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A high school dropout who became a Navy airplane mechanic in the late '50s, Bethune has managed everything from engineering and maintenance at Braniff to operations at Piedmont and 737 and 757 production at Boeing. Even now, as chairman and CEO of Continental, he tastes the food served on the planes (yes, even in coach) and dines on fast food at the airports (look for him at the Mexican joints). He monitors everything from airport decor (blue terrazzo wins out over carpet) to the number of public-address announcements. Pasta warmers and $330 wine-bottle openers don't rate even a question from Bethune, but he can wax enthusiastic over bigger luggage bins and more elbow room in the cabin. "Come back and look at this," he says eagerly, pointing out that 9 of every 10 seats on the new 767 are on an aisle or a window. "We found out customers would rather have an empty center seat" than have more leg room, he says, "so our seats are not as far apart" as those of some competitors.
For Continental and its rivals, of course, the biggest challenge is using these come-ons to win back business travelers, who traditionally flew on short notice and paid full fares, often in the $2,000 range. A Business Travel Council survey of 184 groups that, combined, spend $2.9 billion a year on travel revealed in April that business travel is down 20% this year. Even worse, B.T.C. chairman Kevin Mitchell notes that 60% of the companies plan to cut further. Frustrated by ticket prices that skyrocketed 74% between 1996 and 2000, businesspeople are eliminating nonessential trips, hunting for last-minute cheap fares online, videoconferencing, or taking trains, private planes and even buses. "Some of these reductions are meant to be permanent," warns Mitchell.
Bethune knows he has to chart his course carefully or risk going hat in hand to Washington for a taxpayer-backed bailout. He's already unpopular for leading the charge on Congress to grant a $15 billion aid package for the industry the first week after the attacks. "I ain't running for election here, pal," he says. "If we had waited another week to publicly acknowledge where we were, we'd still be arguing about it, and a bunch of us would be bankrupt."
He predicts that United Airlines, the second largest U.S. carrier, could still go the way of U.S. Airways, which announced last month that it plans to seek government loan guarantees. Just two weeks ago, Bethune announced that to boost revenues, Continental and U.S. Airways are discussing a code-sharing alliance that would allow passengers to book flights on one airline but travel on the other for part of the route. "Fact is, we're all losing money. At Continental, we're just losing less than everybody else," he says. "If we don't survive, no one is going to survive."
It's telling that when Bethune talks about "the industry"--including his assertion that all airlines are losing money--he really means full-service hub airlines: American, United, Delta, Northwest Airlines, Continental and U.S. Airways. He omits Southwest--long the industry's best-run and most profitable carrier, whose market capitalization is larger than the Big Six's combined--and other moneymaking budget carriers like Frontier Airlines and start-ups like JetBlue Airways.