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End of an era: The final flight of US Airways

The last US Airways flight, from San Francisco to Phliadelphia, landed Saturday morning. The plane is Flight 1939, named for the airline's founding year.

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(AP Photo)
In this image taken from video, US Airways flight 1939, the final US Airways flight, prepares to depart Philadelphia International Airport for Charlotte, N.C. on Friday, Oct. 16, 2015. All future flights will fly under the American Airlines banner, following the completion of a merger announced in 2013.
  • By Staff and David Koenig Associated Press

| Philadelphia

The final US Airways flight has landed in Philadelphia, completing the last leg of its roundtrip journey.

The Airbus A321 landed at Philadelphia International Airport at 5:54 a.m. Saturday after departing from San Francisco at 1:07 a.m. as a red-eye flight.

The plane is Flight 1939, named for the airline's founding year.

The flight departed from Philadelphia at 10:36 a.m. Friday, making scheduled stops in Charlotte, North Carolina; Phoenix and San Francisco.

All future flights will fly under the American Airlines banner, following the completion of a merger announced in 2013.

US Airways was formed in Pittsburgh as All American Aviation. It later operated as Allegheny Airlines before becoming US Airways.

The two airlines merged in December 2013 and decided to keep the better-known American name. 

As the Associated Press's David Koenig reported previously, in  the last 10 years, mergers have eliminated Northwest, Continental and AirTran. Before that, Pan Am, TWA and many smaller carriers disappeared.

American officials hired about 1,900 airport and reservations agents and gave special training to nearly 10,000 current employees to perform the switch from the US Airways reservations system, called Shares, to American's, which is provided by Sabre. The airline also reduced the flights around the switchover to lighten the load on computer systems.

Customers booked on US Airways flights after Oct. 17 will get a new flight number bearing American's AA code. That's only about 4 percent of all reservations in the American and US Airways systems, they said.

American will have more technology work to do after October. It still must combine crew-scheduling and maintenance-tracking systems. The Fort Worth, Texas, company has about 113,000 employees, including those at wholly owned regional subsidiaries such as Envoy Air.

American is the biggest airline operator in the world by passenger traffic, having surpassed United after the merger with US Airways.

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