Word: patterson
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...Patterson had anticipated the stormy weather ahead. He had Pattersoned a commonsense pattern for all U.S. airlines. He trimmed down his payroll from 13,700 to 12,300. (Few were fired, but those who quit were not replaced.) As he sweated off the wartime fat, some of the travelers who had been scared away by last winter's crashes began to come back. Last week, United was in the black again. The dismal airlines skyscape suddenly brightened. Was the worst over? No one could say for sure. But Pat Patterson thought it was. Coming from him, that sounded more...
Blow Hot. In an industry noted for its highflying, Buck Rogerish schemers, and its sometimes low-grade economics, Pat Patterson, at 47, is an old killjoy. He is forever crying "Now, wait a minute," when someone wants to jump off the barn with an umbrella for a parachute. He is the No. 1 conservative of the airlines, and proud of the title. He still gets a thrill as an airliner roars up off the runway. But the thrill is enhanced if he knows that all the seats are filled...
Though he has learned to fly in the 1,200,000 miles he has ridden airlanes since 1929, Patterson looks, talks, and dresses more like the banker he started out to be. Small (5 ft. 5 in.), pale-faced, with sharp brown eyes, he usually dresses somberly in grey or black pin-striped suits, lets his dreams fly no higher than his staff of air economists permits...
...helicopter-in-every-garage school which flourished during the war, he says "nuts." When the talk (emotional thinking, he calls it) was perfervid of a sky black with planes-and no one riding the railroads-Patterson snapped: "If all the hot air on the subject circulating today were stored, it would create enough energy to fly all the planes in the U.S. without gasoline...
Blow Cold. Patterson thinks the airplane is still in the taxicab stage, and that the day of cheap mass transportation is years away. Nor does he think that some magical new discovery will hasten things much. He believes in inch-by-inch progress all down the line-starting, for example, by cleaning up the washrooms in airports. The recent squabble over whether airlines shall use G.C.A. (Ground Controlled Approach) or I.L.S. (Instrument Landing System) seems silly to him. Says he: "We need them both, one to check on the other. And we shouldn't use them until we learn...