“When Lorenzo took over the ailing Texas International in 1972, he became the youngest CEO of any airline of substance in the history of air transportation,” according to R.E.G. Davies who has been the Lindbergh Chair of Aerospace history at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and is often considered the dean of aviation history. Davies went on to say that “(Lorenzo's) subsequent progress toward greater goals has been marked with no less success and has been just as systematic,…Lorenzo became the most controversial single personality in the airline world…because he challenged the entire structure of cost-and-revenue relations that had long existed in a closely protected corporate environment and in doing so generated a cause célebre of historic proportions.”