articularly from academic economist. This gained strong momentum in the mid 1970's and between 1977 and 1979. A veritable revolution was accomplished in both domestic and international policy (Airline Deregulation PG 8). The desire of free competition in this industry outweighed the need for tight governmental control of entry, exit, pricing, and other competitive matters. Delta soon realized, that it had to change the way it did businessWith deregulation, the airline industry had to re-think the way it did business. One of the immediate affects deregulation had on Delta was the pricing chaos. With the deregulation pricing, the airlines had to increase their staffing to keep up with the fairs changing on a daily basis. Delta hired an additional 147 employees to keep track of these frequent fare changes, increasing its tariff department staff, five times the number of personnel needed before deregulation. The Wall Street Journal reported that on a typical day, the tariff department compares at least 5,000 industry-pricing changes against Delta's 70,000 fares. These changes in fares to compete for filled seats resulted in record airline losses for the first quarter and are blamed on unrestricted deep discounted fares that generated little traffic. (Aviation Week July 26, 1982 P. 34). Delta Airlines was not able to escape the affects of deregulation and in 1983 lost a substantial amount of money and from 1991-1993 it showed losses on average of a half a billion dollars a year. Delta turned this around by what was called "Leadership 7.5". Under its Leadership 7.5 program, Delta's goal was to cut its cost to fly one seat one mile for 7.5 cents. To do this Delta had to cut operating cost by approximately two billion dollars per year. What this meant in some respects, was a cut in the workforce of approximately 15,000 employees, or 15 percent of it's workforce, quarterly dividend plunged from 17.5 cents to a nickel, and they capped commissio...
