Cont'd
Going behind the scenes - Dispatch and Flight Operations
When I visited World Headquarters back in April, I was given a tour of the new OperationsCenter in the WillisTower. It was something I will never forget. The company has invested millions in moving these departments from Elk Grove to downtown Chicago. Not only Dispatch, but on this floor are the departments that monitor weather and airport conditions world wide. If a storm front is moving into the Washington DC area, these are the people that are charged with first of all forecasting the storm, and then making decisions on re-routing planes in flight and holding planes on the ground that have not left their destinations. The Dispatch operators then receive these new instructions and pass those on to the pilots.
Also on this floor are the Crew Desks. If a flight is canceled, or a delay causes a crew to mis-connect, then the Crew Desk gets involved. Pilots and Flight Attendants will then be reassigned, layover at a hotel, or be put on another flight to “deadhead” to their domicile or next destination in their trip. It would be fascinating to be able to watch them in action for a day. You would be surprised how few people are manning these stations given the thousand of flights United has every day. Helping the Crew Desks are the Hotel Desks. These employees are tasked with making sure hotel rooms are available for layovers whether scheduled or unscheduled, and those hotels have to meet minimum standards that are spelled out in the Collective Bargaining Agreements for the Pilots and Flight Attendants. An unscheduled layover can have the Hotel Desk scrambling to find rooms at the last minute which is not always an easy task.
After finishing this tour, I realized that I also overlooked writing about this part of the airline. The biggest payoff from the merger was going to be the cost savings by consolidating these back office operations. The headquarters for the merged companies would remain in Chicago which means a lot of good people in Houston were faced with a transfer they did not want, or lost their job altogether. I have not given enough time to these hard-working professionals and if any of them are reading this, all I can say is Thank You. I know a big part of every trip I take involves what you are doing behind the scenes.
Recently, management came out with a Press Release announcing that a tentative Joint Collective Bargaining Agreement had been reached for the Dispatchers. There are two different unions involved with the sUA Dispatchers represented by the Professional Airline Flight Control Association (PAFCA) and the sUA Dispatchers represented by the Transport Workers Union (TWU). The agreement still has to be ratified on the sUA side, but it is a positive step forward.
Looking Ahead
In response to the last post, I received some very valuable information that has helped me to understand how this new United looks at costs vs. how it was done at pre-merger United, as wells as Delta and American. It explains why this management is so keen on the use of Regional Carriers domestically, and it also points out why Delta is migrating away from Regionals. I learned so much that I do want to share, but this article is already long enough, so I will write more about this later. I don't want to put the name out there, but I do have to thank the source that contacted me. As a finance person myself I found it all very fascinating.
I was also sent an internal report with the projected fleet scheduling for this summer. It was shocking to see that the number of Regional Carrier flights going through the Houston and Chicago hubs is almost double the number of Mainline flights. It is only at Los Angeles and San Francisco where the number of Mainline departures exceeds Regional. I think this management is finding out the hard way that the Regional Carriers are not as reliable as hoped, especially when weather plays havoc. Regional Carriers have their own internal Flight Operations and Dispatch, and they are not always in sync with United's operations. This answers the question of why there were 30,000 Regional Flight cancellations this last winter, and how it so severely impacted United's Mainline and International operations. It just gives rise to another questions, why are there still so many Regional Carrier flights in the schedule when it all went so wrong in the first quarter. God forbid that a hurricane hits Houston this summer that shuts down IAH for an extended period of time.
I also see that there are still some weaknesses in the SHARES system that have not been fixed. The biggest weakness appears to be in Yield Management. It was just something that Mr. Compton said in our meeting about how they were making adjustments so that more seats open up for availability closer to the departure date. The way he put made it sound like the system could not automatically make those adjustments based on real-time demand as it is done in SABRE and Apollo. I have also noticed that SHARES cannot sell Global First seats on the some domestic flights that have them. It appears that a flight with the same number that rotates from 3-cabin to 2-cabin depending on the day of the week, SHARES cannot sell Global First. It is not as if there are many of us out there willing to pay the fare for a Global First seat, it just appears SHARES does not have the flexibility of Apollo when it comes to Yield Management. Finally, It also telling that it was just announced that Delta is seizing an opportunity and is going to make the switch to Apollo, and that until now, Economy Plus seats could not be purchased through sites using the SABRE system.
Epilogue
You are all probably thinking this post was never going to end. This last week was again filled with highs and lows for me. I never expected that my story would be published by a newspaper as large as Crain's, which is based right there in Chicago where Jeff and his "Team" can see it. I would also never have expected that so many respected analysts and reporters would echo the message I have been trying to get out. Even though we might delight in seeing Jeff get negative press, we certainly do not want it to get so bad where he takes the airline down with him.
As far as the low point, no matter how many negative articles come out, or that analysts at CNBC and Bloomberg say that Jeff and this "Team" should go, there are some people out there that keep them employed. I pointed out in a post on Flyertalk that our efforts should now be directed at this incompetent Board of Directors that appears to be blind to what is happening, as well as the Institutional Shareholders that appear to have no long-term commitment to United. It is time to bombard each Board Member and the Institutional Fund Managers with letters that tell stories of what is going on every day.
For the AFA members, I thank you for your support and I encourage you to do what you can to support your flying partners that have been furloughed or forced to cross over. Management has been caught off guard and operations have been disrupted because there has not been enough reserve Flight Attendants. I want to feel sorry for Sam Risoli as he is caught in the middle; however, a good leader needs to unify his forces not divide them.
The same thought goes for Mr. McKeen and the rest of middle management. When will you decide to grow a set and concede that trying to Continentalize this new United is not working? This merger was meant to forge a new airline that was the best part of both United and Continental. This merger needed innovative leadership from the outset; leadership that truly understood the value of the United Airlines brand. This company needs a leader that gives his middle managers the freedom to manage and encourages them to think outside the box. The stubborn arrogance of Jeff and his "Team" only fosters ineffective leadership. Jeff's arrogance only instills fear in his direct reports and the managers that report to them; that fear being that if they do not "tow the line" they will lose their high paying jobs. That fear is like a cancer that spreads down to the front-line employees that have given up so much to keep both airlines going. It is a cancer that makes their job so very difficult; it is a cancer that has them heartbroken over what has happened to their beloved United. Jeff, you cannot force the "Friendly Skies," you have to foster them.