Will the Real Scott Kirby Please Stand Up?

united plane
Sep 13 2019

United Airlines President Scott Kirby spoke yesterday at the Morgan Stanley 7th Annual Laguna Conference. There probably no one in the industry that’s been more ‘by the numbers’ than Kirby, and in my view no one that’s been more an enemy of customer experience. I’ve often called him a destroyer of airlines.

Yet he told the gathering that “more and more” United has to be “competing on quality instead of just schedule and price.”

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The Business Travel Culture That Is France

Sep 12 2019

A French business traveler died while having sex on a business trip. Although the man’s employer argued that he wasn’t “carrying out professional duties” when he had the cardiac arrest in the woman’s hotel room, under French law “an employer is responsible for any accident occurring during a business trip.”

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How a Coffee Spill Caused a Transatlantic Flight to Declare an Emergency

Sep 12 2019

German airline Condor was flying from Frankfurt to Cancun on February 6th when the Airbus A330 declared an emergency about 880 nautical miles west of Shannon, Ireland.

There was reported smoke in the cockpit. The “flight crew donned their oxygen masks” and declared mayday via ACARS, the digital short message system, because communications were hobbled.

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