From Worst to First: Behind the Scenes of Continental's Remarkable Comeback

Chapter 4. Fund the Future, or If There Ain't No Funds, There Ain't Gonna Be No Future

At the beginning of this book, I said the only place we could fly you with any degree of certainty was nowhere. I now admit that I was exaggerating: There actually was one place Continental Airlines could get you besides nowhere.

Bankruptcy court.

In the decade before I joined Continental, the airline had gone into bankruptcy twice, in 1983 and 1990. We couldn't get to a lot of places, but we were racking up the frequent flyer miles on tours of the American bankruptcy court system. And when I took over, we were mighty close to going down for the third time, which would have been fatal. As John Casey of Braniff used to say when I worked there as Braniff made its way toward bankruptcy, it wasn't the end of the world, but we could see it from where we were. Plus we had a confirmed landing slot and people waiting for us at the gate.

Things didn't look too good.

No, I mean they really looked bad. Much worse than I imagined when I fought so hard to become chief executive of Continental Airlines. In fact, one day in December, 1994, not long after I had finally taken over as chief executive, Greg Brenneman was looking over our financial numbers—and looking them over a little more carefully than they had been looked over in many, many years. I was in charge, and he finally had access to all our numbers and all the financial information. Greg found something he thought was worth mentioning, and he came into ...