Originally Posted by
moondog
1. Do you regard PE as the first LCC? If not, what others come to mind?
No, there's a long history of 'alternative' carriers rising to compete with the 'establishment' ones. Here in the UK, in the early 1930s, government-supported Imperial Airways did classic high fare, well-catered mainstream routes like London to Paris, when along came independent Hillman Airways, who ran cheap, no catering flights from a rough airfield at London (where, incidentally, nowadays G-WHBM lives), also to Paris, with De Havilland Dragon aircraft.
Hillman's Airways - Wikipedia
I'll just make the point that when several such airlines merged up to form 'British Airways' in the later 1930s, it was not the current BA, but an independent company. The mainstream airline of the times was called Imperial Airways.
In the USA I suppose one of the best known examples was Pacific Southwest, known as PSA, who built up a substantial cheaper-fare operation within California, from decidedly cheap fare, old DC-4 aircraft beginnings in the late 1950s. What typically happens is such carriers start off competing on price, having little of the substantial business overhead of a mainstream Network carrier, and where successful the latter may reduce their fares to minimise loss of business, while the successful upstart finds they can increase fares a bit to improve their margins, and thus the fares after a while tend to converge.