tl;dr – It’s the only university to ever do so.
Evidently, Purdue University (go Boilermakers!) has quite the history in commercial and chartered aviation?
According to this Wikipedia article, the airline partly owned the for-profit charter jet airline, Purdue Airlines. Back in the late 1960’s, Purdue Airlines started as a “for-profit supplemental air carrier – the term the US government uses to denote charter operations. The airline was 80% controlled by Stephens, the Arkansas investment bank, which contributed $800,000, with Purdue Aeronautics Corporation contributing its operating certificate to the airline and retaining a 20% stake.”
However, that’s not the airline’s only toe-touching into the flight game. In fact, “Purdue University has a history of operating airlines directly or through affiliates, including:
- charter operations of its own through wholly owned non-profit Purdue Aeronautics Corporation
- being briefly certificated by the US government to operate scheduled service through Purdue Aeronautics
- separately, briefly owning another scheduled airline, Mid-West Airlines.”
After Purdue Airlines shut down in 1971, then-nascent Southwest even hired Purdue’s pilot corps and certain other employees, speeding its start.
Most people who know about Purdue’s aviation history do so through this one fact:
“The airline was famous for operating and maintaining Playboy founder Hugh Hefner’s private aircraft, also a DC-9, named “The Big Bunny” – painted black with the Playboy bunny logo on the tail, which was based at Purdue University Airport and available (though apparently rarely used) for charter use by the airline.”
