Originally Posted by
30west
I wish that all the UAL pilots could have been at the DEN LCA meeting recently and got to hear Kirby and Oscar talk, I'm a 25-year guy and its the most impressed I have ever been, by far by management at UA.
They spoke exactly about all this and Oscar said we will get beat up the next 18 months or so by Wall Street, the analysts, and Investors but he had prepared the board and institutional investors for it.
They both said things we have all said for years, you cant shrink to profitability, Smizek dug a deep hole that we have to fill, you cant give up assets(JFK-LAX), you cant run from a fight with LCCs.
They explained in detail what their plans were I won't repeat in a public forum.
But most of all Kirby explained how his job is to position the airline for the LONG term, its Oscars job to handle Wall Street. Kirby pointed out the analyst get upset when UAL is growing or taking back market share that was lost during the merger when the running of the airline had gone to the back burner.
He said what most of you don't realize is the analyst and the firms they work for DONT JUST OWN UAL STOCK, THEY OWN ALL AIRLINES STOCK INCLUDING LCCs. So if UAL does well at becoming a better, more profitable, more market share airline that means many others will do worse, the Firms don't want that, they want the status quo.
Let's just hope their plans works, it was very well thought out and reasonable IMO. I am more optimistic than ever in my 25 years here.
Thanks for posting what you could of the meeting. Good stuff to hear. I was frankly quite pleased when our stock tanked yesterday after an earnings beat. It means that investors sense that current management is not running the operation solely to appease their desire for short term profit. That's how we behind in the first place.
We desperately need more domestic capacity. There are many reason's DAL is eating our lunch, but that's the biggest one. For YEARS under poor leadership we kept shifting more towards international and less domestic, obviously forgetting that you need the domestic to FEED the international. Balanced is good. I like the direction OM and KB are headed. I share your optimism. For the first time since the mid-90's we have a team that genuinely seems to want to run a great airline.