"I really don’t think the upper management at United has any clue about the nuts and bolts, day to day, inner workings of the company. Post-merger United is too big to fail, too big to manage and far too Balkanized to govern. I fully expect the ugliness to continue at United."

I'm only arguing the supposition that United is a uniquely bad company.

Many other bad companies (that keep United from being unique) haven't stumbled in such a harmful, public way. United did, and we consumers need to make an example out of them.

(Edit: grammar).

This is the kind of problem a company can get into when the people making the key decisions operate in terms of "metrics" that don't track reality well enough. Plus when a lot of the work is done by outsourced vendors, they probably don't pass on unquantifiable bad news.

This also played a role in United's frankly abysmal on-time ratings; in order to have enough capacity while moving everything into tiny regional jets, they had to raise the frequency of the flights, which led to logistical clusterfucks at their hubs when they just overloaded the ability of the airport operations to handle that many flights.

Smisek did do it with the long-range 757s he gained in the Continental merger. Smaller plane, less crew...and just enough range to get back if the headwinds are light. If not, it's an unscheduled 90 minute refuel in Canada. Add the time to clear immigration and customs, and now you have 200+ people with a missed connection.

http://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=699955

I've had it happen to me, it's not fun.

Meanwhile, airlines are also looking at Airbus, which is talking up a long-range variant of the A321neo for exactly this purpose.