to expand themselves quick enough to rival the larger airlines. By the same token, they also couldn’t lower their prices in order to compete with Southwest, without dipping into the red.
As such, month after month, the airline was dipping into the red, as it was indeed getting traffic, and was flying its aircraft. However, the flights were often half full, which lost the airline more money than it made.
New Strategy
In 1996, the airline chose to pursue a different strategy in the hopes of generating a profit once again, with the hope of growing its fleet and routes once again.
Essentially, this new strategy called on the airline to focus solely on the highly profitable Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Seattle markets. This was in the hopes of consolidating the airline’s competition against its largest competitors.
With this, the airline dropped its other routes, flying one last scheduled flight back into Reno, before closing the routes for the foreseeable future. Reno Air Express remained alive and still a part of AAdvantage.
The airline was successful in its primary objectives of returning back to profitability. For a short while, the airline was outcompeting its larger competitors, but soon fell behind once again.
Nevertheless, this brief period of outcompeting its far larger competitors did attract the attention of these same competitors, including American Airlines.
Sale
In February 1999, RenoAir and American Airlines announced that they were in talks for American to buy out Reno. By the end of August the exact same year, the airline ceased operations and was absorbed into American Airlines.
At the time, the newspapers were all over the deal, as many had never heard of RenoAir. As such, many were surprised that American Airlines, one of the largest airlines in the world, was buying them out for $124 million in cash.
Due to this, there was a lot of media coverage of the deal, with business and aviation journalists clamoring to interview both Reno Air and American Airlines executives about the deal.
Speculation at the time was that American were buying Reno for the purpose of buying their route network and absorbing it into their own. This was due to the two airlines competing on many of the same routes.
Others speculated that the takeover was a calculated risk: for only a short amount of time, the small Reno Air had been able to compete and win against them. There was a fear that would become permanent?
American took Reno’s former aircraft and painted them in a hybrid American-Reno livery. This livery consisted of both the white of the Reno aircraft and the American Airlines logo and insignia.
Revival
In April 2004, a group of former Reno employees got together and had a really cool idea: a website and online community dedicated to the history of their former employer.
Originally, this idea was laughed off, but eventually the online community was established under the domain name Renoair.net. This website is filled with every piece of information about the airline possible!
Renoair.net also has one other function too: emails. Today, if you work an office job for a company, you get a company email, needing in the company’s domain name, Renoair.net offers the same thing for free to former employees.
The website had been access almost 100,000 in the last 16 years, by people curious about the history of the airline and the former airline employees themselves!
Starting in 2015, American released a series of retro “heritage” liveries commemorating the airlines that had merged to form American, including: PSA, Piedmont, Allegheny, America West, US Airways, TWA and AirCal.
One of the original “heritage” liveries (which is still in service as of the time of writing) is a 737-800 painted in a modernized version of the old RenoAir livery. This once again invoked curiosity into the airline.
What Was it Like to Fly on RenoAir?
In my time as a pilot, I have had the pleasure to fly on a wide variety of airlines, both inside and outside of the US. Many of these airlines have since become defunct as well!
One of these airlines was Reno Air, with me having flown with them in the Summer of 1996, alongside my wife.
My wife and I wanted to go on vacation to Seattle. As such, we went to the travel agency (after all, this was pre-internet) and booked a flight to Seattle from the nearby airport. For reference, my airline didn’t fly to Seattle from this particular airport.
Personally, even as a pilot, I had never heard of Reno Air, and when I was told I was flying with them, replied who “Who?” before explaining what I did for a living and having never heard of them before.
Nevertheless, we booked the flight, and when it came to the day, we went to the airport and boarded our aircraft. Strangely enough, I actually found the whole experience much better than how my own airline handled things!
Except for one brief patch of turbulence, the aircraft was flown quite well, with the two flights I flew on, being incredibly smooth. The pilots were also quite courteous when we had a conversation about the airline and the MD-87.
On top of this, the cabin crew were also quite helpful, perhaps even more so than my own airline!
Airline seats (in particular their pitch) tend to be the bane of travelers’ existences the world over. Yet, I found that I was actually quite comfortable in the Reno seats, and they were surprisingly large (compared to other airlines).
How Safe Was Reno Air?
Sadly, you will probably never fly on RenoAir (not unless you have a time machine!) Nevertheless, it is still important to look at how safe/dangerous the airline was as a whole.
For the most part, RenoAir was among the safest airlines of its time. Despite being a mostly regional airline with only a few longer-haul routes, the airline operated an all-jet fleet, which are safer than props and pistons.
Despite this, they chose to primarily use the MD-80 family, primarily the MD-81 and MD-82. These are among the most dangerous aircraft to have ever flown by most modern standards.
Nevertheless, for the time that RenoAir were flying in, the MD-80 family were among the safest aircraft to be in the skies. This was aided in the fact that it was used by almost every major world airline.
Despite taking every precaution to become one of the world’s safest airlines, the airline did have one accident. The accident occurred on one of the airline’s six MD-87s, and resulted in no fatalities and no injuries.
The MD-87 was supposed to fly from Detroit, Michigan to Reno, Nevada. Instead, upon takeoff, the aircraft lost power in both engines, this resulted in the aircraft needing to make an emergency landing in Detroit.
Subsequently, the aircraft was repaired by maintenance staff, test flown to ensure safety and subsequently re-entered into service later that same year. The aircraft would remain in service until 2001.
Legacy
Despite being relatively unheard of throughout the vast majority of its operational history, the airline left a sizable impression on the aviation industry as a whole, as well as impacting Nevada greatly.
Aviation Industry
Following American Airline buying out RenoAir, all of Reno’s aircraft became property of American Airlines, and all their employees became American Airlines staff.
Up until 2001, many of these aircraft were still in service with American. Many of them are still flying, just for smaller airlines. Many of the former Reno staff still work for American as well!
Although the airline was mostly unheard of before 1999, the 1999 Reno Air Races (also based in Reno, Nevada) received heavy media attention alongside the completely unrelated airline.
This has helped to boost sales to the air racing organization which have in turn seen better facilities offered and better aircraft race there. To date, several modified warbirds have raced to try to get the number one place.
Nevada
Reno Air’s business helped to keep Reno–Tahoe International Airport as one of the US’s busiest airports. Much of the airport’s expansion was due to Reno Air’s business, which required more runways and terminals.
The airline’s success proved to the world that less populated states, such as Nevada, could indeed have large and successful airlines. Nevada soon became known for its other airlines, which have since gone out of business.
After Reno Air was bought by American, there were hundreds of newspapers looking at the airline, and Reno in particular. This helped to boost sales to things like the Reno Air Race.
On top of this, many people were intrigued by the story of RenoAir and decided to visit Reno to have a look. This unknowingly birthed a tourism industry in Reno, something continues to this day!
What did you think of RenoAir? Did you ever fly on them? Tell me in the comments!
Featured image courtesy of Aero Icarus via Flickr.