Pass Ideas to Center Aisle. American Needs 'Em.

Mary Frances Fagan thought she had done her part to help salvage the world's largest airline. She had spent weeks brainstorming over American Airlines' chronic problems. How to turn a profit. How to trim costs. How to make people work harder and airplanes fly more efficiently.

Then the idea struck her like a wave of turbulence: sell advertising space on the back of boarding passes, as grocery stores do with receipts.

"They sent my idea to the advertising department," she said with a wide grin over a chicken sandwich at O'Hare International Airport. "We could make a lot of money."

As a regional manager of corporate communications at American, Ms. Fagan might not be the likeliest person to come up with new ways of generating revenue. But this is supposedly the brave new flight path of American, where every worker is being asked for suggestions. "Everything is on the table" is the catch phrase, and company executives say they are exploring all possible ways to bring down costs, from adjusting taxiing speed to rescheduling arrivals and departures here so jets turn around faster.

But in trying for greater efficiency, American is not so much leading the field — as it did in the 1980's and early 90's — as playing catch-up to healthier full-service rivals like Continental Airlines, some analysts and industry executives say. And it is jealously trying to copy some techniques that have made Southwest Airlines the only consistently profitable major carrier. To some eyes, much of the tinkering makes American look increasingly like a petulant schoolchild being forced to take summer classes to keep up with its cleverer peers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/21/bu...ey/21AMER.html