Winner - Phil Trenary, Pinnacle Airlines
Award sponsor - Embraer
Just a week before the Strategy Awards took place, Pinnacle Airlines christened its 100th Canadair regional jet in a community ceremony, commemorating it as the Spirit of Beale Street after the famous entertainment centre of Memphis, Tennessee, Pinnacle's home town.
What is remarkable is that Pinnacle has the regional jets and some other Northwest Airlink feeders do not.
When Pinnacle's leader, Phil Trenary, arrived at the carrier in 1997, he found a troubled airline that lacked fundamental operating and managerial processes. Then known as Express I, the carrier was underperforming financially and fighting for its right to exist and grow as a regional carrier for Northwest Airlines.
Trenary and his team had to demonstrate to a fiscally prudent Northwest that it should concentrate the allocation of its regional flying with Pinnacle against other potential carriers including Mesaba Airlines, another Northwest Airlink operator. To win the rights to operate the regional jets, Trenary had to establish a solid operational and financial platform for Northwest. This he has done through good management and fiscal and operational discipline.
Pinnacle had to undergo its remarkable growth and transformation through a severe economic downturn and the aftershocks of the 2001 terrorist attacks. "Pinnacle is in a period of the fastest growth in its history," says Trenary. "Considering the recent performance of the company, it is a tribute to the people of Pinnacle that they can run a great airline despite all the growth and change."
Through this time, Trenary led a team that moved from turboprops into the regional jet and grew from a one-hub operation into a national one. It now serves all three of Northwest's hubs, and has demonstrated consistently high performance at all three. It has served as the presence of Northwest in small isolated rural communities as well as in the big cities and still gives "that friendly down-home service".
Over the past five years, passenger traffic has grown from just over a million to more than 4.5 million last year, and is now poised to reach six million. The carrier has substantially improved the utilisation of its asset base, boosting system load factor from below 60% to over 67% in 2003 despite massive increases in capacity.
It has also consistently improved its profitability, with a tenfold increase in net profits over the past five years to reach $35 million in 2003.
Through this growth, Pinnacle received no special treatment from its corporate parent, Northwest, and in fact had to compete with other Airlink feeders for routes and aircraft. Remarkably, Pinnacle has maintained its excellent operating performance throughout a period of extremely fast growth.
Source: Flight Daily News
