Eastern Air Lines [SEP] airline hub
. This was the first major crash of a widebody jet aircraft.
- On 11 September 1974, Eastern Air Lines Flight 212, a DC-9-31 carrying 78 passengers and four crew operating a scheduled flight from Charleston, South Carolina, to Chicago, Illinois, with an intermediate stop in Charlotte, North Carolina, crashed while conducting an instrument approach in dense ground fog at Douglas Municipal Airport (now called Charlotte/Douglas International Airport). The aircraft crashed just short of the runway, killing 72 passengers and crew.
United Airlines and Western Airlines previously operated such cooperative "through plane" interchange flights on both domestic and/or international services in the past with these schedules appearing in their respective system timetables.
Delta Air Lines pioneered the hub and spoke system for aviation in 1955 from its hub in Atlanta, Georgia, United States, in an effort to compete with Eastern Air Lines. FedEx adopted the hub and spoke model for overnight package delivery during the 1970s. When the United States airline industry was deregulated in 1978, Delta's hub and spoke