WacoFan
Bigly
That's where you are Waco are wrong. Business is not business. Waco couldn't manage his way out of a wet paper bag in this industry, no matter how good he may be in his chosen field of health care.
And rarely has that been the fault of incompetent management. The 190 bankruptcies that have resulted since the deregulation act are largely the fault of two things:
1. Start-up carriers that were started by businessmen who falsely believed exactly as you and Waco do, that because they were successful in other businesses, that their business experience could be carried over to the airline business and make them successful. They learned the hard way that they were wrong.
2. Airlines being forced to restructure, and in many cases failing to do so in a hyper-competitive environment, following a complete structural change of the industry after deregulation. Many of these managers actively lobbied against deregulation, because they knew exactly what would result from it. Bob Crandall is a perfect example of this. He warned everyone that the industry could not survive deregulation without extreme chaos happening first, and he was right. His experience in the industry led him to that conclusion, and his smart business acumen helped him to successfully restructure a legacy carrier and completely revolutionize the airline business in spite of the problems created by the very deregulation that he fought against. He was among the best of the airline executives, and he still struggled to deal with the problems created by deregulation. The bankruptcies and other financial problems of the other carriers that weren't so lucky weren't always due to incompetent management. A structural change so severe as deregulation simply couldn't be handled, no matter how good the managers, at every carrier.
Because the good ideas generated by those projects were integrated into the legacy carrier's mainline operation after they were tested out on the LCC subsidiary.
Pretty certain I could do a better job than Arpey did. Or Bill Compton. Or Arpey's predecessor (can't think of his name off the top of my head - but the idiot that paid the bonuses to execs shortly after 9-11).