To make a long story shortand it was a long dayBain got the job. Flight 426, bound for Wichita, Kansas, crashed near the departure end of runway shortly after takeoff. But its indispensable if you want to break the doom loop. Over a period lasting mere seconds, this seemingly. "Fire service leader: "De Gaulle tower from fire service leader, can you give me the situation of the Concorde?" Maybe it was the 20-hour days I was working. Continental was a case in point. Youre asking for a four-year project. My response: If you cant get it done, well find someone who will. Lo and behold, within six months, every plane was painted the same color inside and out, and all of the terminals had new carpeting. I asked, Does someones boyfriend or girlfriend live there? If you fire people inhumanely, youll be left with a bunch of employees who dont trust the company or their coworkers. Continental Aviation. We just talked at every opportunity about our plans for the airline and how we were going to accomplish them. It remains the backbone of the companys strategy today. Many popular airlines offer loyalty programs. The analysis of impact energy considered a tyre piece of 4.5 kilograms (9.9lb) with a speed around 140 metres per second (310mph). So I tell this story not to vilify them but to demonstrate the kind of trust that starts to emerge when a companys leaders neither hide nor mince words in bad times. Continental Airlines also operate private bus services from airport in The United States to different areas which include California, New Jersey and Philadelphia. Now, strategic direction is always important, but I would make the case that it is particularly important during a turnaround. [26], Despite the accident, Concorde was still considered among the world's safest aircraft. At the same time, we chose 15 or so key performance measures to track relentlessly and to compare against our competitors. The historical norm for delivering bad news at Continental was for a senior manager to dump the news in the local airport managers lap and then hide in our corporate office building. [55], The Parisian court also ruled that Continental would have to pay 70% of any compensation claims. Deciding to focus more on customers desires rather than on cutting costs is actually the easy part. Maybe it was the fact that I had seen a client of mine do largely the same thing during a real estate restructuring, to great effect. Our maintenance team worked their fannies off, and Continentals handsome new image was everywhere. You have to do it fast, right away, and all at once. We named it that because we knew our history was not going to help us. In October 1994, Continentals CEO resigned. (For details of the strategy, see the exhibit Continentals New Flight Plan.). In our case, that meant listening to the customers in seat 9C, the business travelers who book the aisle seats near the front of the plane. The NTSB described those incidents as "potentially catastrophic", because they were caused by blown tyres during takeoff. Both the Delta (London-Cincinnati) and Continental (London-Newark) were heading to the U.S. with nearly 600 people total on both aircraft. There was nothing complex about the Go Forward Plan: it was just a matter of logic and common sense. We decided that at the new Continental, the employees were going to be liberated to do right by the customer and to have fun at work. Actively involving employees in the turnaround is essential. We also assigned one city in our system to each officer and asked them to go through the same process of apologizing to travel agents and corporate customers. CALite eliminated all food on its flights, and it also eliminated travel agent commissions and corporate discounts, which infuriated some very important customers. And they are right: saving Continental wasnt brain surgery. The aircraft struck the ground left wing low after a heading change of nearly 180, crashing into the Htelissimo Les Relais Bleus Hotel. Of course, when you are bleeding cash, its hard to think about anything but tourniquets. At one point, it drifted toward a just-landed Air France Boeing 747 that was carrying then-French President Jacques Chirac (who was returning from the 26th G8 summit meeting in Okinawa, Japan). Find hotels with sparkling 5/5 cleanliness ratings, or bag a room with free cancellation. Please select OK to allow all cookies. On 25 July 2000, Air France Flight 4590, a Concorde passenger jet on an international charter flight from Paris to New York, crashed shortly after takeoff, killing all 109 people on board and four on the ground. I left to a standing ovation. Get your answers here! In fact, I think the word fun scares a lot of executives. We hit it off from the start. Home. They all go together; they reinforce one another. Strong leadership, firm parameters, and clear direction are necessary in a turnaround situation, but the workplace neednt be repressive. In front of a crowd of employees, we lit a match to it. List of Continental Airlines destinations, Philip S. W. Goldson International Airport, Rio de Janeiro/Galeo International Airport, So Paulo/Guarulhos International Airport, Arturo Merino Bentez International Airport, Alfonso Bonilla Aragn International Airport, Jos Joaqun de Olmedo International Airport, Toussaint Louverture International Airport, Ramn Villeda Morales International Airport, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport, Licenciado Gustavo Daz Ordaz International Airport, Josep Tarradellas BarcelonaEl Prat Airport, BirminghamShuttlesworth International Airport, Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport, Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport, Fort LauderdaleHollywood International Airport, HartsfieldJackson Atlanta International Airport, Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, BaltimoreWashington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport, MinneapolisSaint Paul International Airport, Rick Husband Amarillo International Airport, Lubbock Preston Smith International Airport, Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, CasperNatrona County International Airport, 1955 MacArthur Airport United Airlines crash, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Continental_Airlines_destinations&oldid=1133996164, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles with failed verification from February 2018, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 16 January 2023, at 14:02. Every month, Gordon and I hold an open house where employees can ask us questions, and we publish a newspaper describing whats happening in the company. [42] Just before service resumed, the September 11 attacks took place, resulting in a marked drop in passenger numbers, and contributing to the eventual end of Concorde flights. Thats where our focus was, and its a good rule for any turnaround. Photographs in the BEA report showed a smashed steel landing light, clipped by the aircraft, parts of which were probably ingested by engine number 1. Flight 603 was scheduled to Honolulu, HI from Los Angeles. Of course, wed be fools if all we did was talk at our employees. We were cutting bureaucracy and costs but also putting important stufflike the right cultureback in. So cultivating honesty, trust, dignity, and respect becomes the job of the leaders. It was powered by four Rolls-Royce Olympus 593/610 turbojet engines, each of which was equipped with afterburners. The runway behind is irrelevant. When you are bleeding cash, its hard to think of anything but tourniquets. [54][55][56] The convictions were overturned by a French appeals court in November 2012, thereby clearing Continental and Taylor of criminal responsibility. To put an end to Continentals strategic wandering, Gordon and I introduced the Go Forward Plan to our coworkers. The thrust reverser of the aircraft was deployed in flight shortly after takeoff. It is the flag carrier of Republic of China with its headquarters in Dayuan Township, Taoyuan County. Of all the contributors to Continentals success, Brenneman says, the biggest factor in our favor was momentum. Damaged beyond economic repair when the propellers struck the runway shortly after take-off. Language links are at the top of the page across from the title. Managements implicit communication policy had been, Dont tell anybody anything unless absolutely required. Think money in, not money out. As Brenneman wryly states, I knew the fastest way to make money was to stop doing things that lost it, such as flying empty planes. Let me tell you, for instance, about the day I had to shut down our operations in Greensboro, North Carolina. When in doubt, everyone knew it was advised just to let the customers fend for themselves. In Continentals case, we simply needed to fly to places people wanted to go, when they wanted to go, in clean, attractive airplanes; get them there on time with their bags; and serve food at mealtimes. [30][6], According to Rose, former French Concorde pilot Jean-Marie Chauve, and former Concorde flight engineer Michel Suaud, spent six months preparing a 60-page report which was submitted to the investigating judge. They were just frustrated with 15 years of poor decisions and were taking it out on melike blaming your third wife for all of your problems with the first two. We needed to start serving food when people were hungry. Fare Calendars show the best prices over the next 180 days on 2000+ routes. [6], At the start of the takeoff, the aircraft had 1.2 tonnes of extra fuel which should have been burnt during the aircraft's taxi. Time is tight; money is tighter. At the time of the crash, the aircraft had flown for 11,989 hours and had made 4,873 take-off and landing cycles. [48] Continental denied the charges,[49] and claimed in court that it was being used as a scapegoat by the BEA. Get your answers here! It was a humbling experience. 1 and No. We knew a major ending was on the horizoneither the old Continental was going to be entirely reinvented or it was going to go bankrupt for an unprecedented third time and would probably be liquidated. For CALite, Continental removed all first-class seats in some airplanes. We rate each airline and travel agent on the service they provide, and remove those who aren't doing the right thing for our travellers. Continental Airlines flight 1404, a Boeing 737-500, departed the left side of runway 34R during takeoff from Denver International Airport (DEN). They explained that the process was easy: as you pull the bags off the airplane, the ones marked priority go in the first baggage cart, which is the first to be unloaded. We promised them full control of their domains. I truly believed the men and women of Continental could make the airline great again.

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