The new president and chief operating officer of SkyWest Airlines is hoping to keep any turbulence to a minimum, maintaining the regional airline on its so-far successful flight path.
The airline, a subsidiary of St. George-based SkyWest Inc., on Thursday named Russell "Chip" Childs to those posts, replacing Ron Reber. Childs will officially take over April 2, but the transition already has begun.
"To be honest with you, it's very exciting and humbling," said Childs, who came to SkyWest in January 2001 as senior director/controller and was named vice president/controller later that year.
"The initial thing I felt is obviously excitement and gratitude about a great 35-year track record of SkyWest and what the existing management has put together and the work ethic of the employees. I feel like I'm a super-lucky guy at this point as well. Obviously, there are things SkyWest has done in the past that have led to such tremendous success, and I feel grateful and an enormous amount of pressure to keep that going."
Childs will be responsible for the airline's operational, strategic and fiscal activities. The company has three major airline partnerships; nearly 10,000 workers, including about 2,500 in Salt Lake City; and service to 137 cities in 37 states and five Canadian provinces.
In a prepared statement, SkyWest Inc.'s chairman and chief executive officer, Jerry Atkin, said Childs has a "commitment to SkyWest's people, coupled with his financial background, that will prove invaluable to the airline's success."
Brad Rich, SkyWest Inc.'s executive vice president and chief financial officer, said Childs has "done well balancing the hard and soft side of leadership, and I know he'll continue to keep both pieces in balance." Reber described him as "a no-nonsense, get-it-done kind of guy with grass-roots experience in various fields" and that those attributes "will serve him well at the helm of the airline."
A St. George resident who earned his bachelor's degree in economics and master's degree in accounting from Brigham Young University, Childs is only the third president in the company's history. Atkin was the first, and Reber took over in 2005.
Childs described SkyWest Airlines as a company with an "impeccable" safety record and "an emphasis to always be the employer of choice, the airline of choice and the investment of choice."
And he's not looking to change any of that.
"Where we are today is far and away the most paramount regional carrier in the industry," he said. "Anything I can do, relative to my new position, is emphasize anything that got SkyWest in that position. In order for us to succeed and stay in the spot that we're at and even make the bar a little bit higher for the other carriers out there in the industry, I still think we need to go back and re-evaluate those values that have driven us to get us here and make sure those are in place."
Childs said he will spend part of the next 90 to 100 days determining "if there's any way that the airline needs to evolve to make the bar higher."
That can be a challenge with an airline that has grown significantly the past few years. SkyWest Airlines will get about 27 aircraft this year. But Childs said companies sometimes lose their core values in such growth spurts. "I don't think we have, to be honest with you, but my main emphasis is to ensure that we've got all of our core values in place to position ourselves with more opportunity beyond 2007 and into the future."
Childs said the company has the ability to hire the best talent going forward and an infrastructure to enable more growth beyond this year, although he acknowledged that "given where we are a coast-to-coast airline now, some of the challenges are more widespread."
Among the challenges is returning to the top spot among airlines for on-time performance. Weather problems caused the airline to fare poorly in the fourth quarter.
"Some of the things that happened with the weather in the fourth quarter were not standard for SkyWest," he said. "Our history, looking beyond that, is a tremendous history. There are some solutions we used in '03, '04 and '05 when we were the No. 1 on-time (carrier) on the mainland, and we just need to emphasize those key operational principles."
Another potential challenge lies in the fate of Delta Air Lines, one of SkyWest's partners, currently in bankruptcy.
"A lot of our Utah operations are driven by Delta," Childs said. "Under the circumstances that they're operating in, in bankruptcy, there's sort of a cloudy picture there, and a lot of it is depending upon Delta and Delta's objectives. But as you've seen, they're still very committed to the Salt Lake and Utah markets. So, from our experience, it's a little bit of a wait-and-see with those guys."
Childs enters SkyWest's helm during a bumpy time in the airline industry, with bankruptcy and real or prospective mergers and acquisitions fueling questions about the future of many carriers, including SkyWest.
"I can't speculate where it's all going," he said. "But we are in a good position in our industry right now."
E-mail: bwallace@desnews.com