AW&ST: Electric aircraft, air taxis, supersonic flights across the Atlantic, the internal transformation-you have launched a lot of initiatives in a very short period in the middle of the industry's worst crisis. Are you now making the decisions that you have always wanted to make but never could? In a lot of ways, the answer is "yes." I feel liberated to make the kind of changes that I have always wanted to make. Some of them are high-profile, but some others are at least as, if not more, significant: permanently eliminating change fees, the connection saver and eliminating delay codes. If a flight was even 1 min. delayed, it got blamed. Is it maintenance, pilots, flight attendants or the gate? It created such a culture of conflict [about] who is to blame. It also created a culture where if you got a connecting customer running to the gate and [allowing him or her to board] would have made the flight 1 min. late, everyone was incentivized to slam the door and leave the connecting customer behind even though he or she may have had to spend another day in Munich. It was impossible to have a real customer-service culture. Even pre-COVID, I really wanted to take a shot at changing the customer-service culture at airlines. Far too many U.S.airline executives see air travel as a commodity [for which] people only shop based on price. If anything, the biggest bet we have made is that customers care about quality.
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