Ft Worth columnist blasts American’s Horton
This is one of the most blistering critiques we’ve seen of a company CEO where no improprieties were involved.
Mitchell Schnurman of American’s hometown paper, The Ft. Worth Star Telegram, just pummels AMR/American CEO Tom Horton.
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The FWST is fast becoming an extint newspaper. I live in Fort Worth and thier reporting on local news in the past several years is just abismal. Thier circulation is way down, to the point they are giving free newspapers away at the local Wal-Marts (who has the paper on sale within the store). They are desperate to get thier circulation numbers up so they can get more advertising revenue.
Schnurman likes to critisize everything here in Cow Town, from AA to the Cowboys. But his critical writing about the AA/TWA merger shows he knows nothing about the airlines, or any other business, he is just a newsboy. AA did not merge with TWA in hopes it would turn out to be the failuer it became, they wanted to make money from the merger, and most likely would if 9/11 had not happened so soon after the merger. We will never know how successful that merger might have been, the airline industry was kicked on its a$$ for the first half of the last decade, and have yet to fully recover.
Schnurman does not mention that US has yet to settle its own union problems. The unions want to be in full control at AA (as every union wants at thier companies), and Parker is just telling them what they want to hear. Schnurman fails to see that if there is a US-AA merger the AA unions won’t get any more than the US unions do now, which is working without a contract for years now, and the pilots still have two different unions. What is Parker going to do with 3 pilots unions? The same as he does now…..nothing.
Be that as it may – the criticism in the article still seems very valid if the recent quotes its author attributes to Horton are indeed correct.
Obviously. And yet, even before 9-11, there were a few voices doubting the good sense of this acquisition given the somewhat troubled acquisitions of AirCAL and Reno Air by AA, the route overlap between AA and TWA (including proximity of St. Louis to AA’s own Chicago hub), not to mention fleet profile.
But without a 9/11 hit to the airlines, the AA/TWA merger woud have had a different result. It is difficult to say by how much the results would have changed, but it would have been different. AA did get TWA’s extensive European routes, and their new (at the time) B-757s (which they later sold to DL) and their new B-767s. TWA also had a better US west coast presence than AA did.
His coffee and donuts are awesome though. Oh wait, wrong Horton…
Thank you, for making me spew coffee all over my keyboard as I laughed..