Your lowly rating structure reflects the way in how you treat cargo. I wish you would stop saying you are in the supply chain management business. Listen, your record of handling passenger baggage has even been declining at nearly the same rate as you look after commercial airfreight. It is not about the IT systems you have in place to record the supposed movement of freight, it is about the people you employ at the coal face. In the hack-slash world of cutting costs, American carriers have brought everything down to the lowest common denominator. Pay peanuts and you get monkeys.

Cargo Heads such as American Airline’s David Brooks think they are gurus in the class of FedEx’s Fred Smith as they travel the world to standing on any platform they can to tell the world how expert they are at logistics. Dave, every time we use your crummy airline something always happens to prove how woeful your service is. If the freight is not shut out at origin, it goes missing at an intermediary point, but if it is lucky enough to get to destination it gets lost in your terminal. The worst thing is, when you are up to your eyeballs in alligators in exasperation, try speaking to anyone who has the ability to provide an answer that will appease a customer! Talk about goobly-gook and double-Dutch! So Dave, can you spend a little time with your feet planted firmly on the ground instead of your head in cloud cuckoo land and address the issues that cause your airline to constantly muck up.

Firstly, employ some key people who know something about something and pay them well. Secondly, take a look at your resources and determine what you can and cannot handle. Thirdly, teach your handling agents how to handle freight and properly record everything. You may need a bar-coding system to help you for starters. Make a manifest up for every ULD, so the split shipment nightmares become something of the past. How about holding your handlers accountable. You see Dave, American Airlines may have more aircraft than any other, but most of them are simply unsuitable for cargo. Instead of taking bookings in kilograms, why don’t you go a step further and demand the cubic measurement and preferably with the carton dimensions as well? Your aircraft do not have elastic sides, my boy.

So mate, like your American carrier competitors, get your head out of your ass, forget about the supply chain nonsense and get back to basics. You and your employer might just earn a little more respect at the end of the day, if you could just start under-committing and over delivering. We are living in solemn times and we would readily forgive you if you just became honest with yourself.

All five of us hit it off like a house on fire and apart from Gary, who moved over to Qantas after the FedEx merger, Ron, Jim and Mike have enjoyed a twenty-one year friendship and business relationship. CII in the nineties became on of FedEx’s largest forwarder customers in the States and today we still remain a big supporter. Ron, Jim and Mike may have seen a number of bosses come and go at Memphis HQ, but for us FedEx has been a constant. All this will come to a close, when the junior of the three Mike Scanlan retires at the end of the month. For the CII team and me personally it will be a huge loss for us with Mike no longer around. Mike made the mistake many years ago giving Peter and me his home phone number. In the days when Pete and I together spent all day Saturday fifty weeks a year overseeing operations and even building the ULD’s and then following the freight over to the Allied Way terminal to make sure all was okay for acceptance, if there was a slight chance our freight would not ride as booked, we had no hesitation calling Mike at home, “Hey Mike, we’re worried you’re heavily overbooked, our freight including the extra units have to move!” Mike was always a great sport and Pete and I can vouch he always followed through and his confirming call on Sunday told us the good news and sometimes the bad news. His wife Ginny and daughter, Kelly in those halcyon days always wanted to meet this Peter and Julian, the two guys who consistently turned Mike into a seven day a week FedEx manager at the expense of them enjoying a relaxing family weekend! “Just who are these guys, don’t they have families too?”

After twenty-one years sadly we are going to miss Mike. When daughter Kelly was five, Mike made a conscious decision that family was more important than his career. At Flying Tigers he had became part of senior management which involved much travel. In 1988 he took a demotion to L.A. rep and as far as he is concerned it was the smartest move he ever made. From a selfish point of view FedEx’s loss in not being able to take advantage of Mike’s true worth was our gain. There is not one man in the airline industry who can hold a candle to Mike. No airline executive has worked as hard for us as Mike. But apples don’t fall far from the tree! His old Flying Tiger family of Ron Labac, Jim Haggerty and Beverly Bolin also rank among the best of the best. When CII started in 1993, we had to ask for airline credit. The only airline at the get-go that put its hand up was FedEx. Mike placed a little pressure upon Jim to go into battle for us and Jim told the V.P. of credit in Memphis, “I know this guy Keeling and I am so confident of him being a great customer into the future, I will personally vouch for him.” Without Mike and Jim, there would be no CII and Pete and I to this day owe them both a huge debt of gratitude.

So there it is; the end of a wonderful era where CII without the start Jim and Mike gave us, this blog would not exist and CII will have remained an unfulfilled dream. For twenty-one years I have dealt with Mike and he has been an outstanding ambassador for his company. On many an occasion we didn’t get what we were seeking, but Mike was always fair. In fact, more than fair; he is a total class act as a human being. In this age where we now live in an “it is all about me” society and friends remain friends so long as they are useful, gentlemen like Mike Scanlan are going the way of the dinosaur. Little wonder Pete and I know there will be a real emptiness from next month because Mike will not be picking up extension 4166 anymore. Some consolation is we still have Jim, Ron and Bev!

Along with our new approach to consumerism, retailers are starting to notice a resistance of Americans to buy anything “Made in China”. The United States currently leads the world in becoming less enthusiastic to Chinese-made goods and the Chinese light manufacturing industry is starting to feel the chill. Trade exhibitions in large Chinese cities are looking like ghost towns as American buyers stay away in droves. These buyers have become aware that retail stores filled with Chinese junk will not help the nation out of recession. Furthermore, and more poignant is the fact our love affair for poor quality Chinese-made junk is at an end.

China is claiming that making sox and underpants to outfit the world should now move to other third world countries. They are now too sophisticated a country to be involved in such manufacture. I think they are wrong. They claim their growth in chemical, electronic and pharmaceutical manufacture is the wave of the future, not sweatshops pumping out T shirts and cheap shoes. Quite frankly I far more happily would don on a pair of Chinese made cotton sox before I would buy bottle of Chinese produced aspirins! I wish China would realize for them the honeymoon is over for export. I think they need to return to the times of the “Cultural Revolution” and concentrate on cleaning up their internal economy and withdrawing from the world stage as the factory base for producing junk the outside world does not need, but the local population might!