I tend to ignore Virgin America often even when they do make the news.   I’ve had a lot of trouble figuring out what this airline is supposed to be and even more figuring out whether or not they are really going to succeed. 

 

VA has made some news in the past couple of months, though, and I figured it was time to talk about them. 

 

Virgin America began as a concept annunced by the irrepresible Richard Brandon (founder of Virgin Atlantic and the Virgin Group) and it went through quite a few iterations before it launched.  It changed its announced name from Virgin USA to Virgin America, for instance.  Ownership structure was fiddled with several times to meet US restrictions on foreign ownership of airlines.  Business leaders changed and their original CEO, Fred Reid, was eventually removed to satisfy the DOT and gain permission to launch. 

 

Their approach to finding a home was weird to me and kind of reflected a European viewpoint that led me to believe they weren’t necessarily looking at the US market properly.  After leading a kind of competition to find a home, Virgin America settled on San Francisco as its “operations” home and New York City as its “corporate”  home.   Neither location struct me as particularly wise because NYC and California are expensive places to operate and they’re no more representative of the United States than a lot of other locations.

 

While they went through the start up process, Virgin America faced a lot of criticism from other airlines.  Flatteringly, it was quite a bit more than many startups have received over the years.  On the surface, the objection was always to the perceived foreign ownership of Virgin America.  My own sense was that other US major airlines saw another potential jetBlue starting up and given jetBlue’s success, yeah, it would worry a few airlines. 

 

Strangely, at the end, some of the loudest objections came from Continental Airlines who, from my point of view, had the fewest reasons to fear Virgin America’s competition.  Continental had a strong 2 class operation that was highly favored by businessmen for both its service, comfort and frequent flier program.   From my perspective, American Airlines and United Airlines had the most to fear from this upstart’s trans-continental plans.   Even jetBlue had some reason to be worried since VA’s product most closely competed with jetBlue’s and had the biggest chance of nibbling away at jetBlue’s customers.

 

I think the biggest concern from existing airlines was that, once again, a well financed 2 class airline was entering the market that had low labor costs and brand new efficient aircraft.  Startups always have low costs because the airline industry is based on seniority.  A new airline with all new employees quite naturally has some of the lowest labor costs but that does change over time and it really depends on the airline on whether or not those costs rise dramatically or not. 

 

jetBlue has been able to keep its labor costs relatively low by being pretty good at taking care of their employees, for instance.   By having such low costs, airlines like jetBlue and VA, are able to compete very hard on those trans-continental routes that are many airlines bread and butter. 

 

When VA agreed to remove CEO Fred Reid from the operation after no more than 9 months of operation after the certification was awarded, they had to go find a new CEO.  Now, Fred Reid never had the kind of reputation that I would expect an operation like VA to need or want.  Formerly of Delta, Fred Reid performance at Delta was mixed and he certainly wasn’t a charismatic leader which I thought would help VA quite a lot in the US.  Richard Branson’s kind of bravado has never played nearly as well in the United States as it has elsewhere in the world.

 

My thought was that VA would seek a more personable, charismatic leader who would not only have a strong airline background but who would also be a good public figure for this venture.  VA, apparently, felt otherwise and found their next CEO at American Airlines in the form of David Cush.  

 

Mr. Cush certainly fit the bill when it came to having a strong airline background.  He had 20 years of airline experience in a wide variety of positions and a great education too.  The thing is, Cush did it all at the most conservative of airlines, American Airlines.  Huh?  Yes, Cush had youth going for him and he does present himself rather well but it still didn’t mesh in my mind.

 

I suspect VA’s investors, most particularly its US investors, wanted someone who had a very strong financial background and who understood just how important it was to preserve cash and operate with strong controls in place.  They had, after all, funded VA with more money than had ever been put together for an airline startup in the US when VA began.   He did most recently work as Vice President of Alliances and Chief of Sales for American and this hints at Mr. Cush’s ability to access corporate clients.  With VA’s transcon strategy, this kind of made sense.

 

Virgin was so delayed in getting permission to start up, it leased several of its delivered Airbus A320 aircraft to the late Skybus Airlines.  When they did begin to operate, they were hindered in fully starting up operations because some of those aircraft were occupied until Skybus failed miserably. 

 

But . . . operate they did.  Finally in August of 2007 and fully 2 years delayed, they began flights between San Francisco and NYC and Los Angeles and NYC.  This wasn’t a bad start in that they were connecting major business centers with lots of traffic but it didn’t allow them to really get high utilization of their aircraft and pricing on those routes has always had lots of competitive pressure so they lost lots of money operationally. 

 

Every airline loses lots of money in its first months and years.  Airlines really operates lots of small businesses.  Each route is really its own business and it takes time to grow those routes into profitable operations and it takes varying time to do it for each route.  It is an investment that takes time to go profitable and much more time to provide a good ROI (return on investment.) 

 

VA was off and running and I was still scratching my head.  There were still many parts to this airline that defied rational thought in my opinion.  Tomorrow, more on VA and its service and routes and where it is today.

Filed under: Airline History by ajax