Unfriendly skies? How United became the airline flyers love to hate

NEWARK--Shortly after 11 a.m., United Airline's Flight 71 inbound from Amsterdam settled gracefully on Runway 22L at Newark Liberty International Airport.

Within minutes, it was followed by a succession of United arrivals on the same runway from Denver, Miami and Paris.

More than seven of 10 planes taking off or landing at Newark Liberty on any given day have United painted on their sides. By far the most dominant player there, the airline last year brought nearly 25 million passengers in and out of Newark.

But five years following its troubled 2010 marriage with Continental, the airline that boasts of flying the friendly skies continues to find itself in increasingly turbulent ones.

United is on its third chief executive in three months. The carrier's dirty laundry and clumsy political dealmaking spilled across front pages this year. Its employees contractually can't work together. And the U.S. Justice Department just sued, claiming the largest airline at Newark Liberty has grown too big.

But that's nothing to many travelers.

They focus on everything from the lousy coffee on board, to the way it is served once they squeeze in their seats. And the real problem, they say, is that United just doesn't get it.

At the same time the airline has been racking up record profits (boosted by those much-hated baggage fees no one wants to pay), United's performance and customer satisfaction ratings are dragging at or near the bottom of the industry. There are entire websites and social media campaigns devoted to dropping nastygrams whenever there's a hiccup, lost bag or delay.

Which is more often than ever.

It wasn't supposed to be this way five years ago when United, the established giant of the Midwest, struck a bold deal to combine with the scrappy Continental, which had survived bankruptcy and largely won over the flying public.

So what happened?

"You can't attribute it to anything other than management failure," said Brent Bowen, dean of the College of Aviation at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Ariz. "They were not focusing on the traveling public."

Richard May of Belleville, a recent United passenger, said the airline seemed tone-deaf to its customers.

His troubles began when his Oct. 9 trip from Newark Liberty to Tampa was cancelled while passengers were boarding. He was told the crew had exceeded their allowable flight hours.

"I am a physician and know about duty hour regulations," he said. "But we have backups in place for emergencies such as this. It was amazing to see that there was no crew available to bring us to Tampa. I thought Newark was some major hub for United in the New York metropolitan area."

It got worse. Placed on standby the next day, he said he and his wife Rita were told to retrieve their luggage. But after waiting two hours, they learned the bags had gone on vacation to Tampa without them. The next morning, the couple finally boarded as standby passengers--only to be kicked off the plane after a regular ticketed passenger arrived late.

"I know from experience that yelling doesn't do anything. It's not their fault," he said of the United employees. "But all they told me was to go to the United website and provide 'feedback.' I probably would have been satisfied if someone had just listened to us."

For his part, Oscar Munoz, United's CEO, acknowledged the airline's troubles head-on shortly after taking over in September, and has promised change.

"I recognize that the journey hasn't always been smooth and it won't be fixed in a day," Munoz said in a letter to employees, days after replacing Jeff Smisek in the top job.

It has already been a rocky road for him. Now recuperating from a heart attack he suffered in October, Munoz, 56, is not expected to return to United until early next year.

A difficult marriage

The story of United Airlines today is the story of an airline that still hasn't digested its complicated merger -- and all airline mergers are complicated.

Nowhere does this play out as dramatically as at Newark Liberty, where approximately 600,000 United passengers will pass through the terminals this Thanksgiving holiday week.

For evidence of the struggles to integrate even as United dominates Newark Liberty, look no farther than the two 777 jets sitting on the tarmac this summer.

To the casual observer, they appeared virtually identical.

On their tails, both carried the former blue-and-gold logo of Continental Airlines, while the United name was emblazoned in blue and white along the sides.

It looks nice. In practice, it has been a struggle on many levels.

One plane had a pair of Pratt & Whitney PW4000s mounted under the wings, revealing its United lineage.

The other Triple-7 -- which came from Continental's fleet -- was powered by a set of General Electric GE90 engines. In the maintenance area on the other side of the airport, mechanics must keep spares and parts in storage for both engines.

Like the engines, the cabin crews on those planes also cannot be interchanged. While all flight attendants for United wear similar uniforms, those who came from Continental are not allowed to mix with those who worked for pre-merger United. Every flight has either all United or all Continental cabin crews, requiring the now-combined airline to keep several flight attendants from both sides of the arranged corporate marriage on standby to fill in when someone is sick, late or fails to show up.

Based on past performance, there also was a good chance at least one of the planes would fail to reach its destination on schedule. According to federal Department of Transportation reports, nearly one in four United flights arrives late--an on-time record placing it 10th among the 12 top U.S. airlines.

Long before the forced resignation in September of Smisek -- one of the chief architects of the problem-plagued merger -- the airline seemed to have become every traveler's favorite target, while its failure to reach new labor agreements has infuriated its unions. (In Newark alone, there are approximately 12,000 employess, most of them unionized. The airline is Newark's second-largest employer after Prudential Financial, according to city officials.)

And now the federal government has gotten into the mix, seeking to block the airline from acquiring additional takeoff and landing slots at Newark Liberty.

Major airports such as Newark have a limited number of takeoff and landing authorizations, known as slots, allocated by the Federal Aviation Administration to manage congestion. But the U.S. Department of Justice, charging United's airfares at Newark are among the highest in the country --while its service "ranks among the worst" -- filed a civil antitrust lawsuit earlier this month against the airline, which is consolidating its operations at EWR by moving its flights out of Kennedy International to its hub at Newark.

The government argued that United's efforts to lease additional slots at Newark fortify what has become a monopoly, weakening its rivals' abilities to challenge that dominance.

"A slot is essentially a license to compete at Newark," said Assistant Attorney General Bill Baer of the Justice Department's Antitrust Division in a conference call with reporters. "United already holds most of them, and as a result, competition at Newark is in critically short supply."

United has rejected the claims, calling the New York/Newark area "the most competitive air transportation market" in the country.

"Newark is an important United hub and principal transatlantic gateway, yet United has not increased its slots at Newark in many years," said spokesman Rahsaan Johnson. "United has essentially the same share of slots that the FAA provided to Continental when slots were first created at Newark."

But it's also a more expensive gateway. A roundtrip ticket next month from Newark to Orlando on United will set one back $386. The same nonstop flight out of John F. Kennedy International Airport at about the same time on JetBlue or Delta was priced at $224.

George Hobica, a travel expert who operates Airfarewatchdog.com, said the Department of Justice is right to be concerned.

"Travelers in Northern New Jersey do have alternatives. Many fly from JFK or even White Plains; others fly from Philly and Trenton on Frontier," he said. "But Newark is one of the most dominant 'fortress hubs' in the U.S."

In addition, United continues to find itself in the crosshairs of an ongoing federal criminal investigation by the U.S. Attorney's office in New Jersey over its dealings with the Port Authority, the regional bi-state agency that operates Newark Liberty.

Federal prosecutors are looking into whether Smisek in a secret meeting in 2011 with David Samson, the former chairman of the Port Authority, agreed to schedule a money-losing direct flight from Newark to South Carolina, where Samson owns a vacation home.

The twice-weekly flight from New Jersey was put into service while United was negotiating with the Port Authority to expand service to Atlantic City and a $1.5 billion extension of the PATH train to Newark Airport. The flights ended three days after Samson, under fire over the public contracts given to his politically powerful law firm, abruptly resigned in March 2014.

The U.S. Attorney's office has subpoenaed records from the Port Authority and United, but an internal investigation by the airline itself led to the unexpected resignation of Smisek in September, along with two other high-level airline executives who had also been at the meeting with Samson.

Good pizza...

Talk about United and many talk of the days of Continental, fondly recalling its charismatic former CEO, Gordon Bethune, who turned a bankrupt airline around by focusing on customer service, as well as tying bonuses to on-time performance.

It wasn't that the food was great (steamed chicken burritos or burgers in plastic bags, anyone?), or that its planes were any better. But the airline ran on time, its crews were friendly, and the airline was thought by many to be better connected with customers.

Bethune, who would not respond to repeated requests to be interviewed, has said the focus of Continental was to become America's most on-time airline.

"If you're in the pizza business, eventually you've got to make good pizza," Bethune said at the airline's annual meeting in 1995.

Kevin Mitchell, who heads the Business Travel Coalition, an advocacy group, said Continental enjoyed an excellent reputation among business travelers, attributing that largely to Bethune.

But United he said, "enjoyed a toxic employee-management environment" even before the merger.

"United's culture prevailed, with disgruntled employees not eager to please customers in call centers, at airport counters and on board aircraft," he remarked.

United always had contentious labor issues, agreed George Hoffer, a transportation economist at the University of Richmond. And that did not change after the merger.

"You would have expected that the United-Continental merger would have had the most trouble over union confrontations, and they did," he said.

The new company still does not have a joint labor agreement with its 24,000 flight attendants, which is why the former Continental cabin crews do not fly with legacy United crews. It just recently came to a tentative agreement with mechanics in the first joint labor contract since the merger, reached after Smisek's departure. And only this month did it finally announce an agreement in principle had been reached with the Air Line Pilots Association for a contract extension covering the airline's more than 12,000 pilots

Hoffer, though, said it's more than outstanding labor agreements. The company's fleet has also aged and it depends on a "hodge-podge of regional contract carriers" to feed its main hubs, like Newark.

"Their reliability and service went south," he said.

Behind the scenes at Newark Liberty

Any way you figure it, running an airline that, together with United Express, operates an average of nearly 5,000 flights a day to 352 airports across six continents is a complex business--even if everything works the way it should. Several days spent behind the scenes at Newark Liberty illustrate just how complicated.

From his perch in a control center overlooking the runways, Harel Magaritz, 40, United's managing director of EWR Station Operations Control, watches it play out daily, making sure his airline's fleet of steady arrivals all have a place at the terminal, while pre-positioning planes for departures.

Super tugs link up with big wide body jets, hauling them from one end of the terminal to another, or sometimes from one end of the airport to the other. At least 10 aircraft sit in a triangular area still known as "the ballpark," from the days when Newark's airport was a far sleepier place and crews with downtime used it to play softball.

As planes come in, they need to have a gate waiting, and if not immediately being turned around, positioned where they will be ready when needed.

"We always have to anticipate the next move," Margaritz said.

Asked if he was good in chess, Margaritz smiled. "I play Tetris," he said, referring to the fast-paced video game, where geometric tiles must be quickly rotated, shifted or placed in a line.

On a daily basis, the airline's hub operation at EWR sees close to 430 flights come and go to far-ranging destinations, ranging from LAX to CDR and HKG to ROC.

The control center, with its dark carpeting and angled glass, is lined with glowing ground radar displays, flat screen displays of arrival and departure schedules, as well as weather maps and closed circuit TV screens keeping a watch on gates. The flow is constant. Planes are dispatched, catering trucks are directed, mechanics sent to fix a balky cockpit gauge or faulty toilet, and baggage carts are given traffic directions.

Those baggage trains emerge from the dark bowels of the terminal, where another choreographed ballet is continually underway amid a noisy labyrinth of rapidly moving conveyor belts that whisks bags from one end to the other.

From the time a passenger's bag disappears at the check-in gate, it heads down a chute and is directed through security inspection screening and then onto a series of belts that take it to the proper plane, helped by laser readers that scan bag tags.

A red Calvin Klein bag comes hurtling down one chute and its barcode is scanned. With scarcely a pause, it is sent to Houston.

"It's a game-changer," said Stefan Mayden, 57, of the system. Head of airport operations for ramp service and cargo, Mayden remembered when so much of the baggage was moved by hand. Now he can track it all from a small control room, where flat screens display neon green schematics of every conveyor belt and loading point.

The busiest road at Newark Liberty is the two-lane stretch of asphalt directly under terminals, where baggage carts attached to white tractors whiz by like trucks on a freeway, moving luggage to the planes, or bringing back bags that will end up on carousels in the terminal.

So far this day, 14,000 bags have moved through the system. And it's only 1 p.m.

Recent U.S. Department of Transportation reports show United's baggage complaints were average for the industry this year. Through the first nine months ending in September, United had 3.29 mishandled baggage reports per 1,000 passengers--better than American Airlines, but behind Delta, JetBlue and Virgin America.

On the other side of the airport, Robert Ruzich, is United's fix-it guy. As the airline's managing director for technical operations at Newark, his mechanics service the planes and make sure they're ready to fly.

The planes begin "talking" to maintenance when they are within an hour of the airport, reporting any trouble that need attention. It all shows up on a computer screen. Click on an icon for a plane parked at Gate 137 and a series of messages will pop up.

A spoiler checklight is out. The toilets don't flush or a coffee maker needs work. Other planes might be reporting a trouble with an engine or more serious issues.

"We're a recovery station. We find out what's wrong and get it back into the air," Ruzich said.

It's not all high-tech. Old-style delivery tricycles with baskets and pedals to supply the power are parked around the inside of one huge maintenance hanger to bring parts and supplies from storage to various jets that wait for attention.

Aircraft needing more extensive work may be ferried to the airline's "heavy" maintenance and overhaul facility in San Francisco.

Like other U.S. airlines, United also has outsourced some of its heavy maintenance to repair facilities overseas to save money--a practice that has drawn criticism by those who question whether there is sufficient FAA scrutiny of foreign contract stations. The Department of Transportation's Inspector General has raised the issue repeatedly, most recently in a July report regarding the FAA's oversight of repair stations used by American carriers in Europe.

Johnson said the airline contracts with facilities in various worldwide locations, including in China, to perform heavy maintenance, cabin reconfigurations and major overhauls.

"All maintenance work, whether here or abroad, is completed to FAA and United's high standards," said the airline spokesman.

Profits and complaints growing

United is making more money than ever--it reported third-quarter net income of $1.7 billion, up from $1 billion the same period last year

It has been working to upgrade passenger amenities (including a total transformation of Newark's Terminal C, where one can now order sushi, drinks and designer tacos by iPad and have it delivered by a wait staff while they wait for the next flight to Chicago).

Still, the carrier remains unloved by many frequent flyers. On-time performance has dropped, while flights have been repeatedly delayed or cancelled because of the airline's failure to integrate its computer systems since the merger, say critics, pointing to a series of computer system crashes this past summer. In July, all United Airlines flights were grounded for almost two hours due to a "computer hardware problem." The airline had a similar grounding in June because of automation issues and Munoz has conceded that technology "is not our shining light."

Mitchell said the integration of the two airlines' computer systems, policies and operations has not gone well.

"Many customers of United's simply do not feel valued," he said.

And many of those passengers have taken to social media sites like "I hate United Airlines" to complain. The administrator of the site asked not to be identified:

"I'm sadly an all too frequent flyer on UA logging 100's of thousands of miles a year for business. I am hesitant to be public. Don't want flight attendants making my life worse!" the blogger texted in response to questions.

Bowen, who co-authors an annual airline quality survey, said United ranked near the bottom in its most recent report. It found on-time arrival performance declined from 79.3 percent in 2013 to 76.0 percent in 2014, mishandled baggage rates went up, as did with customer complaint rates. United fared no better on other customer satisfaction surveys by JD Power and Consumer Reports.

"Twenty years ago, United was in the top tier of the ratings," said the noted Embry-Riddle dean. "Since the merger with Continental, they've been at the bottom. I have not seen any initiatives to improving customer service."

Bowen said he now avoids United himself because of what he sees as a lack of focus on the customer.

"I was loyal to United. But it became personal and I stopped," he remarked.

An analysis of the most recent air travel consumer report by federal Bureau of Transportation Statistics does not give high marks to United when it comes to getting passengers to their destinations on time.

For the 12 months ending in September, just 76.5 percent of United's flights arrived on time -- 10th among U.S. airlines. Delta had an on-time arrival record of 85.6 percent.

The number of complaints filed against the airline, meanwhile, is increasing. The airline had 3.1 complaints per 100,000 boardings in September, up from 2.34 the same month in 2014. Delta had less than 1, and Southwest had .54 complaints per 100,000 boardings for the same period.

United's numbers, though, were not the worst. American Airlines had 4.15 complaints in September, and low-price carrier Spirit Airlines was at the very bottom, with 11.57 per 100,000 boardings.

Changing its flight path

Before he was grounded by his health issues, Munoz acknowledged in interviews that United still had post-merger problems.

"This integration has been rocky. Period," the CEO said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. "We just have to do that public mea culpa. ... The experience of our customers has not been what we want it to be."

He recalled in other interviews a conversation he had with a flight attendant who was near tears as she told him she worked for the airline for 25 years. "I'm just so tired of having to tell people I'm sorry,'" she told Munoz.

Not expected to return until early next year, Munoz has been temporarily replaced by Brett Hart, the airline's executive vice president and general counsel.

United, in the meantime, says it is making changes.

Johnson noted the airline has added 200 new aircraft in the past five years, including a mix of Boeing 787 Dreamliners, shorter-range 737s and Embraer E175s. He added that October saw one of its best operational months in company history. Customers satisfaction numbers were up, computers disconnect problems were down and United marked "consecutive days with zero cancels in October for the first time in company history."

Oh, and the lousy coffee? United says it is brewing up changes there as well.

The airline, which serves more than 72 million cups of java on board its flights each year, announced last week that Italian premium coffee brand Illy will become its new coffee of choice next year.

Ted Sherman may be reached at tsherman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @TedShermanSL. Find NJ.com on Facebook.