Our oldest child just had a birthday, and one of the things we did to celebrate was to visit Wings Over the Rockies Air & Space Museum in Denver. She had a lot of fun at the Museum of Flight in Seattle in 2019, so this was sort of a followup to that.

I’m no expert in aviation and don’t have any extraordinary interest in aircraft, but I find it interesting enough to stay entertained at these museums. Where I do have a special (weird?) interest is in learning some history of various companies, how they started, who bought or sold them, why they failed, their old logos, etc. That’s what fueled this post - learning a little backstory on a defunct airline.

Wings over the Rockies had a couple of mini-features on Frontier Airlines. Today, Frontier is known as an ultra-budget airline, but spoiler alert - this post is not about the company that puts animals on the tails of their planes.

Frontier Airlines was created in Denver in 1950 through a merger between three airlines that all started after WWII - Arizona, Challenger, and Monarch. All three had bought Douglas C-47 cargo planes that were left over from the war, and converted them into DC-3 planes. There were quite a few overlapping routes between the three companies, so they were doing a lot of competing for the same customers.

After merging into Frontier, the company grew to eventually serve 170 different airports. The DC-3 airliners were replaced with some newer planes, one of which was the well known Boeing 737. In 1973, Frontier hired the Emily Howell Warner, making her the first female pilot to fly for a scheduled American airline. Just a few years later, she also became the first female captain for an airline.

The Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 led to some major changes to the industry. Service to smaller towns became significantly more expensive, which led to airlines cutting off service to many of their smaller destinations.

People Express acquired Frontier in 1985, but continued operating it as a separate company. About a year later, Frontier filed for bankruptcy. Continental Airlines acquired People Express and Frontier in 1986, and both companies were then merged into Continental.

Frontier no longer existed at this point, but Continental continued using Frontier’s jets (after repainting them). In 2012, Continental was acquired by United Airlines.

This is a pretty brief summary based mostly on things I learned during the museum visit, but it turns out there’s much more out there if you’re so inclined - Old Frontier Airlines. I browsed through a few of the links there, but my favorite was this one - The Death of Frontier Airlines - notice the dripping blood at the top of the page…