United CEO Threatened To Fire Anyone Who Says “Weather” In His Presence

United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby says he once told his operations team that anyone who said “weather” in his presence would be fired. He was talking about his previous airline, where he was President – and using weather as an excuse for not getting passengers where they needed to go. Thunderstorms wreak havoc, but how an airline prepares and recovers from it is more in their control. Like my previous employer, I told the operations team, “Anyone that says the word weather in my presence is going to get fired, because I do not want to use weather as an excuse.” I know weather happens, I know we’re going to be safe, we’re never going to do anything that’s unsafe, and weather does happen. But our job is to figure out how to minimize the impact of weather, and you can’t use weather as an excuse. John Collison’s interview with Scott Kirby and Ben Thompson The exchange starts with a disagreement over “expectation management.” Collison suggests that’s part of what Kirby is describing. Kirby pushes back. He wants passengers to expect the airline to get them to their destination, and he doesn’t want employees lowering those expectations by saying that sometimes weather just happens. Two airlines dealing with the same weather can wind up with very different results because of their schedules how they recover when things go sideways. Kirby says United has been running simulations of Denver’s summer thunderstorms, looking at ways to use different arrival and departure routes rather than broadly throttling traffic. He thinks better technology, with cooperation from air traffic control, could reduce summer weather delays there by 50% to 75%. And United has made great progress in explaining what’s happening to passengers. Kirby describes a day in Chicago when the airport was sunny, but a line of thunderstorms beyond passengers’ view had closed the routes to the airport. Passengers assume airlines are lying when they’re told weather is delaying flights when there are blue skies. United sent some passengers the normal weather delay message. Other passengers received a radar map showing the problem. Among passengers facing a one hour delay, the net promoter score for those receiving better information was significantly higher. I think the numbers were negative 60 NPS on the normal way of sending it, plus 60 when we send a picture of the map. A 120-point difference. He says the score with the map was “better than an on-time flight.” United introduced its radar map messages in July 2024. Back in 2019 I highlighted their “Every Flight’s a Story” project, which replaced vague references to “operational” issues or weather with explanations of what had actually happened. The radar maps are part of that. And I’ve written about the awkward problem these better explanations create when airlines later blame weather to deny assistance. A passenger gets a message that their plane needs maintenance. The delay drags on, weather intervenes, and eventually the airline says the disruption was outside its control. American has also improved the explanations in its app, including distinguishing a maintenance cancellation from a weather delay: That leaves a record the passenger can compare with the answer they get when they ask for a hotel or meals. If maintenance kept the airplane on the ground until a weather restriction began, the sequence matters. I’d like the same detailed explanation in the airline’s response to that request, rather than a form letter that reduces the whole episode to “weather.” Topics on this page