Hard Landing Quotes

“The travel agents’ motive was plain enough. By the mid-1970s travel agents sold nearly half of all airline tickets. (The airlines sold the rest directly to corporate accounts and individual passengers—by phone, by mail, at airports, and at downtown ticket offices.) Travel agents had been multiplying like delis in Brooklyn, and in some cases they were assuming the same mom-and-pop look. Entrepreneurs, retired couples, wives of the wealthy—almost anyone could start a travel agency merely by stocking the Official Airline Guide and leasing some storefront space or a cubbyhole in a suburban shopping strip. Some people went into the business simply because they enjoyed traveling themselves.”
― Thomas Petzinger Jr., Hard Landing: The Epic Contest for Power and Profits That Plunged the Airlines into Chaos

“Above all, Bob Crandall was stricken with personal ambition. Was there a moment, he was once asked, when he realized that he wanted to run American Airlines? “Yeah,” he answered. “When I was born.”
― Thomas Petzinger Jr., Hard Landing: The Epic Contest for Power and Profits That Plunged the Airlines into Chaos

“Part of the Growth Plan's genius lay in how diabolical it was. The one controlling obstacle to the plan, of course, were the unions at American [Airlines in the early 1980s]. The very concept of a two-tier wage system ran 180 degrees counter to the fundamental all-for-one, one-for-all principles of unionism. But the Growth Plan was conspicuously structured to benefit _existing_ union members, who in an expanding airline would enjoy vastly greater promotion opportunities, meaning that their salaries would increase even more than otherwise. The incumbent employees would reap this windfall on the backs of future employees, but what did it matter when the winners under this strategy were the only ones able to vote on the proposal?”
― Thomas Petzinger Jr., Hard Landing: The Epic Contest for Power and Profits That Plunged the Airlines into Chaos