Frank Lorenzo

Francisco (Frank) A. Lorenzo was one of the most notorious players in the history of commercial aviation in the United States. Born in 1940, he was the son of Spanish immigrants in Queens in New York. He went to Columbia University and then received a business degree from Harvard Business School in 1963. He had an early interest in aviation that led him to take control of Texas International Airlines (TIA), a company that was on the verge of bankruptcy, in 1971. The Deregulation Act of 1978 allowed Lorenzo to expand his business dealings and he systematically began to acquire companies such as Continental Airlines, New York Air, Frontier Airlines, and Eastern Airlines, in his bid to compete with the new non-unionized airlines. By the mid-1980s, he had acquired a reputation for vicious business practices that were particularly unfair to the labor force. By filing for bankruptcy at different points in his career, he was able to bypass unionized labor and impose harsh working conditions on the employees of his various corporations. His rise to the top was finally thwarted when Eastern Airlines collapsed in 1991 and a U.S. bankruptcy court ruled that Lorenzo was unfit to run the company. Lorenzo left the debacle with a vast personal fortune and tried to found a new airline called Friendship in 1993, but the U.S. Department of Transportation did not grant him permission.