Originally Posted by
Herkflyr
How long have you been here? I've been here since the late 90s. Unlike now (and we do have a good management team--overall) our management then was pretty terrible. And I am not talking about labor issues, I am talking about day to day operational leadership, both from a flight ops and overall airline perspective. We proudly had horrible looking airplanes with paint peeling off them, multiple generations of liveries (also known to line pilots as paint jobs), and of course if pilots, who despite everything, want to be proud of the company we have hitched our career to, mentioned this, the knee-jerk reply was always, "we can't afford to take these planes out of revenue service, you pilots just shut up and color, and fly, don't tell us how to do our job." We proudly never ran the APU, and baked our passengers in the back, severely ****ing them off "to save fuel you know." Worst of all, we had a terrible revenue department that took a perverse glee in building a network schedule that required more aircraft than we owned--all to supposedly "maximize revenue." Then, every day, we would proactively cancel a bunch of flights, enraging our most important passengers.
And of course, if pilots ever brought this up, "you pilots just fly planes and don't tell us how to do our job" was the canned response.
All this was accompanied by a huge bout of hubris--until we started hitting some turbulence even before 9/11. As we approached BK our revenue per passenger trailed the industry--that's what happens when you run a bad operation.
Richard Anderson crushed that dysfunctional mindset. Amazingly, we managed to get the entire, post-merger fleet painted in record time, and for the first time in 15 years, sometime around 2010, we finally had a fleet with the same paint scheme across the board. We abandoned the arrogant, and dysfunctional model of overscheduling flights to "maximize revenue" (at the expense of long term goodwill and loss of customers) and somehow managed to NOT cancel a bunch of flights.
I am starting to see the same management hubris now as I did then. Yes, we are making a lot of money TODAY, but assuming that will last forever is the first step into ensuring that it will not.
I have to agree with rip on this. The exact things you cite are the opposite of the recent IROPs. Those were systemic failures due to poor leadership and the feeding frenzy post deregulation. My opinion is that there was some driver in 2025 to maximize profit by limiting cost. I think when early 2025 revenue tanked for pollical reasons that scared them. The reaction was a moratorium on spending which was obvious to us doing the actual operations. Pilots, scheduling etc. I had a dispatcher say they were renewing the push for min (covid era) fuel also. I think that was temporary because the market has stabilized and continues to be robust. The tariff effects have waned and airframe deliveries and engine issues are becoming more manageable.
I think 2026 will be the international growth year that 2025 was supposed to be. Glen leaving and Ed planning his exit/successorship means we are potentially headed to the past were none of the up and coming C suiters have any experience. The biggest threat isn't IROPs because we have the template to correct that and a little money will go a long way to fortify the brand by stabilizing the operation. The threat is a change in mindset that returns us to the 1990s philosophy of route dominance over brand image. The company is a consumer brand now not an industry tenth player trying to build a network and out wit rival operators.
The industry has matured into a healthy competitive balanced stable system of transportation. Yes, the IROPs need to be addressed but what built this company into what it is today is market rationalization and a focus on profitability over route dominance at all cost. The next leadership team will have a "vision" for Delta and I hope it's more of the same and not world domination through reckless money losing routes for routes sake. United has a larger international operation and there is room for us to smartly open and compete in some of those areas, especially in the pacific but we can't lose sight of what has made this company an industry leader. That is brand and revenue management. The financial side of the house has and will dominated and direct our future. Yes, operations need to improve especially IROP recovery but that's the easy fix with manpower, equipment availability and maintenance touches. The harder part is revenue management and the discipline to stay the course as a consumer brand and manage for profitability versus a new (old) vision of dominating an industry through rapid expansion and market share.