Human Toll of a Pension Default
by Dale Russakoff
The Washington Post
[This article is dated, but worth remembering as we near the eighth anniversary of 9/11. For many airline families, 9/11 was only the first shoe to drop. -- Ed.]
Ellen Saracini lost her husband, United Airlines Capt. Victor J. Saracini, when his Flight 175 crashed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. Now she stands to lose more than half of her widow’s pension in a very different kind of crash — United’s default of its $9 billion pension obligations.
[... snip ...]
… United Chief Executive Officer Glenn Tilton testified to the Senate Finance Committee about $4.5 million he is receiving from United to replace benefits he had accrued over a 32-year career at Texaco, his previous employer. Tilton said that the default will not affect the payment, and that he has $1.5 million left to collect. He said this does not represent a double standard because United promised him the money in his contract.
Read the rest of the story »
The Video Piling-On Continues ….
This youTube video may be old news to some of you, but I’ve just seen it for the first time. This is Southwest Airlines flight attendant David Holmes bringing it, impressively, with some slow-starting, almost unlikely audience participation by these front-seated business passengers.
Just as with United Breaks Guitars II, you have to watch closely and stay with it all the way to the last second. Welcome aboard!
The Kennedy Era and the Legacy of Flight
I am mourning the passing of Senator Ted Kennedy this morning. As a child of the 1960s (I was born in 1959) the Kennedys have always been part of my consciousness with regard to who Americans are and what they can be.
As a boy, with a cheap Sears telescope and a Polaroid camera, I took pictures of the moon, inspired by President John Kennedy’s challenge in May 1961 that Americans should fly to the moon and explore it by the end of the decade. Of course we accomplished the president’s goal early and the whole world cheered the brave pilots of Apollo 11 who in 1969, ably flew to the most distant place we could yet reach. It was a singular human accomplishment that has not been surpassed in over 40 years. No country but ours has ever flown man to the moon, to walk there.
As I look back on it now, as I near the age of 50, I realize that the event is so historic and memorable because it happened at the intersection of leadership, science, technology, education, dreams, and daring, and exemplified to the world the better nature of Americans.
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“Guitars:” A Good Story Drowns A Missing Message
I spend a lot of time nosing around the web looking for juicy, newsy, topically interesting stuff to put into my next blog post. I’ve got some Googlish, automated methods for randomly finding stuff that might fit a theme, from a variety of sources. I’ve done this for months now — long enough to notice recurring patterns with search engines that should be troubling to United Airlines … that is, of course, if United was paying attention.
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Tale of the Tagues: An Airline Story, Part 2
[Read first » Tale of the Tagues: An Airline Story, Part 1]
After his first departure from ATA, John Tague and two partners started The Pointe Group, an airline consulting firm with presence in both New York and suburban Washington, D.C. Tague’s only two consulting engagements as an ex-ATA executive were short, almost simultaneous, and quite unusual. At the request of a west coast investment bank, he became the consulting CEO for two ailing regional airlines: Air South, based in Columbia, South Carolina and, a few months later, Vanguard Airlines, based in Kansas City, Missouri.
It wasn’t clear to industry observers at the time how a single CEO was going to simultaneously nurse back to health two struggling airlines that were located 850 miles apart. One analyst, George Hamlin of Global Aviation Systems in Washington, D.C., likened the airlines’ plight to “two drunks staggering down the street trying to hold each other up.”
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