Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, June 2, 1995 TAG: 9506020087
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
USAir is solidly committed to providing jet service at the Roanoke Regional Airport, the airline's top public relations executive said Thursday.
Nancy Risque Rohrbach, senior vice president of public and community relations for USAir, made the remark at the Hotel Roanoke and Conference Center, where she was speaking to a meeting of the Blue Ridge Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America.
Mark Courtney, the airport's marketing director, was standing nearby when Rohrbach spoke, and he couldn't, if he had tried, conceal the smile that crept across his face. That's because the airline has been looking for ways to cut millions of dollars in costs so it can again become profitable. That has included eliminating some flights and replacing large jets with smaller turbo-prop planes on other runs.
Of the five airlines serving the airport, USAir provides 52 percent of the departing flights and 67 percent of the passenger seats. The airline has 215 employees in Roanoke.
Rohrbach, who has been with USAir since January 1994, talked about the task of managing the airline's public image at a time when it has suffered quarter after quarter of multimillion-dollar losses and adverse publicity after a series of fatal air crashes.
The Arlington-based airline reported losses of $322 million in last year's fourth quarter and $117.5 million in the quarter ended March 31.
A 1968 graduate of Radford College, Rohrbach has held a number of public relations-related jobs in the public and private sectors as well as serving as an assistant to President Reagan and secretary to his Cabinet and as an undersecretary of labor under President Bush.
After determining that the world of low-cost competition and lower fares brought on by deregulation was with the airline industry to stay, USAir developed a plan in March 1994 to cut $1 billion annually from the airline's operating costs, which last year totaled $7.5 billion.
"We are a high-cost carrier in what is essentially a very charged market," Rohrbach said.
When Continental invaded USAir's territory in 1994 with its now-abandoned Continental-Lite no-frills, low-fare service, it significantly affected USAir's revenue, but failed to accomplish its boast that it would "push us into the Atlantic Ocean," she said.
USAir already has accomplished nearly half its cost-cutting goal through managerial and operational changes, Rohrbach said. One such change - which did not affect Roanoke - was a 10 percent cut, announced in March, in USAir's 2,500 daily flights.
The other half of the billion-dollar savings the airline is seeking is expected to come from employee concessions. USAir announced May 21 that it had reached an agreement with the flight attendants' union for concessions on wages and work rules. With the pilots and machinists having reached agreements with the airline earlier, the way is essentially cleared to make the needed cuts in labor costs, Rohrbach said.
The agreements with the unions, however, still must be approved by union members and USAir's board and stockholders. It will take the rest of this year to implement the savings measures, she said.
The airline is doing fine for the short term with more than $400 million in cash on hand, but its long-term survival depends on the success of the cost-cutting program, Rohrbach said.
Two fatal crashes of USAir planes last year near Charlotte, N.C., and Pittsburgh, which were part of a string of five crashes over a five-year period, hurt the airline's efforts to return to profitability. USAir's ticket sales fell sharply after the accidents and only returned to normal this year.
Rohrbach characterized a New York Times story last fall about USAir's safety record as "skillfully misleading," forcing the airline to respond through advertising. The Times told USAir the story was to be a broad look at the airline's operations, but focused instead on instances when USAir airliners left passenger gates with insufficient fuel, Rohrbach said.
The Times did not give the airline sufficient opportunity to explain its side of the story and to point out that the problem was not unique to USAir, that the employees involved had been reprimanded and the problem corrected, she said.
While the company's crisis control plan was stressed in 1994, something that was complicated by an 80 percent turnover of employees in her office through retirements, Rohrbach said.
USAir was faced with a public loss of confidence, Rohrbach said. The airline knew it had the numbers to show it was safe and tried to get the message across to the public by profiling USAir employees and their families who fly on the airline, she said.
It's tough for an airline to talk to the public about safety, Rohrbach said. "The industry, by and large, because accidents happen, does not like to declare themselves safe," she said.
by CNB