Zard

“No one’s gonna ruin this airline but me!”

-Gary Kelly

e6bpilot

Haha. Basically.
If nothing else good comes of this, I would love to see Kelly retire and Jordan go away for good.

It isn't 1985. Nobody is doing a hostile takeover and chopping up SWA and selling it to holding companies. Labor in this company is in a great position. Yes, change is scary, and I wouldn't trust Elliott or any of these idiots with running an airline, but come on....

We have been dealing with gross incompetence and neglect for the last 5 years. $2B. That's 2,000 million dollars. If I lost that in 5 days, I would expect to be fired and never work again. Instead, our management team blamed it on the weather and gave themselves bonuses while they gave away our profit sharing. That makes me mad and it should make everyone else mad too. If ever there was a time for scary change, it's now.

Yes, I would have preferred this happen organically, but our amazing management team sat on their hands and let the company get weak, which resulted in our current situation. I don't like where we are at, but I have zero control over it and I think in this case that the end result is going to be better than the status quo.

Yeah, Boeing happened and our CEO succession plan fell apart, but these are the problems that management teams are paid to solve. Ours tried solving them by hoping things would just work out. Here we are.

REF 5

Status quo left the building. Change is coming. It will be either the GK and BJ show or someone elses vision. Either way it's coming. After DAL results this morning, which is the gold star, their vision of SWA 3.0 will look like will be under great scrunity.

9thAmendment

Change is coming but we can be perfectly confident that the change implemented by current leadership will be completely insufficient and will not solve any of the current problems.

An analogy would be SWA is at the 1 yard line with 1 second left on the clock. They are down by 5 points and a touchdown would win the game. Management huddles and says things like “we need to do it the Southwest way” and “we’ve never scored a game winning touchdown before. That isn’t how we operate.” After a 2 year long time out “seriously studying the issue” they break the huddle and set up for a field goal. This is obviously going to be a fake field goal attempt as surely they wouldn’t be so inept to not even try to win. Management has to know only a touchdown would win them the game, right?

Everyone looks on with great anticipation as SWA actually does follow through with a field goal. They score 3 points and lose the game as time expires. Management erupts into huge celebrations like they just won the Super Bowl and gives themselves bonuses for “doing something” while everyone else looks on in absolute astonishment at what they just witnessed.

That’s exactly how I see the big September announcement will play out.

WHACKMASTER

Thats spot on and I completely agree with all of your points. Somehow we might just come out of this a more functional and healthy company.

I’m under no delusion that Elliot is our friend though.

journeybird

Hilarious and depressing.

rickair7777

Correct. And it's harder and a lot riskier (for management) to file BK now than it was in 2007 due to changes in the law. No more quick trips through the BK drive-through to reset inconvenient obligations.

The debtor in possession (management) can very easily lose control and their jobs. They won't go there lightly.

RJSAviator76

I'm starting to think that Elliott just may be the godsend if they manage to go through Dallas and unfu<k the incompetence that began festering at the GO for several years now.

Whose bright friggin idea was to implement the new phone tree? If you're gonna do something like this, first and foremost, PLEASE HAVE A ******* CLUE!!! How much money did that cost? What VP authorized this abortion? GONE! FIRED! If it's LK, he's another clown that needs to follow BW wherever the hell he went to...

I'm seriously sick and tired of idiots pi$$ing around marking their territory for the sake of marking their territory.

Cyio

The phone tree and the entire system, for that matter, are such a joke that I chuckle every time I have to use it. I mean, who designs a phone system that is primarily used by people in a noisy, voice-heavy environment with voice prompts? Walking through LAS the other day trying to get in touch with scheduling was interesting, to say the least. "I'm sorry, I don't recognize that," it repeated about 10 times with me never saying a word.

WHACKMASTER

Preach brotha! You’re exactly right.