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  1. #1

    Join Date
    Jul 2011
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    Feed for the forum

    There are some interesting topics at times, but are also often slack, Of 17 categoires, 2 have a current post today, 11 dont have a recent one and 4 dont have one this month. There are 5 pages of negative complaints by purity guards and only 2 new posts, that seems unbalanced.. Obviously the ones of general or broader interest are not crowding out the spellbinding details of cotter keys.
    Here's one that I liked and learned from, the Gordon Bethune book , paperback, FROM WORST TO FIRST. I in 1994 Cont reluctantly hired him from Boeing as CEO, since they were about to go bankrupt. They had a lot of narrow folks who didnt want to change or broaden anything either. He found it was bad, the only good news was they wernt quite all the bottom. Of 9 categories to measure airlines they were only worst in 8 of them and next to worst in one.
    He changed in three ways. First was attitude ,morale was so bad no one cared or expected to improve, Stews would not report broken oven cause they knew maintenace probably wouldnt fix it anyway, result cold meals. Lost baggage, late departures. He talked to employees, hard to convince many but also began bonuses for on time departures, etc, and a $65 bonus monthly helped. Next was accounting review and the startling finding was the top and bottom level flgihts were losing money. They had paid too much for the big 747s or such and loan terms didnt allow profit. He pushed hard to get lenders to take back planes, At the bottom end the lite part was not making money due to low ridership. Mangement had cut it to the bone to save money. Gordon said, "Its like pizza, first you cut back on the meat, then you go to canned tomatoes instead of fresh, then less cheese, pretty soon youve made a pizza so cheap nobody wants to eat it." So they sold the lite part, and began to make money on the mid range. They had also alienated travel agents but cutting commissions and had to fix that. In a couple of years they became a top airline.
    As for the lite part there is a bit of a parallel in gen av planes today. The rock bottom barw bones are not where the demand and profit is, rather might be something like an equipped Cirrus, or fancy jet.
    Last edited by Bill Greenwood; 09-27-2017 at 09:36 AM.

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