The airline business is fast-paced, high risk, and highly leveraged. It puts a premium on things I like to do. I think I communicate well. And I am very good at detail. I love detail.
A recession is when you have to tighten your belt; depression is when you have no belt to tighten. When you've lost your trousers - you're in the airline business.
A lot of people came into the airline business. Most of them promptly exited, minus their money.
The airline business is crazy. I've not been enamored with the industry in general. You can't depend on anybody and anything. It's dog-eat-dog and one thing or another from one minute to the next. What I understand about it, I don't like what I see.
These days no one can make money on the goddamn airline business. The economics represent sheer hell.
I've said many times that I'd be thrilled to sell the airline to the employees and our guys said no, we'll take all the money, anyway.
Once you get hooked on the airline business, it's worse than dope.
It's not a testosterone-driven industry any longer. Success is making money, not in the size of the airline.
The quickest way to become a millionaire in the airline business is to start out as a billionaire.
The airline business is it is mostly run by a bunch of spineless nincompoops who actually don't want to stand up to the environmentalists and call them the lying wankers that they are.
I was never, ever interested in becoming a businessman or an entrepreneur. If I was a businessman, or saw myself as a businessman, I would have never gone into the airline business.
I have to say that flying on Air Force One sort of spoils you for coach on a regular airline.
If the employees come first, then they're happy. A motivated employee treats the customer well. The customer is happy so they keep coming back, which pleases the shareholders. It's not one of the enduring green mysteries of all time, it is just the way it works.
The airline industry is full of bullshitters, liars and drunks. We excel at all three in Ireland.
There has always been a certain romanticism associated with the airline business. We must avoid its perpetuation at Eastern at all costs.
We have a business that some people feel pollutes, and I happen to agree with them. . . . And so on the basis of trying to do good and, you know, hopefully turn a profit, what we did was we pledged that we'd put all the profits from our airline business into trying to develop clean fuels.
As of 1992, in fact-though the picture would have improved since then-the money that had been made since the dawn of aviation by all of this country's airline companies was zero. Absolutely zero.
Americans have an abiding belief in their ability to control reality by purely material means. . . airline insurance replaces the fear of death with the comforting prospect of cash.
