What does it stand for?
 

Do the letters actually stand for anything?

Pacific Southwest Airlines.

Kinda.

The original Pacific Southwest Airlines was acquired (or merged, I dunno) with US Airways a while back, which gave Airways rights to all of the trademarks of the original PSA for ten years.

At the end of that ten years, rather than let that trademark out into the Public Domain (how many reincarnations of Eastern or Pan Am have there been?) Airways renamed one of its subsidiaries to PSA, just the letters, not the actual name, so as to maintain the rights to the PSA trademark.

That subsidiary was originally named Jetstream International Airlines, which is where the JIA and JS codes come from.


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That’s neat to know. Funny how they did a better job keeping track of that after 10 years when google let their rights to the domain google.com slip once. Some random guy bought it on the market. They then bought it back from him for 6006.13 (numbers that look like google) which he then donated to charity and google matched.

Yep, same deal as with Piedmont. Nothing "original" Piedmont or PSA about the current airlines, just named that way to protect the trademark. But PSA "originally" stood for Pacific Southwest Airlines, and even though the current airline is not the same, that's where the letters originate from.

Other fun trivia - JIA flew Jetstreams (duh) and the livery was white with a ... blue streak ... down the side :)

Pretty cool. I have to admit I geek out on stuff like this. Thanks ZeroTT.

I think the same is true with the paint schemes. Hence the PSA, piedmont, airways, etc.. on some of the mainline equipment. Is it true if you don't use it you lose it?

No, AA has a history of holding onto its trademarks, same with US Airways. Hence is why you see Air Cal, TWA, Reno Air paint jobs on AA 737 mainline equipment and on the US side, you have PSA, Piedmont, America West, Allegheny paint jobs on the Airbuses.