You love to talk about the balance sheet and the lack of pension obligations, but you consistently ignore all of the other metrics important for judging the health of a company and its capacity for growth. Whether you look at operating margin, net margin, return on equity, return on assets, or virtually any other metric used to judge the effectiveness of management, SWA is performing atrociously, and has been for some time. Yes, SWA has plenty of money sitting around (by airline standards). But the problem is that management doesn't seem to have the slightest clue what to do with all of that cash to create shareholder value. Shareholders would be smarter to put their money in a CD rather than giving it to Gary to sit on for the next decade. And just as the shareholders get screwed by Gary's inability to produce value, so do the employees get screwed by career stagnation.
He likes to talk about those things because they are true, much to your dismay.
I get that fact that you don't like Gary Kelly, but he's performing atrociously? That's pretty funny.
Let's see, he's continued with year over year profits. More than 40 of them if I'm not mistaken.
He has the cleaniest/strongest balance sheet among his peers, actually has for several years.
A company that owns out-right more than 2/3rds of their fleet. Unheard of in this industry.
Now let's turn an eye toward shareholder value...
He's pushing for 15% ROIC and Wall Street is paying attention. His initives are getting traction. Full 800's, adding more seats on the 700's, AAI transistion/codeshare, big addition of ancillary revenue (early boarding fees is off the chart), etc, etc.
My shareholder value is up over 50%. I think I've done slightly better than your idea of a CD, but that doesn't fit in well with your 'anti-GK' rhetoric. Don't let your BS actually get in the way of the facts.
I'm not going to sit here and bash the AAI product. It was a 'different' product than SW. Doesn't make it any better or any worse. And I agree that there were plenty that liked the Business Class. But that Business Class caused pain in the Coach class. Overall, it worked pretty well. Airtran just didn't have the cash on hand to take it to the next level. That's why the BOD pulled the parachute on the operation. Gary gave them a nice return on their investment as well, and if you were a large AAI shareholder you would have walked away with a nice premium on what was the current price.
I'm not saying Gary is perfect or hasn't made some bad choices, but I'm not sure what metric you are comparing his performance as a CEO. I would say he is above average in every regard. I'd put him in the top 5% of airline CEOs. You just don't like the fact that he bought your airline.
While you're at it; tell me how many SWA pilots have apps at United, Delta, and FedEx. Today's winners are tomorrows losers. United pilots have been a little quieter over the last decade haven't they ..... Hmmmm ? I see you haven't applied lesson to your own hubris yet.
