How to Save an Airline

As a service supplier to the airline industry and a frequent flier, I would like to disagree with your comment to the letter from Barry Wightman, (June, page 6).

If the airline management had not been so busy stealing, raping, and plundering the airlines (e.g. Braniff, Pan-American, Eastern, Frontier, et al.) they were hired to manage and had looked beyond the trees to see the vast forests of low-fare business out there, they would have formed a low-cost subsidiary in the 1960s.

I remember when Texas International took over Continental and then merged a regional low-cost airline into a first-class airline; the top management was so busy raping and plundering the two companies that they never bothered to manage and grow two very good carriers. They never optimized the potential of the franchises.

Texas International should have been the low-cost competition to Southwest. The management philosophy should have been: "if they scratch their ass, I'll scratch mine;" "if they fart, I'll fart;" "if they belch, I'll belch;" "whatever they do to provide low-cost service, I will copy it. If it works, it will be part of our management philosophy; if it doesn't we will drop it as fast as they do and try something innovative on our own."

My mother had a saying: "Poor folks have poor-folks ways." The airlines should have recognized that poor folks are spending their money and want to get there as cheap as possible, even if they are treated like cattle in a second-class cattle car. Executives and government employees are not spending their own money.

R. Thurl (Dick) Bowen
Operations Manager
Anderson-Bowen, LLC

A Larry Good Owner

I have a Larry Good engine. If you think the FAA is being unfair to poor Larry then I am willing to give you the engine free of charge if you're willing to fly behind it. The FAA is doing a terrific service to the public by warning us of people like Larry. While taxi testing the engine on my Glasair I noticed oil on the case. After sanding off some paint and bondo I found a four-inch crack on the case. I just recently received word back from ECI that no part of that engine is serviceable. Without going into all the many details, anybody who has seen the inside of the engine will swear that a catastrophic failure was imminent in the first 100 hours of operation. By signing the logbook and selling that engine, that makes your man Larry a sociopath. It is my opinion that there are plenty of areas to find fault with the FAA but this is not one of them.

Mike Deach
(via e-mail)

I wasn't faulting the FAA for highlighting the Larry Goods of this world, I was picking on the FAA's chosen method of disseminating the information. Did you read the SAIB (supplemental airworthiness information bulletin) on Larry Good? It seems that you didn't learn about the problem until you found the oil leak. Thank goodness you did. But if there is a situation as bad as what happened with Larry Good's supposedly overhauled engines, the FAA needs to pull out all the stops and let the world know about it instead of publishing the information in an obscure SAIB, which hardly any pilots or mechanics even know about. SAIBs are a useful tool, but they can't possibly be helpful unless the FAA spreads the word.

-- Matt Thurber, Editor

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