Most airlines (except SouthWest and a few others) are run by managers who know only what they learned in MBA school. They never were involved in any way with the actual routine operation of airlines. They did not come up through the ranks. They do not give a damn about customer satisfaction, employee loyalty, stockholder equity or anything else along those lines.

They run the airlines entirely by the Income & Expense statements. They make 250,000 fare changes a day in an attempt to squeeze the last penny out of their victims, the private travellers and the corporations who sponsor business travel. They pull down huge salaries while their companies go belly-up. The boards of directors (known in the trade as the idiots) permit this to go on and the stockholders have little power due to the fact that the management controls the proxy apparatus.

In short, they are just a bunch of ENRON-like companies which are marching to their inevitable dooms. The bigshots will get hundreds of millions in "golden parachutes" while the workers get the shaft, the vendors get 2 cents on the dollar, and the stockholders get absolutely nothing. Welcome to MBA World.

Not all MBAs are greedy, grasping, incompetent sleazeballs, but the airlines seem to have been taken over by the worst of the lot.

David F Mayer