My first encounter with AirTran came in the fall of 2006. I was working for Alamo/National Car Rental and not enjoying it very much at all. I was a staffing manager and my basic job was to hire and coordinate the drivers who move the cars to and from the shop and airport to the cleaners before and after the vehicles are rented. It's a rather cold business, mostly because the emphasis is on the cars, or as they call them in the business "the metal", and not on the customers. I worked a lot with careeerbuilder.com as far as finding new employees as we were turning over our staff with a ridiculous level of frequency. One night at home I decided to send my resume to them under the category of "airline" and came up with two possibilities. One was AirTran and another was ATA (American Trans Air). I sent them in with not much confidence that I would hear anything from either.
In mid-October I received a call from AirTran asking if I was still interested in interviewing for a position. I said certainly and I did so on October 23rd. I passed step one and was told that I would be off to Atlanta for training on the 28th. So I spent my birthday traveling do Dixie for a week of who knows what. I was excited and scared to death on day one as I stepped into the orientation classroom with about 100 other candidates from around the country. I did the best I could for the week and even though I knew I was probably going to "make the grade", I didn't know for sure until my instructor, Steve Goehring, placed my first name tag in front of my keyboard.
I got back home to Minneapolis and started the following day. I had not yet left Alamo/National and decided to continue there part-time until I either had my position filled or my mind turned to mush- whichever came first. But I worked both jobs until May when, you guessed it- my mind turned to mush.
I enjoyed the job a great deal. Working the ticket counter, at the gate and in the baggage services office. We had great little thing going even though many of our passengers had never heard of us before, but those who had were incredibly loyal. They having been refugees from their experiences with Delta and being treated so badly by them in the past. Many people got our name wrong when telling us which airline they were booked on. "Trans Air", "Trans Am" and Air Trans Am" were the ones I heard most often.
I would go down to Atlanta for training sessions to the original training facility which was in an office park near the airport. It was as unassuming a place from the outside as it could possibly be. It was minimal at best and looking back on it now it was ancient by the standards of what I get to go to today. It had basically one restroom each for men and women, a pretty small area for dining with 8x10 photos of every training class on the walls. It was always kinda cool to find your own class and wonder how many of those people were even still with the airline. I recall the first sign on the wall that stood out to me. It stated, "LATE IS NOT AN OPTION". That simple phrase stuck with me from my first visit there until my last. It had an area outside where we were forbidden to step on the grass which was between the building and the parking lot. Over the years I heard about more than one trainee who tried to "stretch the envelope" by walking on that grass and found a one-way ticket on the table in front of their chair in the training room later that day. Our bus driver was a woman who must've had the aforementioned sign about being late tattooed inside of her eyelids because if you were not at the predetermined pickup location at the scheduled time, you were going to be calling for one of the ATL's taxi services. And she drove that bus like when was handling a sports car. She would miss trees, sidewalks, buildings, other buses and sometimes people with only enough room to slide 2 sheets of typing paper between them. I'm sure she could've driven NASCAR if she'd wanted to. Eventually we moved to cushier digs a little further away, across from the Boeing simulator building. This was posh by comparison to say the least. Those who had been at the original facility knew that we were on the rise.
Virtually every week I would have a pilot of ours ask me during a conversation, "Any news, any rumors?" And the answer would usually be that I'd heard that this might happen or that might happen but nothing really substantial followed. But as things progressed during my first few years I knew that something was bound to happen eventually. That's just the nature of the industry.
I was heading to Atlanta for a training session on the morning of November 28, 2010 when I got the news that we had been purchased by Southwest Airlines. Now, Southwest had moved into the Minneapolis market in March of 2009, at the counter right next to us in the space formerly occupied by Champion Air. It seemed like a logical move as we had just about grown to as much of a market share as far as destinations were concerned, as we could have. I literally found out while siting on the aircraft which would take me to Atlanta. I remember looking out the window at the Southwest jet parked only three gates away and wondering what the future would hold for us at AirTran.
We knew that there would be growing pains and that the nice folks we'd worked alongside of for the past 18 months were going to be our co-workers within the next two years or so as the merger process moved forward. We would need to learn their computer system and they would need to learn ours. Their's was infinitely simpler to operate as we at AirTran had a system that reminded me of ms-Dos (you youngsters will have to google that) in that it is basically command-based with absolutely no drop-downs and virtually no on-screen help.
It was interesting to see pilots and flight attendants whom I had known in one uniform show up at my gate wearing different colors with new name badges and new employee numbers. I share a common thread along with them that others do not. I was always pleased to meet fellow AirTran employees who had been with us since the ValuJet days. These nice people had FOUR-digit employee numbers. I was in mild awe, to say the least.
Over time I have come to realize that many of the employees of airlines have worked for more than one airline. I became one of them in September of 2012.
So as the AirTran name disappears from the active list of airlines I take great pride in the work that we did under the teal-colored script lower-cased "a". They were the first airline to give me the chance to do a job which will hopefully take me to my retirement some 20 years or so from now, I would suspect. I know there are many others who feel the same sense of pride. For while we all are grateful to be in the employ of the largest domestic-flying airline in the United States, there will always be, just under the bold Canyon Blue of Southwest Airlines the ever-present beat of that lower-cased teal "a" that binds us together.
Tomorrow marks the last day of operation for my original airline employer, AirTran Airways. Today's my blog talks about how I got there and some of my experience there.
It is dedicated to those who worked with me under the "a" (In first-name alphabetical order):
Allison Northrup, Amber Havelak, Andrea Urbanski, Angie Sitko, Austen Barranco, Briana Walsh, Casey Fritz, Christine Edwards, Christopher Anderson, Colie Minucci, Colleen Shellum, Cory Petersen, Cris Godoy Franchevich, Dang Tran, David Fox, Deeq Sayed, David Tinetti, Ed Walz, Elham Ferdowsi, Eric Kloepfer, Erica Lynch, Irv Adams, Jaine Lafay Nelson, James Richards, Jan Gottschalk, Janey Roddy, Jason Harens, Jill Christine, John Hillman, Kate Kranz Dennison, Keesha Smith, Kevin Inkman, Leon Weaver, Mark F.E. Barie, Mary Louise Knoblauch, Matthew Volpe, Meghan Chapin, Mike Zirbel, Nikki Williams Locky, Pamela Aanenson, Rob Kneusel, Sara Gavin, Tina Fleming, Tracy Johnson Wagner, Valley Hintzen and Wilfred Johnson.
So tomorrow, when flight #23 leaves Minneapolis it will take a small piece of me with it. But I know where it's going. For as one of our passengers once told me about six years ago, "I don't know if I'm going to heaven or hell but I know ONE thing. It's gonna be via Atlanta!"
............I'm just sayin'.
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