When Joel Schwartz flies to Vegas, he faces more significant odds than most others.
As an obstetrician, he consults women with high-risk pregnancies.
If he’s not in the office on time, he has a packed waiting room. His partners must pick up his caseload. And his anxious patients may end up with a doctor they do not know.
Schwartz, who commutes from Denver to Las Vegas every week, doesn’t like to roll the dice when it comes to air travel. After Denver- based Frontier Airlines filed bankruptcy earlier this year, he said he bought five months’ worth of tickets on United Airlines.
His first United flight was canceled. His second was nearly two hours late.
A consummate traveler, he said he found the airline’s employees unusually grumpy.
When he called customer support, he said he could only reach people in exotic locales who seemed scantly empowered to help him. So Schwartz bought backup tickets on Southwest Airlines to ensure he’d be on time for his patients each week.
Schwartz said once he’s burned through his nonrefundable United tickets, he’s going back to Frontier or Southwest, or anywhere else.
“You would have to cut my arm off before I’d ever go back to United,” he said.
At this point, it’s hard to say what might be worse. United’s service? Or a one-armed obstetrician who can’t always get to his Las Vegas office on time?
I reviewed flight records that United spokeswoman Jean Medina provided. Schwartz’s first flight was indeed canceled due in part to weather the day before. His second flight was one hour and 56 minutes late. But the rest were either on time or only a few minutes late.
“The flight has done well on Mondays,” Medina said.
Still, Schwartz said that when his first flight was canceled and his second flight was late, he could no longer gamble his patients’ well-being on United.
United’s on-time performance ranks 18th out of 19 airlines, according to Department of Transportation data. It ranks 17th for customer complaints.
Calling attention to these and other disappointing numbers last week were United’s own pilots and their union, the Air Line Pilots Association.
They are demanding that CEO Glenn Tilton resign. They are hanging out their dirty cabin blankets on a website called, Glenn Tilton Must Go, . As airlines drown in rising jet fuel bills, the pilots union says Tilton’s performance is among the worst.
UAL Corp., United’s parent, lost $3.27 billion in the first half of this year. Its stock is down more than 70 percent since emerging from bankruptcy in February 2006, while the Amex Airline Index, is down about 50 percent during that same time.
Tilton is a former oilman who took Texaco through bankruptcy and helped merge it with Chevron Corp. before joining United in September 2002.
He and his crew earned tens of millions taking United through Chapter 11, hacking away at airline workers and their benefits. Along the way, they leased a shiny new headquarters on Chicago’s Wacker Drive. Then they sharpened their knives again to get through an unprecedented spike in fuel prices.
“Two things (Tilton) knows from ChevronTexaco is bankruptcy and mergers,” United pilot Jerry Leber, a spokesman for the pilots union, told me. “You can make a lot of money, if you are in the executive suite, on either of those two transactions. And he’s been trying to do a merger at all costs over the past 12 months.”
Amid unfruitful talks with Continental Airlines Inc., US Airways Group Inc. and reportedly Delta Air Lines Inc., too, Tilton has disrespected his employees, Leber said. His employees have in turn neglected customers.
“Seventy-seven percent don’t think United is a great place to work, and 73 percent of them are looking for another job,” said Leber, citing internal employee surveys.
United has lashed back by calling the pilots’ action a ploy to reopen contract negotiations and deflect attention from a lawsuit against them.
United sued the pilots union on July 30, for allegedly holding illegal sickouts to protest pending job cuts. The pilots, calling in sick, are contributing to United’s lacking on- time performance, the airline alleges.
Whatever side one takes in this labor-management spat, a few things remain obvious: The planes are late, Tilton has ugly employee-relations problems, and it’s no fun flying an airline where everyone is fighting so nastily.
“Pilots feel like the passengers feel,” Schwartz said. “Everybody is fed up with the entire situation.”
Getting rid of Tilton might be a start.
“Everybody is to blame when the team is not winning,” Schwartz said, “but it’s the guy at the top who has to go. And hopefully, he doesn’t get a huge severance package.”
Al Lewis’ column regularly appears Wednesdays and Sundays: 201-938-5266 or al.lewis@dowjones.com
