Remembering 9/11, Eight Years On
September 11, 2001 … September 11, 2001 … 9/11.
Just a mention of a date is enough to reopen and expose many tragic and unnecessary memories.
Yes … of course you remember where you were and what you were doing when you heard. I was at a neighborhood restaurant in Elgin, Illinois having breakfast with the woman who would become my wife exactly one week later. I remember the waitress, trying to both refill our drinks (with shaking hands) and tell us what the sharply escalating buzz was about. She knocked a glass of water all over me, but seemed not to notice; her thoughts were elsewhere. The queue grew rapidly at the cash register as people left half-eaten meals to rush home to their TVs and Internet connections.
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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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