What's in a name?

What's in a name?

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose,
by any other name, would smell as sweet."

Business 101. When you are an established company, one of the single most important things you can do is protect your name. That is how you are identified.

There is a reason that Disney (tm) protects that mouse and his silhouette. If you were to, say, stamp that mouse logo onto bumper stickers (obviously without Disney's permission) and start selling them, the lawsuit filed against you would start in the 10s of millions of dollars. Serious.

What is in a name.

Envoy Air, Inc.

A little background is in order.

American Eagle was the name given to the 'feeders' that provided short-haul service to American Airlines in the mid 1980s. You can look up the entire history of the airline, etc, on Wikipedia here, but I'll give you the short form.

American Airlines had a number of 'feeders,' or regional airlines that provided connecting service from the hub system to smaller cities that AA could not service, like Waco, Texas, Madison, Wisconsin, etc. With smaller loads to those cities, it made sense to contract that flying out, or come to an agreement with a local carrier that already had service to those cities, in exchange for flying the passengers through their system.

The original Eagles were Metroflight, Air Virginia (which would become Nashville Eagle,) Simmons Airlines, and Command Airways. These were combined or joined at one point or another with Wings West and Flagship. Executive was brought into the 'fold,' but was kept on a different "Operating Certificate" because of their Caribbean flying (over-water requirements, etc. Pretty much every pilot and FA at an airline is subject to everything or place that an airline can serve, with all the requirements of currency, etc... so keeping Executive separate actually made fairly good business sense.)

Over time the Company realized that having multiple separate airlines was starting to work against them. They would have crews in DFW from Wings West, and planes in DFW from Flagship, and the WW crews could not fly the Flagship aircraft, etc. In the meanwhile, they had flights not being operated, cancelling, etc, with crews and airplanes right there. Not to mention the fights in the crew lounges. Serious. Even by the time I got down there in 2000 crews would talk of...' that section over there is where the former WW guys sit, so don't go over there...' 'Those are the Metro pukes, by those tables, avoid them.' Serious. Although you can understand all of this when you know what Whipsawing is.

So one of the things that companies do to reduce costs is try to get a lowest common bidder. Now, it would behoove a corporation, and be due diligence for their bond- and share-holders, to make sure that the lowest bidder can actually deliver on what they promise.

Whipsawing is a whole 'nother animal. An airline (say... AA, for instance,) would get a tentative agreement from Regional Airline A to fly a certain plane on certain routes for $X/seat mile. These would sometimes be flights already flown by Regional Airline B. Then AA (or whatever airline) would go to Regional Airline B and say "Regional Airline A has agreed to fly these routes for $X/seat mile, if you don't go to at max $X-10%, we'll give the flying away to that airline. Then they could even go to a 3rd airline and repeat that. Ad Nauseum.

Really, it gets wildly more complicated than that, but that is the gist of it.

You whipsaw, or pit those airlines against each other, in a bidding war. But it is a bidding war for flying that is already being done by one of those airlines. This starts what we call a race to the bottom. The lowest bidder is usually the lowest for a reason!

This is where people outside the airline industry kind of lose contact with the world that pilots inhabit.

Flying is an incredible job. You can't beat the view... we had clouds and rain for a good 2 months a few years ago, but I manged to get some blue skies every day. If you are the Captain, you are the Master. There are a number of jokes about it, but the difference between being a First Officer (co-pilot) and being a Captain, is the First Officer asks, the Captain tells.

This is rooted in "The Buck Stops Here." The basis is from sailing and seamanship. Somebody has to make the final decision. Someone has to be the decision maker. Dispatchers, Schedulers, Flight Attendants, Gate Agents, Yield Management... everyone has a little say in the matter, but there must be someone who has experience (ideally) who is on the scene who will make the decision. You have to be able to operate as a bit of an independent agent. You must be able to make decisions.

Blanket statement, but realistically all US airlines decide who is CA and who is FO by seniority. Obviously, you want your most experienced pilots to be the ones making the decisions. It is simple; when your seniority can 'hold' Captain, you go for some additional schooling, then get tested a smidge more thoroughly on what you already know (or if you are going to another aircraft, you get to really learn that other plane!!) and then you get to fly from the left seat (and generally take a substantial raise, too!)

Most of the pilot jobs are union jobs, too. no statement for or against unions, but everyone who has been in a union knows, if you switch positions, where do you go? Right to the bottom.

So after you have been at a particular airline for a while, they kind of have you trapped. If you want to switch airlines, even with 20+ years experience, in all kinds of aircraft, all kinds of weather, the day you show up for the first day of class at the new airline, you are Joe the New Guy. You have nothing. Day 1.

Most jobs, if you make a management position, when you send out your cv you are applying for management positions, etc. Or you can use that as leverage into a track that will get you placed better.

Not for pilots (or FAs, for that matter. I am concentrating on pilots, though, since we tend to be a LOT more heavily financially invested in just GETTING our jobs.) Just about any other job, if you got into higher positions, you would be rewarded for that.

Not to mention, you have to be selected from the application pool. This takes a combination of luck, 'who do you know,' and a bunch of other factors, like timing, are they hiring, is there growth, are there retirements, etc. You can usually find a fairly ready job at a similar 'tier' airline, but then again you could be leaving a job making $100K/year for a new hire position at... honest... $19/hour. And while that may sound like much, a monthly guarantee might only be 72 hours/month.

BTW, that is what college kids are looking at. They are coming out of college with $100K+ in debt, and entry level positions can pay $19K/year. Some pay a little more, and the rates go up to decent wages at some airlines (at AE, or now Envoy, our FOs top out in 8 years at $42/hour. But that can be a loonnnng road. I know it. I was an FO for 10 years.

OK, enough digression.

Eventually, AA realized they could get more 'bang for their buck' by combining the "Eagles" under a single "type," and save a lot of headaches. So they merged a few of the regionals, and eventually cobbled everything together under the name American Eagle Airlines, Inc. It was combined under the Simmons type (hence the MQ, for Marquette, Michigan) and in the 1990s, everything was one happy, loving company.

They added Business Express as a buyout, and those pilots were added to the seniority list when I was a new hire, so throughout the year 2000, etc.

American Eagle Airlines became one of the dominant regional carriers in the industry (maybe by force of weight!) and our only real limit was the Scope Clause that we operated under. Essentially, unless AA increased 'available seat miles,' we were limited by a formula of AA ASM / X. I don't know what it was, but we could not add flying in certain types of aircraft and we were restricted from flying certain routes, etc. However, we were very successful. More flying was moved to Eagle (such as Cleveland to Chicago, which used to be a mainline AA route,) in place of cities like Stephen's Point, Wisconsin to Chicago.

Eagle started flying further and further away. We started servicing cities that mainline AA had almost completely forgotten about, such as Louisville, and picked up former traditional AA cities, like Montreal. We could do the lower load flights more efficiently, so it made sense for Eagle to do those flights, and for AA to free up another aircraft to do higher capacity routes, like Dallas, New York, etc.

We built up a reputation under the Eagle name. People knew what they were getting. We had transitioned to an all jet fleet, and had 240+ aircraft. We were the only regional that had to report Arrival Delays to the FAA for tracking, that is how big we had gotten. Of course we were not perfect, and as you get bigger, more can slip through the cracks, but we took a lot of pride in who we were. I had not problems telling people I flew for American Eagle Airlines, the regional arm of American Airlines.

Recently, a few years ago, Some of our Chicago flying got farmed out to another regional, named Chautauqua Airlines. They are a subdivision of Republic Airways Holdings, inc. AA decided to farm out some of our close in flying, and then Eagle could be sent on more longer haul flying. So Milwaukee, Madison, Lacrosse, Grand Rapids, etc... were farmed out to another airline. Those are flying jobs that are not on our list, not available for us to fly, and they pay a fee (Fee For Departure) to that airline to operate the flight on a schedule that meets up with the AA one, but anything above that fee that they get, they get to keep.

Then, we were informed that our LAX flying was being farmed out to SkyWest. The company had said they were going to put a certain percentage of flying up for bid, and we had to bid against other carriers for it. I know, we are wholly owned, who is doing the bidding for us?

So we were never even informed that the LAX flying was up for grabs, we just got an announcement that we were closing up our base there, and the crews would be displaced and reassigned.

Then we were informed that our San Juan flying was up for grabs, and some of our Miami flying would go with it. This went partially to JetBlue, and the RJs picked up the rest.

Then they started assigning some of our Dallas flying to Express Jet.

The LAX flying and the DFW flying was rebranded as "American Eagle," so those airlines had to have written on the side of their aircraft "Express Jet, dba [doing business as] American Eagle."

That was the start of the death of our name.

Almost 2 years ago, now, we were asked to take a round of concessions in our contract, so that it would position us to fly larger regional jets, specifically the new Embraer 175s and Bombardier CRJ 900.

I was not a supporter of that agreement, but the work group passed it, and 48 hours later AA announced that the EMB 175s were going to Republic Airways, and they would be taking that flying in Chicago.

Thanks, guys!

So AA was emerging from bankruptcy after joining with USAir, and now would be known as the American Airline Group.

Someone somewhere decided that since we had an airline, American Eagle Airlines, and we had other regionals flying under the American Eagle banner (dba,) it would make sense to have the 'contract carriers' fly under one banner, one name, simple for all.

So they decided that name would be American Eagle.

Once again, American Eagle would be the shell that regionals would operate under when they were 'feeding' AA.

But in the meantime, there was an actual airline named American Eagle Airlines.

So... completely against all sense, everything anyone would have learned about branding in BIZ101, they decided to take an established, recognizable company, give their name away to 10 airlines, and change the name of the company.

And they changed it to USAirways business class service. Envoy.

So now, every regional airline that is feeding USAir (for the moment) or AA, is painted or will be painted as American Eagle. A name that is already established.

But when you go to the airport, you will check in at the American Eagle ticket counter. Except you have no idea what airline you will be getting. Here are the carriers that will eventaully be operating under the American Eagle Logo:

Envoy (Legacy American Eagle)
Republic
Chautauqua
ExpressJet
SkyWest
Air Wisconsin
Mesa Airlines
Piedmont Airlines
PSA Airlines
Trans States Airlines

Your ticket will have 'Operated by,"and the aircraft are required to have the name of the actual airline (Doing Business As) but the aircraft will all be painted as "American Eagle."

I am sure that this was extensively focus group tested, and it tested high. I have yet to meet or talk to a single airline person who thinks this is a good idea, who gets behind the new name and cheers.

They decided that we needed our own identity.

We had our own identity, and YOU took it away from us, and gave it to everyone else.

It is going to cost millions of dollars to make the changes. Every single item from Legacy American Eagle has to be changed to Envoy (a note on style... Envoy Air is the name of the airline, but the logo is not capitalized. Who decided this, e. e. cummings??)

No joke that it is millions. We will all get new uniforms. Everything that you can imagine that needs to be changed will be changed.

It makes you wonder what they are thinking. Some firm decided that this would be a good idea, and it was worth spending $$Millions to make the change.

Did anyone at the Board of Directors ask some of the basic questions??

IS this good for our bondholders and shareholders?

IS this good from the standpoint of our reputation as an airline (name recognition?)

HOW does this increase shareholder value or equity?

WILL this be good for the company long term, for our employees and customers?

I am not a fan of the name change at all. I really think they would have been better off making the regional feed all "Envoy," and all of the regionals could be a "messenger or representative on a diplomatic mission." American Eagle operating as Envoy for AA. I could fly with that.

I still have a few more days before I have to go back to work, and it will take me a long time to erase 14 years of flying as "Eagle" or "Eagle Flight." But it is not my airline, and if they want to change the name, they can. April 15, 2014 is a sad day.

What is in a name?

Everything.