March 24, 2008

Skybus CEO Reigns

From the Dayton Business Journal. This does not happen, if everything is good at Skybus. Now I am officially worried about their future:



Skybus Airlines Inc. Chief Executive Officer Bill Diffenderffer is stepping down as the discount airline's financial chief steps in to lead the company. The Columbus-based airline on Monday said Diffenderffer told the company's board he was resigning effective immediately to return to the writing career he left in 2005 to help launch Skybus.

His successor is Mike Hodge, 35, who has served as the company's chief financial officer for a year after a stint as managing director at Tiger Management, a New York-based hedge fund that provided equity financing for Skybus. C. Robert Kidder, chairman of Skybus' board, said in a statement that Diffenderffer "feels that now is the time for others in the organization to take the lead in moving Skybus forward."

Diffenderffer in 2005 published "The Samurai Leader," a book about business leadership. He stepped in as CEO of Skybus after spending 25 years in the travel industry. He began his airline career in the early 1980s as an attorney for Eastern Air Lines. Since then, he has served as CEO of SystemOne Corp. and SystemOne Amadeus, the computerized reservation division of Continental Airlines. He also spent three years through 2001 as chairman and CEO of Xtra Online, a developer of travel-planning and reservation software. Before coming to Skybus, he was a partner in IBM Corp.'s global transportation business consulting practice.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

True, true ... better that we didn't get mixed up with them.
Remember the hokey advertising campaign when MTV first came out and they were trying to get cable channels to carry them, " I WANT MY MTV !!!" Maybe we should start something like "I WANT ALLEGIANT AIRLINES BACK AT ORH !!!"?!?!?!?!?!

Do you think it would work?

Harry Tembenis
Worcester, MA

Bill Randell said...

Harry:

We have 300,000 of grant monies from the DOT that we got a one year extension to spend by Spetember, 2008.

We should call Allegiant and say "We want You Back and we have 300,000 reasons why"

Bill

Anonymous said...

I thought our liason said we cannot spend that money on airline subsidies?????

How about if we spend it on subsidizing terminal operations and passing that reduced cost onto a carrier? Would that be a legal way accomplish the same objective? What you cannot do directly, you do indirectly.

Anonymous said...

What does he reign over?

Anonymous said...

An empty airport

Anonymous said...

In other, sadder news, Pan Am officially shut down on March 3. It did well by Worcester when it operated and I'm sad to see it go under... again.