Atlanta, capital of Georgia. A little over 500,000 inhabitants. Barcelona, capital of Catalonia. 1,600,000 inhabitants. Two cities separated by 7,400 kilometers and, objectively, with very few things in common. That changed when in 1990 the IOC, International Olympic Committee, chose the American city as the venue for the Games of the XXVI Olympiad, beating Athens, Toronto, Melbourne, Manchester, and Belgrade, the other aspirants to host the post-Barcelona 92 Olympics.
Atlanta is the host city of Turner Broadcasting System and its well-known CNN, the first television channel to offer 24-hour news. It is also the global corporate center of The Coca Cola Company and the parcel delivery company UPS, United Parcel Service, with a presence all over the planet.
However, the main employer in the region is an airline: Delta Airlines inc., which this week celebrated its 30th anniversary operating in Barcelona. The company's first plane, a Lockheed Tristar, flew from Atlanta to Madrid and from there to Barcelona. A flight that in its early days made an intermediate stop in Barajas, then became triangular: Atlanta-Madrid-Barcelona-Atlanta and, finally, became two separate services thanks to sufficient demand in both cities on the peninsula. The Olympic Games and the legacy of Barcelona in 1992 played a decisive role in the arrival of this long-history company in Catalonia.
From cotton to aviation.
Georgia's economy, one of the symbol-states of the Southern way of doing things in the United States, depended on cotton for decades. It was precisely these plantations that were the starting point of Atlanta's main airline, currently the second largest airline in the world by number of planes.
Delta was born from cotton, or rather from those who attacked it, since boll weevils were insatiable and regularly invaded the fields of the southern states. The worst plague was in 1923, against which the methods to eradicate them proved insufficient. Two acquaintances from the cotton sector, one of them an official from the United States Department of Agriculture, and the other a crop owner, had a joint business idea to end the plagues in a pioneering way: use an airplane from which, much faster than previously used methods, treatments could be applied over enormous extensions of land.
Thus, Messrs. Collett E. Woolman and B. R. Coad became partners and the following year created Huff Daland Dusters, a small aerial work company dedicated to fumigation, with such success that in just two years they went from using a single aircraft to having 18 units in the fleet, distributed throughout the so-called southern cotton belt and even leaving the United States to work in other areas of Latin America.
Passenger, cargo and mail
Woolman wanted to diversify the business by entering into passenger and mail transport starting in 1928, changing the company's name to Delta Air Service of Monroe, Louisiana. Curiously, the new company's first paying passenger traveled seated in the same place where the insecticide tank was previously located.
The company's excessively long and localist name was shortened shortly after, becoming simply Delta, as a tribute to the region surrounding an area of the Mississippi River, and half a dozen planes that were actually for passengers were acquired. The beginnings were difficult, as the dependence on contracts for mail transport, which were what truly made the routes profitable, was total and in its first years of life other competitors won all the tenders to carry letters and postal items through the different states of North America.
Thus, Delta remained in hibernation for almost five years until in 1933 it won its first mail contract and since then it has not stopped flying or growing. In the 1940s, the company moved its headquarters to Atlanta. During that decade it consolidated a strictly domestic network, until in the 1950s it began flying abroad, starting with the fashionable destination then and also today: Havana, then continuing to other Latin American cities, an expansion of destinations that coincided with the merger with other smaller companies, which reinforced its position in areas where its presence was testimonial.
'Jets' to arrive faster
As in all large American companies, jetliners arrived starting in 1959 and thanks to them, aviation multiplied, while flight durations were cut in half. In just 10 years, propeller planes disappeared from the fleet, beginning a decade that also saw the deregulation of the US air market, which Delta, as a veteran of the sector, had to firmly navigate to adapt to new times in air transport.
In that period, some iconic airlines fell or dwindled until they disappeared. This situation was taken advantage of by Delta, which ended up acquiring the European routes of the famous Pan Am, becoming since then a major international company that went from having a residual presence in Europe to becoming a reference carrier in the EU for the transatlantic market. An operation that included Barcelona where it initially grew its seasonal line with Atlanta and then added the direct flight from El Prat to JFK, participating in the small air bridge between Catalonia and the airports surrounding Manhattan, where up to seven daily connections have been operated by Delta and other airlines such as United, Norwegian, Level, and American Airlines.
Delta has continued to grow through mergers, such as the last and most important one with Northwest in 2009, which has given it a presence on all continents, reaching a fleet operated by itself and not including regional flight franchises, totaling almost 900 aircraft and a workforce that until 2019 amounted to more than 91,000 employees. That pre-pandemic year, the airline billed 39,230 million euros and had profits of 4,200 million.
Hit by covid
Covid-19 hit the company's waterline during part of 2020 and 2021: grounded fleet, lack of passengers due to health restrictions, border closures, and a generalized halt in the global economy. Last week, the company announced pre-tax losses for the last quarter of the fiscal year of 345 million euros and, for the entire year 2021, of 2,966 million euros. Nevertheless, looking ahead, in its annual report, Delta is confident of a strong increase in travel in spring and summer 2022, with significant pent-up demand not only for leisure travel but also for business, a mix of travelers who are precisely the typical profile of this company's customers on flights to and from Barcelona with the large Atlanta hub, which, except for these last two years, remained the undisputed leader in global air traffic and the inexhaustible travel vein that flights to New York from Barcelona have always been.