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

Chapter 5. Make Reliability a Reality, or It's Time to Act like a Real Airline

Let me tell you the story of the ambulance in the valley.

There's a little town, and it's about halfway up a mountain in a bend in the road. That hairpin turn is a terrible hazard, and, about once a month, cars go flying off into the valley below. It's awful.

The town council gets together and they look into how much it's going to cost to regrade the road, put in signs, and install a guard rail—in other words, make the thing safe. Well, it's going to be really expensive. In fact, it's going to be so expensive that they decide they just can't afford it. But the cars are still flying off the road and people are getting hurt. They don't like that, and they want to do something, so they solve the problem of the dangerous road in what they believed was a less expensive way.

They put an ambulance in the valley.

It's a great story because it shows how hard people will work to avoid solving their real problem. At Continental before I came here, that kind of thinking was a way of life. The philosophy was that you couldn't solve a problem because it was too expensive to do what would solve the problem.

You know what? If you're asking how much it costs to solve a problem, you'd better ask the other question I've mentioned. You may say it's too expensive to fix the road. But you have to ask the other question: What does it cost not to fix it?

When we're talking about the core product of our airline, that question is central. ...