Word: turnarounds
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...LOUIS, MO: Surprising industry insiders, Trans World Airlines chief executive and president Jeffrey Erickson announced his resignation late Thursday, on the day the airline posted a $14.3 million quarterly loss linked to the July crash of TWA flight 800. The tragedy reversed the remarkable financial turnaround that was underway at the long-floundering company, which posted a 400-fold gain in its second-quarter earnings on July 17, the day of the crash. Erickson, 51, said he would step down in January. As investigators increasingly focus on possible mechanical failure as a leading theory for the crash, amid speculation, accurate...
...Turnaround...
...last week's disaster could endanger both the turnaround and TWA's future. Comparisons were being made to Pan Am, a troubled company that ultimately couldn't survive the bombing of its Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. The disaster cost Pan Am hundreds of millions in canceled bookings, which helped put it out of business in 1991. Even before last week, some observers were questioning TWA's long-term outlook. Scott Hamilton, editor of the trade publication Commercial Aviation Report, told Bloomberg Business News earlier this month, "If anything goes wrong of significant consequence, like another Iraq invading...
Airline companies are intently focused on efficiency, which means minimizing the amount of time a multimillion-dollar piece of equipment is on the ground. But this short turnaround time might increase vulnerability. An arriving jet is swarmed by 50 or so mechanics, janitors, refuelers, caterers and ramp workers, not all of them airline employees. It's a period of nearly unlimited access by people who may not even know one another. FBI investigators are no doubt interviewing anyone who so much as came near Flight 800 as it was serviced at the gate at J.F.K...
...only has TWA survived, but the carrier once piloted by mogul Howard Hughes and later by corporate raider Carl Icahn has been enjoying a financial turnaround. Just hours before Flight 800 went down, TWA reported a $25.3 million profit for the second quarter, a fivefold gain over the same period a year ago. And with passenger traffic growing, and its $300 million cash stockpile rising, TWA has been planning to add as many as 40 Boeing 757s and 15 McDonnell Douglas MD80s to modernize the U.S. industry's oldest fleet (average age: nearly 20 years). The airline canceled a party...