more tough business decisions
I think the owners know more than we might think. I remember sitting in the back of the plane for 20 minutes while an owner literally yelled most of that time, not at me, but to me about how pissed he was at the company. He said (yelled) "a fish stinks from the head down..." and I had to agree with him.
There for several months, not a single rotation would go by where we didn't show up with something broken on the airlplane; the crapper (for a 4.5 hour leg), the Airshow (when the owner specifically stated that the Airshow/DVD MUST work), the APU broken (in PBI mid-summer; a recent stroke victim), 2 broken tray-tables (with catered salads for 5), even the wrong seats installed in the Hawker so the video screen was completely covered up (stupid). And each of these rotations at least 3 owners, at least 3 (and I"m not exaggerating) would tell me they were leaving Flight Options for NetJets or were going to buy their own airplane. But their number one complaint? They were sick and tired of being lied to by Flight Options.
One guy, and XP owner who we "rescued" in an 800because his XP was allegedly down, went onto Flight Aware and saw his "broken" XP leaving on a trip 1 hour BEFORE it was supposed to be picking him up and tracked it flying all over the country all day long(good ol' Front Row at its finest!). Tell me that is "good business" or a "tough business decision." He told me, and I quote, "this company lies consistently to two groups of people: owners and pilots, and does so on a regular basis." What was I supposed to say?
What am I supposed to say to an owner who has been waiting for 6 hours to be rescued (while Owner Services had been telling him the whole time that we were just 45 minutes out) when in reality we were doing other trips before we came and got him? What do I say to the man when he is just trying to get home from the same event his buddy was already home from via NetJets? How do I explain to him that the OCC, once again, built the schedule backwards to get 13:59 out of the crew, and they had timed out before they could reach the poor man? And that they had known HOURS before his originally scheduled departure that this was going to happen, and yet lied to him and told him his Beechjet had broken? You just can't keep lieing to people, intentionally, as a practice, and expect things to get better. These people aren't stupid, yet Cleveland has deluded itself into believing that they are smarter than 1) their owners, and 2) their employees.
You can piss off airline customers and there will always be more to take their place. You just can't do that with millionaires, there's not that many of them, and they all know each other. Plus, many of these people have been in aviation for a long time, and know more about it and airplanes than the little girl in Owner Services, or more than the guys in scheduling, and most likely more than the CEO of the company. Lieing to customers, intentionally, day-in and day-out, isn't a necessary business decision, or at least it shouldn't be. I think Mike likes the JetPass cards as much as he does because it allows him the freedom to disregard our passengers with the same indifference to their inconvenience as he did the airline passengers when he was bankrupting those little commuter airlines he used to be in charge of.
We can handle an MEL in the cockpit, but these people pay huge money for the DVD player, the APU, the freakin' lavatory, the cabin lights, their seats (!), and for God's sake the tray tables to work!!!! These aren't "passenger convenience items." The coffee pot is a passenger convenience item, the flightphone is a passenger convenience item, but toilets and DVDs and tray-tables and airconditioning are very important things in 'their' world on board the airplane that they expect to work! Other than going fast, this is what they are paying a lot of money for, and what no one in Cleveland can seem to comprehend (or, they might get it and just simply not care).
Flight Options has run off more business than it can attract. Tell me that kind of crap is "just business." I'm sick of being embarrassed of the planes I have to present to these millionaire owners. Their peers are boarding shiny clean jets that don't have 5-10 orange stickers on the panel or throughout the cabin. My pax board planes that look like freighters, rarely have a matching radome, headliners falling loose, MEL'd seats and tray tables, MEL'd toilets, rarely a working flightphone, ugly stained carpets I wouldn't let my own children play on let alone someone else's, torn seat cushions, and broken APUs in the dead of winter in Green Bay or the peak of summer in Miami.
Maintenance can't or won't or isn't allowed to fix these airplanes because scheduling is driving the company, or Sanjay is trying to meet a metric. The cart has been in front of the horse for so long, on purpose, that I'm afraid the damage to the company's reputation is irrepairable. That is NOT good business, and the Sheering Gang is doing this stuff intentionally! They have their own agenda and the owners be damned (as well as the employees). Flight Options is masquerading as a service business when in fact it is only a facade; its a money machine that just looks like an aviation company. No wonder the pilots are pissed! It used to be a good company with a lot of promise, a company to be proud of. Putting fancy corporate names on a sh!t sandwich won't make it taste any better to the end user.
Speaking of, is it true that Sanjay's wife was (nepotently) put in charge of marketing? Is that what happened over there? Whats up with that?
Bottom line: the owners know, at least a lot of them do, exactly what the deal is with Flight Options and its pilots, and they won't be renewing their contracts. Mike can spin that however he wants to, and convince the Board that they were "unprofitable contracts" or part of an "acceptable owner attrition rate" 'til he's blue in the face. Oh yeah: owners could care less about the "Owner Feeback Cards." Those cards are for marketing and for nothing else, period. They are NOT used to improve service, at all. If an owner is angry, he will get on the phone, or write a letter (cc-ing his attorney), not fill out a silly card. When they DO fill out a card, its because the flight was miraculously on-time, and mostly because the pilots helped them have a good experience, or salvaged a bad one (like they do day after day). So Mike gets 20 cards returned to the company in a given month, disregards the fact that the pilots are being praised, then tells the press that "100% of our Owner Feedback Cards are positive!" and waxes congratulatory about our "unprecedented customer service."
Flight Options pilots: how many times have you had owners tell you that they know how bad things have gotten for the pilots, and that it has been the pilots that have been the only good thing in their experience with this company? I know I've heard that more than many times over the past 3 years.
I think the owners know more than we might think. I remember sitting in the back of the plane for 20 minutes while an owner literally yelled most of that time, not at me, but to me about how pissed he was at the company. He said (yelled) "a fish stinks from the head down..." and I had to agree with him.
There for several months, not a single rotation would go by where we didn't show up with something broken on the airlplane; the crapper (for a 4.5 hour leg), the Airshow (when the owner specifically stated that the Airshow/DVD MUST work), the APU broken (in PBI mid-summer; a recent stroke victim), 2 broken tray-tables (with catered salads for 5), even the wrong seats installed in the Hawker so the video screen was completely covered up (stupid). And each of these rotations at least 3 owners, at least 3 (and I"m not exaggerating) would tell me they were leaving Flight Options for NetJets or were going to buy their own airplane. But their number one complaint? They were sick and tired of being lied to by Flight Options.
One guy, and XP owner who we "rescued" in an 800because his XP was allegedly down, went onto Flight Aware and saw his "broken" XP leaving on a trip 1 hour BEFORE it was supposed to be picking him up and tracked it flying all over the country all day long(good ol' Front Row at its finest!). Tell me that is "good business" or a "tough business decision." He told me, and I quote, "this company lies consistently to two groups of people: owners and pilots, and does so on a regular basis." What was I supposed to say?
What am I supposed to say to an owner who has been waiting for 6 hours to be rescued (while Owner Services had been telling him the whole time that we were just 45 minutes out) when in reality we were doing other trips before we came and got him? What do I say to the man when he is just trying to get home from the same event his buddy was already home from via NetJets? How do I explain to him that the OCC, once again, built the schedule backwards to get 13:59 out of the crew, and they had timed out before they could reach the poor man? And that they had known HOURS before his originally scheduled departure that this was going to happen, and yet lied to him and told him his Beechjet had broken? You just can't keep lieing to people, intentionally, as a practice, and expect things to get better. These people aren't stupid, yet Cleveland has deluded itself into believing that they are smarter than 1) their owners, and 2) their employees.
You can piss off airline customers and there will always be more to take their place. You just can't do that with millionaires, there's not that many of them, and they all know each other. Plus, many of these people have been in aviation for a long time, and know more about it and airplanes than the little girl in Owner Services, or more than the guys in scheduling, and most likely more than the CEO of the company. Lieing to customers, intentionally, day-in and day-out, isn't a necessary business decision, or at least it shouldn't be. I think Mike likes the JetPass cards as much as he does because it allows him the freedom to disregard our passengers with the same indifference to their inconvenience as he did the airline passengers when he was bankrupting those little commuter airlines he used to be in charge of.
We can handle an MEL in the cockpit, but these people pay huge money for the DVD player, the APU, the freakin' lavatory, the cabin lights, their seats (!), and for God's sake the tray tables to work!!!! These aren't "passenger convenience items." The coffee pot is a passenger convenience item, the flightphone is a passenger convenience item, but toilets and DVDs and tray-tables and airconditioning are very important things in 'their' world on board the airplane that they expect to work! Other than going fast, this is what they are paying a lot of money for, and what no one in Cleveland can seem to comprehend (or, they might get it and just simply not care).
Flight Options has run off more business than it can attract. Tell me that kind of crap is "just business." I'm sick of being embarrassed of the planes I have to present to these millionaire owners. Their peers are boarding shiny clean jets that don't have 5-10 orange stickers on the panel or throughout the cabin. My pax board planes that look like freighters, rarely have a matching radome, headliners falling loose, MEL'd seats and tray tables, MEL'd toilets, rarely a working flightphone, ugly stained carpets I wouldn't let my own children play on let alone someone else's, torn seat cushions, and broken APUs in the dead of winter in Green Bay or the peak of summer in Miami.
Maintenance can't or won't or isn't allowed to fix these airplanes because scheduling is driving the company, or Sanjay is trying to meet a metric. The cart has been in front of the horse for so long, on purpose, that I'm afraid the damage to the company's reputation is irrepairable. That is NOT good business, and the Sheering Gang is doing this stuff intentionally! They have their own agenda and the owners be damned (as well as the employees). Flight Options is masquerading as a service business when in fact it is only a facade; its a money machine that just looks like an aviation company. No wonder the pilots are pissed! It used to be a good company with a lot of promise, a company to be proud of. Putting fancy corporate names on a sh!t sandwich won't make it taste any better to the end user.
Speaking of, is it true that Sanjay's wife was (nepotently) put in charge of marketing? Is that what happened over there? Whats up with that?
Bottom line: the owners know, at least a lot of them do, exactly what the deal is with Flight Options and its pilots, and they won't be renewing their contracts. Mike can spin that however he wants to, and convince the Board that they were "unprofitable contracts" or part of an "acceptable owner attrition rate" 'til he's blue in the face. Oh yeah: owners could care less about the "Owner Feeback Cards." Those cards are for marketing and for nothing else, period. They are NOT used to improve service, at all. If an owner is angry, he will get on the phone, or write a letter (cc-ing his attorney), not fill out a silly card. When they DO fill out a card, its because the flight was miraculously on-time, and mostly because the pilots helped them have a good experience, or salvaged a bad one (like they do day after day). So Mike gets 20 cards returned to the company in a given month, disregards the fact that the pilots are being praised, then tells the press that "100% of our Owner Feedback Cards are positive!" and waxes congratulatory about our "unprecedented customer service."
Flight Options pilots: how many times have you had owners tell you that they know how bad things have gotten for the pilots, and that it has been the pilots that have been the only good thing in their experience with this company? I know I've heard that more than many times over the past 3 years.
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