Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA) - California 1968

Beautiful specimen certificate from the Pacific Southwest Airlines Company printed in 1968. This historic document was printed by the American Bank Note Company and has an ornate border around it with a vignette of an allegorical woman with a flying wing. This item has the printed signatures of the Company’s President.


Certificate Vignette



Pacific Southwest Airlines was a United States airline headquartered in San Diego, California, that operated from 1949 to 1988. It was one of the first large discount airlines in the United States and is considered a precursor to Southwest Airlines. PSA was known by its slogan "The World's Friendliest Airline" and for the iconic smile painted on the nose of its airplanes, the PSA Grinningbirds... Opinion L.A. of the Los Angeles Times stated that PSA was "practically the unofficial flag carrier airline of California for almost 40 years."

PSA is one of the four heritage airlines that form US Airways, the other airlines being America West Airlines, Piedmont Airlines and Allegheny Airlines. US Airways has now announced its intentions to merge with American Airlines under the American name.

Its Boeing customer number was 14. Following the merger with USAir, the PSA name was given to Jetstream International Airlines in order to preserve the PSA name and trademarks.

History from Wikipedia and OldCompany.com (old stock certificate research service)

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About Specimen Certificates

Specimen Certificates are actual certificates that have never been issued. They were usually kept by the printers in their permanent archives as their only example of a particular certificate. Sometimes you will see a hand stamp on the certificate that says "Do not remove from file".

Specimens were also used to show prospective clients different types of certificate designs that were available. Specimen certificates are usually much scarcer than issued certificates. In fact, many times they are the only way to get a certificate for a particular company because the issued certificates were redeemed and destroyed. In a few instances, Specimen certificates were made for a company but were never used because a different design was chosen by the company.

These certificates are normally stamped "Specimen" or they have small holes spelling the word specimen. Most of the time they don't have a serial number, or they have a serial number of 00000. This is an exciting sector of the hobby that has grown in popularity over the past several years.