Former Usair Chief Defends Airport Agreement

[USA320Pilot]

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Respectfully,

Chip

 

[PITbull]

As you note, Colodney stated that they insisted on building the airport because of over crowding in the old airport. I remeber that so well. You couldn't even walk in the terminal.

Colodney was a great CEO. WE miss his leadership. If he were sitting in that seat today, we would have given him what he requested in concessions. Why? Because he is an honorable man who deals in good faith, knows USAirways inside and out, and would have adapted to the times as a team together.

Yes. We would have given him the concessions, indeed.

 

[Fatherknowsbest]

PitBull,
I agree with many of your posts. This one is not one of them. If you repeat over and over that Colodney is a great man....does this make it true? I think not. There was a time when everything he touched turned to gold. But this is the CEO who bought 2 airlines and then didn't know what to do with them. Didn't know how to merge them, didn't know what management to keep, didn't realize which contracts worked and why, and which ones didn't. There was no meaningful plan.
You will never admit that the wrong turn the Company took, was under his stewardship. Many, many, many ex (layed off) and current employees know better. I have no problem with the fact you like the man. Stop trying to pretend all would be fine if he were still in charge. These are the dumbest comments you have ever made on this board in my opinion. I appreciate the fact that most of your comments are dead on. Two thirds of the employees that are left will never share your view. Should we put this up for a vote? Lets just stop playing the what if game. I would certainly say that he (Colodney) is better than what we currently have at the helm...he is still the one who started the mess that we have been in for a number of years, he couldn't even find a decent replacement!

 

[PITbull]

PitBull,
I agree with many of your posts. This one is not one of them. If you repeat over and over that Colodney is a great man....does this make it true? I think not. There was a time when everything he touched turned to gold. But this is the CEO who bought 2 airlines and then didn't know what to do with them. Didn't know how to merge them, didn't know what management to keep, didn't realize which contracts worked and why, and which ones didn't. There was no meaningful plan.
You will never admit that the wrong turn the Company took, was under his stewardship. Many, many, many ex (layed off) and current employees know better. I have no problem with the fact you like the man. Stop trying to pretend all would be fine if he were still in charge. These are the dumbest comments you have ever made on this board in my opinion. I appreciate the fact that most of your comments are dead on. Two thirds of the employees that are left will never share your view. Should we put this up for a vote? Lets just stop playing the what if game. I would certainly say that he (Colodney) is better than what we currently have at the helm...he is still the one who started the mess that we have been in for a number of years, he couldn't even find a decent replacement!

Father,

It wasn't up to Colodney to find a replacement, it was up to the BOD. It was also up to the BOD to acquire Piedmont and PSA. If you remember, the plan was to make the airline bigger so there would not be a hostile takeover. Remember the "poison pill" theory. The Lorenzos and Icahns were raiding airlines and then throwing the carcuses away. In retrospect, we may have been taken over by Icahn, and we would all be on the "outside looking in" if we didn't get bigger quick. We were at war in IRAN in 1992 "desert storm" and fuel was skyrocketing. In addition Colodney had already put in 30 years and he was retiring. Most of the failures that ensued had alot to do with the economic times. When the economy was robust, U did exceptionally well, like in the latter 90s, inspite of labor costs and such.

Yes, I would like to take a vote. However, I don't know how fair it would be and the turn out may not be so good, as there are many new employees since colodney which started in 1992. Plus, many of the merge airlines never worked under colodney long enough to evaluate his abilities or lack of as you and I.

I still stand by my statement. A CEOs honor and trust is more important to me than successes and failures. No one has a crystal ball to know the outcome of decisions, otherwise we would all be billionairs now wouldn't we?

Say what you will about Gangwal too, but the man had honor and kept his word. As a unionist, that has much value in the arena of "good faith".

I don't want to rehash the Gangwal thing all over again, cause that is not what this thread is about, however, I'm a believer when their is trust among men (women), we will have successes and failures together, and we will pick up the pieces and try again together. That's a "fighting machine".

With this management, I can't go there.

 

[ClueByFour]

I don't want to rehash the Gangwal thing all over again, cause that is not what this thread is about, however, I'm a believer when their is trust among men (women), we will have successes and failures together, and we will pick up the pieces and try again together. That's a "fighting machine".

This is probably the biggest reason why LUV works, at least according to Herb.

There are a number of other things (controlled growth and the like), but ultimately, the management trusts their employees and empowers them to do the right thing. In return, many of the groups are (were?) compsensated less that their peers in terms of cash, but much more in terms of equity.

When you have this type of environment, the fact that employees trust their management and have a very large stake of performance based compensation, you will have a powerhouse.

Good buddy of mine went to work for LUV after 2 years of college on the ramp. He has since worked his way thru his A&P (some of which they picked up), went to work for mx, makes some decent scratch, and has a ton of profitsharing and equity compensation. The scary thing is that to hear him talk about working there, you would think that Herb is the Second Coming and wonder what exactly they put in the kool-aide. I've never heard anybody talk with the same level of enthusiasm about their job and/or employer.

There is much more to running a business, and even at LUV, they don't hand you everything on a silver platter (their work rules and compensation rates while everyone else was going sky-high is evidence of this). However, Dave and Dave could learn something from the Wild Turkey swilling crowd from DAL in terms of leadership.

 

[Garcia]

Gangwal = Honor Gimme a break! Accepting 15,000,000 while U is in chap 11. Try looking up sycophant. (gee i hope i spelled that correctly) you'll find him there.

 

[PITbull]

I don't believe Colodney created the problems we sit on today. Some of those high labor costs everyone is screaming about was created by wolf, inadvertantly. He insisted on "Pariety plus 1%" by all labor groups in the late 90s when all our contracts were amendable. What that translates to is...the average pay rate of all the majors plus 1%. There was much resistance by all labor groups as they didn't want to be tied with all carriers for wages. However, Wolf threatened to shrink the airline not grow, and told the pilots there would be NO airbus purchase without that language. So they conceded. Only group that refused is AFA. We were actually going to strike over it in 2000.

Well fast forward to the United merger. United mangement ended up giving huge increases to their labor groups because they wanted "peace" and no labor problems or unrest during the merger episode and they wanted DOT to approve this merger. ALPA at United got a 45% increase over the life of their new contract, which floored the Industry. As a consequence to the "pariety +1%" langugage for ALPA at U, our pilots got 2 huge raises two years in a row. Pariety was never intended by Wolf to be a "wind fall" for U pilots. But that is just what transpired. At the same time, 9/11 happened, and put the industry into a tail spin. That is why our pilots were able to have such a huge stake in the company. This pariety increase for U pilots translated to 33% just over two years....May of 2001 and May of 2002.They gave all that back and some. In return, Dave gave them a 20% stake in the company. AFA never got raises, cause we didn't have parity. IAM only received 6% as their pariety increase in 2001. Of course they gave that all back and plenty more with Dave.

Point I'm trying to make, is with Colodney, he made the decisions based on the "times". There were hostile takeovers in the late 80s and early 90s. I remember this so well. We needed to get big, fast, because Icahn made a bid for USAir, and colodney was not going down without a fight. So, he invented this "poison pill" theory, and we started to purchase airlines so Icahn couldn't take over USAir. Maybe that wasn't the wisest move in retrospect, and PSA was just not a good thing for us all the way around, because we got our butts kicked from the young SW airline on the west coast, so we retreated.

I was quite young when colodney was CEO. I was hired at 21, right out of college, and he would be in Pittsburgh walking around our crew room so often. Once he met you, he wouldn't forget your hame. When I had him on my flight, he would call me by my first name, and joke as if I was his best friend for the moment. And he would give you a hug when he saw you.

He inspired me. I trusted him. He was "good people" in the heart.

 

[PITbull]

Gangwal = Honor Gimme a break! Accepting 15,000,000 while U is in chap 11. Try looking up sycophant. (gee i hope i spelled that correctly) you'll find him there.

Garcia,

You are confused on your "time line". Gangwal took his contractual pension pay out in November of 2001. Dave S. put us into BK on August 11, 2002. Gangwal was off the property.

 

[PITbull]

Bob,

None of those monies were BONUSES.

I don't know what you were doing in Nov. of 2001, but in January of 2002, In USA Today Wolf made public three things when Gangwal resigned and Wolf took over CEO position again:

Wolf statements:

1. USAirways had $1 Billion in cash in the bank at the end of December 2001
2. USAirways was in the BEST position it has ever been in
3. We won't even need to apply for an ATSB loan.

That, my friend, is factual statments from the CEO. Three months later, on March 2, 2002, they hired Dave S. as CEO and the rest is history.

 

[wings396]

As you note, Colodney stated that they insisted on building the airport because of over crowding in the old airport. I remeber that so well. You couldn't even walk in the terminal.

Colodney was a great CEO. WE miss his leadership. If he were sitting in that seat today, we would have given him what he requested in concessions. Why? Because he is an honorable man who deals in good faith, knows USAirways inside and out, and would have adapted to the times as a team together.

Yes. We would have given him the concessions, indeed.

Colodny WAS a great CEO in his time. The biggest problem with him was that he vacated his seat too soon after the mergers of PI & PSA. Ed should have stayed on for a few more years to follow thru on what he started. In my opinion his biggest failure was not keeping some of the PI Marketing people on. Coming over from PI, the lack of Marketing was the thing that stood out the most to me. Ed should have had a plan in place to standardize the fleet soon after the mergers took place. The F-100 purchase was a big blunder of his for certain. Remember that when Ed was at the helm, USAIR had little or no Competition in many NE cities.
He could do no wrong in this environment, but when this started to change the Airline NEVER figured out how to adapt. This is still evident today with us being run out of station after staion. To me this is our #1 problem to date, with a lack of revenue killing us instead of labor costs. So to sum it up, "Uncle Ed" started the ball of Demise rolling back in 1989......

 

[bandit1]

Mr Colodny was a great CEO and yes he should have hung around a little longer. What got US in this mess in my opinion was offering LPP after the mergers which amounted in over 800 million in costs per year for the next 3 years after the mergers coupled with a declining economy. It wasn't enough for the two aquired airlines to get large pay raises to meet the old USair scales and to fit in seniority wise on an equal basis, unlike AA who had recently aquired Air Cal and Delta who aquired Western, those folks started at day 1 seniority. Mr Colodny and his management team at that time wanted to make sure All their employees from all three airlines did not suffer as a result of the mergers therfore adopting the LPP.

An interesting fact that after the merger the combined USAir/PSA/Piedmont combination was, we were the second largest airline in the World next to Aeroflot in terms of passengers boarded annually at around 56 million.

 

[etops1]

can we please stop dwelling in the past. what happened back when colodny was president happenned. we can't change that. what we can change is our future. that is a big problem we have is that we dwell to much on a "what if"scenario. well "what if" did not happen. we need to find a way to help this company stay in business. we need stop the name calling. stop the rumors .and start working together. even if management is not on our court there is much we as employees can do to make this company succesful. we have good employees at this airline. show our customers that we really appreceate their business. i am not saying that we do not do that because i know we do but a little more effort would not hurt. i understand the morale is at a all time low but that is not our customers fault. also as employees we need to work together operationaly.
i just got a letter from the union that f/a's are not to help utility clean the a/c because that's their job and not the f/a's. things like this is what hurt our company. why can't i help a cleaner if it means this plane will be turned around quickly and it will get us out on time. this is what i mean about working together. thats what makes luv ,j-blu, and the others so succesful. we need to look at the big picture here. and its our customers. many of you may not agree with me but thats where i stand on this. we can't let mangement turn us against each other cause thats what they want.
i know that there are cleaners that are layed off and that if i pick up that means i am doing that cleaners job. but if we keep with the whole "oh well they wanted to lay people off ,its not my problem" bit. this company ain't going nowhere. let me tell it is our problem. because when that flight is disrupted operationaly . wether its because of an abusive sick call, no cleaners or what ever the fact. we lose cause those people ain't coming back to u. and those people pay our bills.
so if you don't agree with me so be it. everyone is entitled to there own opinion. but we are trying to run a business here. i say we because management is at the crystal palace sitting on there asses. we are the ones out there on the line making this airline work everyday. if we don't care even if mangement doesen't care. heck screw them . but lets not screw our selves. lets be the best we can be. cause in the end all we have is eachother. lets hope that htis new year is a succesfull one for us here at u. lets prove the skeptics wrong. this company is a great company. better than luv,ual,b6,aa,dl,nw,con,better than those competitors. why ,because we have better employees that have been from thick through thin through the years. let's show them that we are better and that we are going to be around to for a long time. and plaese if you respond to my post and nothing nice to say . i really don't want to hear it.

 

[Retired1]

Mr Colodny was a great CEO and yes he should have hung around a little longer. What got US in this mess in my opinion was offering LPP after the mergers which amounted in over 800 million in costs per year for the next 3 years after the mergers coupled with a declining economy. It wasn't enough for the two aquired airlines to get large pay raises to meet the old USair scales and to fit in seniority wise on an equal basis, unlike AA who had recently aquired Air Cal and Delta who aquired Western, those folks started at day 1 seniority. Mr Colodny and his management team at that time wanted to make sure All their employees from all three airlines did not suffer as a result of the mergers therfore adopting the LPP.

An interesting fact that after the merger the combined USAir/PSA/Piedmont combination was, we were the second largest airline in the World next to Aeroflot in terms of passengers boarded annually at around 56 million.

It was always my feeling Ed Colodny was a great man during his time here. I can see no reason to blame him for the shape we are in now. Noone had the ability at the time to look forward to where we are today. Seems like way after he left the people in charge were even buying the stock back.

 

[wings396]

We are not living in the past, we are just stating the FACTS as they apply. A statement was made about about Uncle Ed, and we responded to it. I am saying nothing more than the wheels of destruction were set in motion by him 15 years ago. Nobody here can argue that we have not been on track since 1989 can they????
We are now forced to live and pay for a chain of blunders that started in the past while he and others live in retired wealth. The past is the past, but we suffer in the present due to it.

 

[tug_slug]

The past is the past, but we suffer in the present due to it.

Can our future be changed, if so at what cost?

Tug