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The Culture Wars at United Airlines
“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to
say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things
we don't know we don't know.” —Donald Rumsfeld
When, five years ago, in May, 2010, United and Continental Airlines announced a “merger of equals”,
perhaps nobody at either airline foresaw the destructive and corrosive “unknown unknowns” of combining
two so utterly different airline cultures. The result has been an airline that, five years later, has failed to
deliver on any of the promised synergies, and consistently ranks at the bottom of the industry in just about all
measures of performance.
No one who retired prior to the merger would recognize the 2015 version of United Airlines. Beyond an
increasingly cynical and aging group of legacy United employees, little remains of the old United Airlines.
From the coffee to the cockpit SOPs, the constant refrain is, every time we think we’ve reached a new low,
management finds a way to sink even lower.
In truth it was never a merger of equals, and it probably would have been better to honestly face this fact
from the beginning. There can only ever be one CEO, and from the moment that the UAL and CAL Boards
of Directors made the decision to appoint Jeffrey Smisek CEO instead of Glenn Tilton, the management of
the former Continental Airlines was in control. Five years later there are no former UAL managers at or
above the Executive Vice President level — no one with the authority to make key policy decisions from the
perspective of 80 years of United Airlines institutional knowledge.
Five years ago, to outsiders, and particularly to Wall Street, ridding United Airlines of its management
appeared to be a no-brainer, considering the airline’s performance since the Dot-Com crash of 2000.
Continental, by comparison, appeared to have had a much better decade, winning various awards for
customer service. But, below the surface, the state of each airline was much more complicated. In fact,
United Airlines still did a lot of things really, really well, whereas Continental mostly looked good because it
had had so much room for improvement after the terrible days of Frank Lorenzo and two bankruptcies.
The legacy of Frank Lorenzo cannot be overstated. When he broke the backs of ALPA and the IAM during
the 1983 pilot and mechanic strikes, he implemented a management style and an employee culture that
continues to this day. The current senior UAL managers all came of age in this culture, with a disdain and
contempt for employees that is apparent in a way that was never true at United. Granted, the old United had
its share of labor problems, especially during and immediately after the 1985 pilot strike, but the fact that
United was never a union-free airline meant that its management had always engaged with its unions in the
running of the airline.
Continental, in contrast, had 27 years of union-free, or, at the most, very weak union operations, which
meant they had free rein to do whatever they wanted with no one to call them to account.
This lack of accountability has produced a “shoot first, ask questions later” management style in just about
every area of the new United Airlines. A perfect example of this—indeed, a perfect example of an “unknown
unknown”—was the switch from UNIMATIC to CSS for flight operations. We on the United side of the
house had joked for years about how primitive was UNIMATIC, how it was written in COBOL on IBM
punch cards, and how it was long past needing a modern replacement. Nobody could have possibly imagined
that the Continental equivalent, CSS, could be so much worse. The transition to CSS on January 1, 2014,
was a disaster, with flight operations management totally losing control of pilot staffing, to the point where
they were calling retired pilots, and, in at least one case, a dead pilot in an effort to keep the airline flying.
What everyone failed to appreciate was the fact that UNIMATIC has been developed and refined for decades
in a culture of accountability to ALPA. UNIMATIC had always to be completely transparent to anyone who
wanted to audit how management was complying with the pilot contract in running the airline, because
ALPA would never have allowed anything else. This attitude was so deeply woven into the fabric of the old
United Airlines that its management would never even have considered trying to operate in another manner.
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