Is being an airline CEO as hard as it seems ?
 

Met an airline CEO today on a flight on his airline, and had a VERY open and frank conversation about his company. Remarkably candid, with absolutely no holds barred, which *really* surprised me.
It made me think that the CEO job of a small (and struggling) airline is really rather difficult and undesirable. Is this a fair assessment ?

As the old saying goes, "The easiest way to make a small fortune in the airline business is to start with a large one".

I would imagine being in charge of any small and struggling business is difficult - what did he say that made you think an airline is more difficult/different?

Awful lot of factors out of your control I think - and cut throat competition in most places

What I find surprising, at least with successive CEO's at BA, is that they do so little to optimise the ones that are.

I think once it gets to the size of BA there are so many interlocked variables, in different countries, different subsids, different aircraft, that changing anything s likely to cause pain somewhere

I agree with Asturias56. BA and the other major groups are so locked in to their established ways that major change is all but impossible. Imagine if BA CEO said it was time to completely overhaul their IT systems? The cost is just too high and too risky. This is one of the main reasons why large companies fail.

I sat next to a CEO of a rather large USA based airline at an Aviation dinner. Of all the things that wound him up, in his view the worst was "Unfair" competition.

I got the impression that he thought he could run a brilliant airline if all the competitors were made to go away.

A bit like being the boss of LHR??

If he means “market distortion by means of state subsidies (either direct or via subsidised infrastructure)”, then, yes, you can look at that as “unfair”

This is the airline business - it's been full of subsidies for over 100 years,

Before that, the shipping business! Nation states have long equated Shipping and Airlines as an extension of the State. Even when they are no longer state owned, they are 'flying the flag' and all that nonsense.

As I like to say after a good moan on the state of the company, "well, if running an airline was easy we'd all be doing it."