I feel he's not such a great CEO for two reasons. First, he's turned US Airways into a vacation airline instead of a pretty good business airline. That's fine when your core market is PHX and LAS, but it pretty much is the kiss of death when you run up and down the East Coast all day. He has (or his minions) have consistently made changes to things to save money with out looking at the long term effects (and by long term I mean more then a week out). Something as basic as closet space on a 320 has been redone several times because Sand Castle guys didn't understand the concept of people traveling with winter coats.
The second issue is he can only manage through chaos. His plan for growth was to keep merging, and as long as stuff was merging he had reasons for why a lot of stuff wasn't working. But now, here we are almost THREE years past the date of the merger and only two labor groups have been integrated, there are still a whole bunch of systems that don't work (including the reservation system that doesn't even recognize a fair number of international city codes).
The place is falling apart and fuel costs have VERY little to do with it.
And yes, I seriously wonder if any of us will have jobs here within a year or so, not just because of fuel costs, but because the airline has pretty much driven away most business travelers, who are the only ones who will be able to afford the fares when they actually charge what they have to due to fuel.