For United, a Smaller, Humbler Era at LAX

It’s just after 8 a.m. as Mike Scanlan paces into Terminal 8 at Los Angeles International Airport, a rolled-up stack of flight schedules clutched in his fist, his eyes scanning like search beams. Thick-chested and spike-haired, with the wide stance of a policeman, Scanlan became United Airlines’ general manager in Los Angeles three years ago.

The station was in full flower then, a budding hub painstakingly nurtured to seize the biggest share of LAX’s departure board. For Scanlan, the post was the culmination of 30-plus years with United--the best gig imaginable for a self-described “airport rat.”

Back then, Scanlan’s morning patrol was guaranteed to provide a certain satisfaction, even on days scuttled by weather or human foul-ups. Signs of United’s ascendance were everywhere.

But on this Tuesday in mid-December, Scanlan turns onto the concourse and deflates. In what should be the heart of the morning rush, the gleaming expanse is utterly deserted.

“Look at this, it’s just awful,” he said. “We invested a lot of money here.”

But he has to move on, to shake off the sting, to complete the circuit every day, just as he must believe United will rebound from autumn’s wreckage.

In the months since Sept. 11, United has gone from an expansive behemoth to a company “struggling for its life,” in the words of its recently departed chief executive. The new era has chiseled out a smaller, humbler, more anxious community at LAX, where United once generated $1 in every $6 of its revenue.

United made deeper service cuts at LAX than at any other hub, slashing departures by more than one-third and scrapping its Western shuttle service.

More than 15% of its Los Angeles work force is gone, laid off in waves that began just a week after the carrier lost two planes in the terrorist attacks.

“By the time you dealt with your grieving, you were let go,” said Helene Ehrlich, who was furloughed Sept. 22 from concierge service.

Scanlan’s daily circuit has become as much about holding the remaining employees together as about making United’s planes run on time. His unflagging barrage of shoulder slaps, handshakes, banter and commiseration doesn’t always work. But he’s too invested not to try.

“How you doing? Is everything great?” he asks a gate agent.

“I’m h-a-p-p-y,” she spells out sarcastically, forcing a smile.

Scanlan can’t leave it alone. Each time he passes the agent on his rounds, he checks her expression, smiling at her broadly, finally getting one back that might be genuine.

“I’ll work on her all day,” he said.

Before Sept. 11, United ranked a runaway No. 1 in the numbers of people it transported and employed at LAX, in the space it occupied and in the array of places it flew its customers.

Much of that success was achieved since 1994, when the airline embarked on a risky, $300-million campaign to create a hub at the nation’s third-busiest airport.

Over a five-year span, United steadily added flights onto a foundation of Pacific routes acquired in the mid-1980s. It annexed part of Terminal 6 to accommodate the extra planes and built its own customs facility.

Shuttle by United challenged Southwest Airlines for short Western hops, acquiring a fleet of 737s and refurbishing Concourse 8 for the traffic. The company added about 3,500 Los Angeles employees, who found the momentum infectious.

“It was the jewel. I was a pig in mud,” said Tony Geck, hired as a mechanic in 1997. A compulsive tinkerer, Geck loved the challenges posed by United’s diverse fleet, fixing everything from armrests to engines during his midnight shift.

“There was good flying here,” said Holly Hightower, vice president of United’s local flight attendants union.

By late 1999, United and its affiliates owned more than one-third of LAX’s departure schedule, flying about 50,000 passengers in and out daily on more flights than American and Delta combined.

But the muscular franchise was showing signs of dysfunction, even before the terrorist attacks.

A series of missteps in 2000--from the labor strife that triggered a summer service meltdown to an ill-fated bid to acquire US Airways--left United internally divided and financially fragile. As a recession gripped the travel industry, every layer of the LAX station braced for cuts.

But because of the attacks, they came more swiftly and carved more deeply than anyone could have anticipated.

Scanlan leans back in his chair in the same conference room that, three months earlier, served as United’s crisis center.

As he listens to routine rundowns on weather, delays, staffing and repairs, he can still see the room as it was then: walls covered with flip charts showing the status of people and planes, and a long rectangular table cluttered with enough phones for a telethon.

The mess has been cleared away, but the crisis has not ended.

Instead, Scanlan sees it playing out each day in small bursts of tension and volatility.

He moves briskly through Concourse 7 just before 9 on this mid-December morning, his head pivoting to measure lines and monitor the interplay between employees and passengers. The planes are running about 70% full, he notes, but holiday volume soon will kick it up past 90%. He searches for signs that the operation is ready.

On his way toward the mushroom of gates at Concourse 7’s tip, he freezes mid-step, staring at the boarding area for a flight to Baltimore.

Security Screenings a Delicate Exercise

A “selectee”--United’s cheery euphemism for passengers randomly chosen for extra security inspections--is standing stiff-spined in anger. Dealing with selectees is now standard, a delicate exercise that can instantly turn confrontational, even a little frightening.

Scanlan stares helplessly as gate agents try to placate the man, who tosses down his carry-on bag and some shredded luggage tags. Finally, they’re able to steer him into a discreet corridor. Scanlan exhales.

The quantitative damage United sustained at LAX after Sept. 11 was at least predictable, if bruising to company pride.

Though still tops in passengers and destinations, it has dropped to No. 2 behind Southwest Airlines in departures, not including flights on its commuter affiliate. It has cut its daily seat capacity to 1994 levels. The shuttle--so emblematic of the LAX success story--was eliminated in a cost-cutting move Oct. 30.

Since flying resumed, the logic and rhythms of the airport often elude even Scanlan, the airport rat. Familiar airport routines have turned exotic, and everyone’s job has mutated, he said.

Glen Winn, United’s counter-terrorism chief, used to be a backstage figure who dealt with a closed circle of company executives, government agencies and security contractors. Now he is part salesman, part public education guru, briefing big-buck corporate clients such as Mattel and Warner Bros. on how their employees can ease their way through airport security.

“This is high-powered business for us,” he said. “They really want to get down to the nitty-gritty.”

Security was always Winn’s focus, but it also has become uppermost for employees whose jobs used to be primarily about efficiency, convenience and comfort.

Scanlan points to a customer service representative redeployed at the screening checkpoint. Before, her most stressful duty was rerouting inconvenienced travelers. Now she grapples with seemingly small decisions that could affect planeloads of lives.

She relates the latest quandary as Scanlan passes by: Would the Federal Aviation Administration want screeners to confiscate a passenger’s expensive cigarette lighter, or can they simply drainthe butane and let him keep it?

The adjustments have been particularly stressful for employees who face the prospect of confronting passengers verbally or physically. Hired to be friendly and helpful, they are on alert for suspicious or threatening behavior in people they were trained to serve.

Many flight attendants, in particular, have struggled with the anxiety. Can they fulfill these new duties? Do they want to? Hightower, the attendants union leader, has experienced the changing expectations firsthand.

“I’ve been told, ‘Throw yourself at the guy and do what you have to do.’ I’m like, ‘That’s the plan?’ ” Hightower said. “This has changed the function of our job, period. I have a lot of people saying, ‘I didn’t come on board for that program. I didn’t sign on to be a policeman.’ ”

Layoffs Force More Changes

The layoffs forced still more changes, even for employees who survived the initial rounds of cuts.

Seniority protected Eugene O’Donnell, a mechanic with United for about 10 years. But he lost his coveted foreman-like position and was bumped up from four days a week to six days. Although he works about the same number of hours, he’s struggling to get comfortable with an unfamiliar crew on a new shift.

“It makes it harder to work,” he said. “You can sense the friction, even amongst the guys.”

One reserve flight attendant said she has been working more than ever since the attacks because so many others have taken voluntary furloughs. Her sleeping pattern has become so truncated by middle-of-the-night duty calls that her doctor put her on medication for exhaustion.

She has thought of quitting, but slogs on, reluctant to be jobless in a slumping economy.

“Every time I fly, I’m bitter,” she said.

United’s continuing crisis has had even more dire effects on the 1,282 employees laid off since September.

Teresa Gavey thought she found an invaluable measure of security under United’s giant wings. She made just $7.93 an hour cleaning plane cabins part time, but the job came with benefits and enabled her to send her mother on a discount trip to Washington. Now, she has lost her Compton home and sleeps on a sofa in her mother’s trailer.

“I’m getting by, but it’s a struggle,” Gavey said, picking up four bags of potatoes at a union food bank in early November.

The International Assn. of Machinists lodge in Hawthorne started the weekly food giveaway program in mid-October for members in distress. With each succeeding Tuesday, the lines grew longer, the prepacked boxes of potatoes, beans and juice covered more of the office floor and the chitchat became angrier.

Gavey, like many furloughed employees, suspects her termination had as much to do with preexisting hostility between United’s management and labor unions as with the terrorist attacks.

“I don’t put it all on the tragedy,” she said. “They were going to clean house anyway.”

Mark Liberman, vice president of United’s Western region, disputes this notion, noting that the layoffs also have thinned the airlines’ management ranks in Los Angeles by more than 30%.

“We’ve gone to a few too many retirement parties for people who didn’t want to retire,” he said. “We, as their company and their family, have let them down.”

Divisiveness Is a Concern

Still, he acknowledges that United’s employees--current and former--may have felt so alienated from their managers that even the shared trauma of Sept. 11 could not bring them together.

“This is something we need to work on: trust,” Liberman said. “We’re divisive in the way we do things.”

For Geck--the mechanic who once was so proud to work for United that he hung airline gear in his home--that divisiveness made his mid-October furlough more a relief than a setback.

As the airline’s labor situation worsened, his job became weighted down by bureaucracy, slights and reprimands, he said. On his last day, only one supervisor of a dozen came over to say sorry and good luck, Geck said, blowing air through his nose in a soft snort.

All that gear with the United logo has long since hit the trash bin. “I’ve destroyed anything that remotely reminds me of them,” he said.

Helene Ehrlich, by contrast, has had a tough time letting go of United.

For weeks after her dismissal, she returned regularly to visit former colleagues in the concierge service, finding solace when her regulars at the Red Carpet Club commiserated with her. She missed the job’s sense of purpose and the excitement of airport life--the constant flow of faces and stories.

After a while, though, the visits “just got too hard, with all the people looking at you like, ‘I’m so sorry,’ ” Ehrlich said. Her uniforms still hang in her closet, but she has applied to UCLA’s graduate management school. “That community was the most wonderful thing in the world to me. But I’m not part of it anymore.”

A dozen supervisors file into the conference room tucked underneath Concourse 8 and Scanlan kicks off the 9:15 a.m. station briefing.

So far, only fog in Salt Lake City has put a serious snarl into the morning schedule. Scanlan moans in mock despair after hearing that a key early flight missed its departure time by a single clock tick. “One minute,” he said, “You’re killing me.”

Then, somehow, in between updates on employee-of-the-quarter luncheons and wheelchair-transport programs, the agenda turns to Sept. 11 and it just won’t budge.

Cargo manager Jack Paluska holds up a book co-written by Lisa Beamer, widow of a passenger who resisted United Flight 93’s hijackers.

“I had the honor and privilege of being with her husband in Shanksville,” he said, referring to the 12 days he spent at Flight 93’s rural Pennsylvania crash site. He rubs his palm over the book cover.

That somber moment segues into news on another round of pilot layoffs and on deadlines for new federally mandated employee background checks.

Three months have passed and United’s managers still haven’t made it through the daily meeting without mentioning the attacks or changes directly related to them, Scanlan said, adding, “It’s in your face all the time.”

Despite the damage, United has not relinquished its long-held designs on Los Angeles.

“We’re still the big dog,” said Alan Wayne, the company’s longtime spokesman in Southern California. “We’re just not growling as loudly.”

Liberman expresses his resolve by courting corporate customers, personally calling a local paint company executive after reading that the man had an unpleasant experience on Southwest.

Scanlan expresses his by walking the beat.

Sometimes all he can do with the clamor and confusion set off by Sept. 11 is tell it to pipe down.

As he makes one final circuit around the check-in area, a recorded voice suddenly blasts over the usual murmur.

It seems to be emerging from a speaker on a short stand. The man kneeling beside it, noodling with volume controls, explains that he is testing a system that instructs passengers on how to navigate the rigorous new screening checkpoint. He’s with United, the guy says, oblivious to Scanlan’s identity.

Scanlan, deadpan, tells the guy he’s with United too.

“And my feedback would be,” he said, cupping his hands to form a makeshift megaphone, “This is too . . . loud.”