EoW September 2011

❈ As for the United-Continental merger, Ms Grant said that no consideration will be given to at least one question that vexed the Delta-Northwest deliberations: how best to slice a lime. Ultimately the Delta 10-slice lime was chosen over Northwest’s 16 slices. Said Sherri Kawell, of United: “Not on our integration synergy checklist.” Elsewhere in the Plain Dealer . . . ❈ Also on 27 th June, Cleveland-based Andrew John reported the activation of a giant (340-ft) wind turbine rising alongside the Lincoln Electric Co headquarters building in nearby Euclid. The 800,000lb turbine, imported from Germany two months before, is the biggest in the area and quickly became a notable feature of the skyline. If local elected officials have their way, the $5.9 million project will be the first step in bringing cutting-edge energy sources to northeastern Ohio. The turbine is expected to produce 2.5 megawatts of electricity for Lincoln, and cut a half-million dollars from its annual energy bill. Euclid’s mayor Bill Cervenik, who envisions his city as a potential national symbol of clean alternative energy, said he helped the company secure a $1 million federal stimulus grant to aid in financing the turbine. So far, Mr Cervenik told the Plain Dealer , he had received only one complaint about the towering structure: that it despoils the view of Lake Erie. “Steel is what we would call a ‘mature technology,’” said Suresh Babu, an associate professor of materials science and engineering at Ohio State University, in Columbus. “We’d like to think we know almost everything about it.” To judge from his credentials, Prof Babu knows more than most. He also serves as director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Center for Integrative Materials Joining for Energy Applications, headquartered at the university. For an amateur metallurgist claiming to have made an important discovery, Prof Babu is an obvious go-to person. “If someone invented a way to strengthen the strongest steels even a few per cent, that would be a big deal,” Prof Babu told Pam Frost Gorder of the Web-based technology news service PhysOrg.com . “But seven percent? That’s huge.” Seven percent is, in fact, routinely achieved by the inventor Gary Cola in his laboratory in Detroit. The steel he produces there, now trademarked Flash Bainite, has tested stronger and more shock-absorbing than most titanium alloys for common industrial uses. And, as Mr Cola demonstrated to the astonished professor and his students, the procedure takes only seconds. (“A NewWay to Make Lighter, Stronger Steel – in a Flash,”9 th June). Technology A self-trained metallurgist tweaks heating and cooling, produces a super-steel

United and Continental

Not for the faint of heart: the combination of two carriers into the largest airline in the world

In an update to the merger in October 2010 of United Airlines and Continental Airlines, reporter Alison Grant of the Cleveland Plain Dealer detailed a joint effort to systematise their services to 144 million passengers boarding 1,262 aircraft in 62 countries each year. The Herculean task has occupied 25 integration teams across the US, and the end is not yet. Until they get a single operating certificate from the US government, expected late this year, the two carriers are flying independently as subsidiaries of United Continental Holdings Inc. When the melding is complete, Chicago-based UCH will be the world’s largest airline as measured by revenue passenger miles. Scott O’Leary, the managing director of customer solutions, said at midyear that UCH was about halfway to goal. (“In United-Continental Merger, 1,000 Questions Remain,” 27 th June). A United spokeswoman told the Plain Dealer that, between the two airlines, procedures on airport operations alone – exclusive of onboard services – fill 21 manuals of 800 to 1,200 pages each. Sherri Kawell, who heads the team overseeing airport operations and cargo, said she hopes that those combined procedures can be made to fit into seven manuals. As announced in May at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, United is scrapping “the tulip” – the iconic double-U logo created by design maven Saul Bass in 1973 – in favour of the Continental spinning globe. As explained by Ms Kawell: “One of the new airline’s primary assets is its global route network, and this is a more fitting icon to represent that scope.” More pressing issues than logo design require attention. Meshing pilot teams and coordinating two networks of computers are two big challenges still to be met. ❈ Citing Cornell University research from 2008, and the view of some analysts that there has never been an indisputably successful airlines merger, Ms Grant took note of the industry’s “spotty record” at consolidation. She wrote: “In the troubled union of US Airways and America West, company executives [still] speak of a ‘west side’ – the former America West – and an east, while flight crews operate totally separate fleets six years after the merger.” The purchase in 2008 of Northwest Airlines by Delta Air Lines went more smoothly, despite the enormity of the undertaking. A photograph released by Delta to the Wall Street Journal shows a planning board bristling with more than 300 coloured sticky notes, each representing a project that the Journal said could involve thousands of tasks.

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EuroWire – September 2011