(USA Today) The AirTran Airways brand will fade into the aviation history books by the end of the year.
The final flight for the airline, now a subsidiary of Southwest, will come Dec. 28 on a flight from Atlanta to Tampa, The Associated Press reports. The flight will be designated as AirTran Flight 1 and follows the 1993 inaugural route of discount carrier ValuJet, the airline that would eventually assume the AirTran name.
ValuJet operated its main base in Atlanta, flying mostly within the eastern half of the USA. ValuJet merged with AirTran in 1997, a deal that came about a year after ValuJet Flight 592 crashed into the Everglades in 1996. As part of the merger, ValuJet rebranded its operations by assuming the AirTran name.
The merger helped ValuJet bridge a difficult time in the wake of Flight 592, which "investigators blamed ... on a fire that started with improperly handled oxygen generators in the cargo hold," AP writes. ValuJet was grounded by regulators for several months in 1996 and faced an uncertain financial future after resuming operations.
Yet following the switch to AirTran, strong post-merger leadership helped the airline develop a strong safety record and grow into one of the USA's strongest low-cost outfits. AirTran offered both cheap fares and business-class seats, developing a large hub in Atlanta and significant bases in locales including Baltimore, Milwaukee and Orlando.
Ultimately, AirTran's success made it an acquisition target for low-cost giant Southwest Airlines. The carriers announced in 2010 that they had reached a deal for Southwest to buy AirTran in a $1.4 billion deal that eventually closed in 2011.
As part of the merger, Southwest has been folding AirTran's operations into its own — slowly shifting AirTran's Boeing 737s into its own fleet and unloading most of AirTran's smaller Boeing 717s to Delta Air Lines.
That integration has taken longer than has been typical for most recent U.S. airline mergers, a process that's now pushing four years. During that time, Southwest has operated AirTran as a subsidiary that continues to fly under its own brand.
Overall, though, the number of AirTran-branded planes has been continued to shrink, with the final flight on Dec. 28 finally completing Southwest's effort to fold the AirTran brand into its own.
