I remember flying Swissair in economy class. We had leather seats and the meal consisted of a plate of dry Grisons beef fillet, which is very expensive. It was a flight from Paris to Zurich. I complimented the steward about this unexpected high standard. His proud answer was that it was normal Swissair standard. The week after, Swissair went bankrupt…
SR 111 had relatively little to do with the failure. It was the result of excessive debt incurred by the CEO of the group, who ran up about CHF 5,000.000.000 of debt the board of directions was not aware; the 9-11 disaster with SR losing USD $ 17M per day,; the entrance of the new Euro in surrounding countries, versus a strong CHF; and the accumulation of Sabena and other airline shares that ultimately doomed the finest airline the world had ever known, bar none! @@ilovesuisse1
@@ilovesuisse1 What? No, it was Project Hunter that did them in. I don't understand why people just make things up. The airline couldn't survive even if Halifax and 9/11 had never happened. Or are you saying that our highest court (Bundesgericht) was handling the bankruptcy just because there was a crash in the 90's?
Not with Unions.Then/ Extant not a large pool of customers,coupled with out of control increasing costs.can only subsidize entities losing money for so long.
Part of the expansion aggression made during the 90’s was the retrofitting of brand new in-flight entertainment systems for older fleets to attract new customers. The decision which ultimately brought down Swissair Flight 111 when the sketchy wiring circuit caught on fire.
@@ursodermatt8809 it was all the MD11s repainted in the eurowhite livery. One MD11 had the system in all 3 classes (a single picture exists online - in economy the screens were incorporated into a secondary panel attached to the tray table) and the rest had it in First & business only. I'm not sure if the 747s got the system too when they went eurowhite
Knew about the crash. Never knew it was in some sort of reaction to the struggle to survive in a competitive market. Too bad the passengers became part of the damage of turbulent market maneuvering.
@@JosipRadnik1 I agree. I don't think McKinsey would sink to a detail like "upgrade in flight entertainment". But some conditions led to hiring McKinsey. My bank employer worked with them eons ago. Upshot was the bank was bought by a expanding bank. And down the line, there was a massive management problem. McKinsey? No. But their presence is like when ambulances come. They are a rescue operation.
In 2000 my parents visited Europe, booking a SwissAir flight. When they arrived at the airport there was no sign of SwissAir staff, and it took a while for them to figure out that the flight was cancelled, and to make alternative arrangements. This was very much the opposite of what one would expect from SwissAir. But when SwissAir disappeared the next year, we weren't very surprised.
Sadly my one experience of Swissair shortly before their demise was similar, the only airline I've ever known to lose hold baggage on a point-to-point flight. Apparently the ground staff at Basle had forgotten to unload one compartment completely, so there were a dozen or so upset passengers milling around. But by then the plane was apparently on its way back to London. We got our bags next day. Not what I expected of Swiss efficiency.
@@iankemp1131I flew almost three decades as cabin crew, within don’t know how many flights as a passenger, but somewhere in the upper hundreds or thousands. It did happen, that your checked luggage did not arrive at the destination. Lost and Found report and the suitcase was geleitetes next day or days. It really isn’t a big deal. Expect the Unexpected.
@@wakeupcall2665 well yes, we all know that glitches can happen and I've had luggage delayed on a couple of occasions when connecting flights were late and there wasn't time to transfer it, that's fully understandable. But this is the only time I've seen a substantial number of people left simultaneously without luggage on a simple point-to-point flight on any airline because they forgot to unload a complete compartment. Mercifully very rare, as it should be.
@@ristokempasSwitzerland is not a shifty country, i find that comment offensive. I don’t know anyone who worships “Moscovia”. That’s a daft comment, considering how many thousands of Ukranian refugees we have here. I love my beautiful country, plenty of people love visiting here. Maybe you should look at your own country, maybe your country is not so perfect like you think. Saying you are a European from a wealthy country sounds snobbish, full of self importance.
@@paulyoung7551There has to be a McKinsey connection to 111. That is the only possible explanation for using a Las Vegas based company to install an in flight entertainment system in the aircraft. Vegas doesn't even have a maintenance hanger today. At the time of 111, the Vegas airport was nearly irrelevant by any metric. The only importance the Vegas area had for aviation was that the fan disc that failed on United 232 (Sioux City) was forged in Henderson. Why Swiss Air chose a company no other airline had heard of to supply the IFE system had to be connected to McKinsey.
@@hewhohasnoidentity4377 Sounds like the lowest bidder to me. I somehow doubt the Swiss actually knew where exactly they had sent the planes off to get the new systems installed, they just knew the board was adviced by McKinsey to send them there.
@paulyoung7551 he recommended that older be planes be sent to equip with new entertainment systems, and the same old wiring were used to cut cost on implementation. The wires which would catch fire on flight 111.
I flew Swissair many times in the late 80’s, including holidays with my family. They were superb. Then they seemed to just give up and became hopeless and I never used them again. Frankly, I really do not understand why anyone now flies out of choice. The golden days are truly over.
I worked for a company that was Mckinsey'd back in the late 80's and took about a decade to recover. When I first heard the name mentioned in this video it was an "aha, I now get it" moment. I flew Swissair a number of times in the 80's and 90's and always thought they were excellent.
Yeah, they did spin off that "Hunter strategy" to Swissair stupid ass executive named Bruggisser and he was foolish enough to buy it. All the remaining board people were honorary people with no aviation background whatsoever and did sleep the board meeting out and just collecting their attending board fees. Management issue all over.
Unfortunately, it wasn't McKinsey alone. The whole Swissair debacle is a prime example of a class of "business elites" sitting on inherited laurels and thinking that their mere existence would pay for itself.
One saying about McKinsey was that they would go into a company and tell them to decentralised everything that was centralised and vice versa. Then in 2 years go back and repeat the process in reverse. A nice permanent income stream! Sadly my one experience of Swissair shortly before their demise was less good, the only airline I've ever known to lose hold baggage on a point-to-point flight. Apparently the ground staff at Basle had forgotten to unload one compartment completely, so there were a dozen or so upset passengers milling around. But by then the plane was apparently on its way back to London. We got our bags next day. Not what I expected of Swiss efficiency.
Who would have guessed, outsourced consultants getting it wrong. I've "never" experienced that. A friend had his whole dept outsourced to save money, now costs the company 3 times more than it did before.
Swissair's Qualiflyer group always seemed like a 90s version of Etihad Partners That being the group members didn't help Swissair/Etihad, just bogged them down
You can turn it also the other way round. When Etihad started to buy shares in crappy airlines, here in Switzerland many people said things like "oh look, they do a Swissair" or "ah, that's where all the former Swissair managers have ended up...".
One of the nicest flights I have ever had was returning from Zurich to Heathrow about 2. pm. Blue Skies sunny, turned up at the Airport just 30 minutes before take off, Check In said stay calm. Luggage was taken from me by Swiss staff who said DON'T RUSH, your aircraft is through those doors and immediately on your right BUT Duty Free is opposite, you have time. Even on such a short flight, nice food and drink, impeccable service and I thought "Swiss have got this sorted". How wrong I was but thanks for explaining why I was wrong.
Management consultants are expensive and I have not heard of any of their successes. In fact they drop in, make several suggestions, which unfortunately the management agree too. Fini.
Excellent vid. If McKinsey was so certain of their advice, they should have been made to invest in the airline. The same could be said for any consulting company who advise organisations. Skin in the game is required, otherwise it’s just management being lazy which deserves to fail.
Ever notice who hires consultants? Men. And not simply because the majority of corporate leaders are men. Why? Consulting for many industries is little more than hiring a team to regularly jerk off the clients. Thus the more they play to the client egos and hubris, the better. And remember this rule of consulting - “We don’t actually DO anything we propose, we just propose it”.
Well some executive women in charges are also quite bad. See Anne Lauvergon at the head of the french atom company who nearly drove it to bankrupcy because she agreeed to overpay billions for the acquisition of an african company that was pretending to have uranium mineral stock which they didn't have 10% of what they pretented.@@kcindc5539
@@kcindc5539 What the hell are you talking about? "Ever notice who likes to eat hamburgers? Precisely. Men! And who was a man? Hitler! Therefore..." That is how that reads. I can make up a "rule" too if you'd like. I don't think the consultants in this case were fluffing the airline. They just made bad recommendations. A LACK of ego could be argued to be the problem here as it seems the Swissair higher ups were very passive.
I very clearly remember my first trip to Switzerland in 1995 (as a teenager) with a Swissair flight from LHR to Zurich on a brand new Airbus A321. It seemed very high quality and I was most impressed by their luggage delivery service to your hotel and the fact that the train station was right under the terminal. So slick. Shame it all fell apart.
The train station hasn't moved 😉 Having a train station right under the terminal isn't unique, though I can't think of there being one in any UK airport.
@@sheevone4359 Stansted does, but it's a terminus and far away from London. Gatwick almost does (it's next to it). Heathrow Terminal 5 does, but that's a terminus too and wasn't built at that time. We don't have any through stations under airport terminals that are that close to a major city.
Unfortunately companies still spend millions on consults to cut costs and usually get rid of the people that hold the company together but their job title / description may not actually Match what they do.
Very impressed with your level of detail in bad management decisions. Acquiring loss making airlines, never a favorable strategy and outcome of profitability. Basic business and common sense approach.
I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but I always feel satisfyingly exhausted after your videos. Your style is just right for these stories. Great vid as always!
A week after 9/11 I flew London St Louis with TWA . Three weeks later returned on the same route again with TWA . On outward the aircraft was less the half full , on the return less then ten in cattle class , passengers outnumbered the cabin staff . Shortly after the airline collapsed . The number of airlines that have folded is quite incredible , does the industry have a self destruct button , mergers that only benefit one side . Corruption ? McKinley was under investigation for insider trading.
6 months after 9/11 I flew on an American Airlines flight from St. Louis to Kahului, Maui, and it was so surreal since it was on ex-TWA metal (one of their 767-300s in their final livery), full TWA interior, and paint. Almost forgot I was actually on American Airlines at one point... maybe I am just dopey sometimes. 😂
Ha - McKinsey faces charges of corruption in their role with the Guptas in state capture in South Africa. Though, we don't expect anyone to be bought to justice. How is this company still operating?
I think as well Swissair 111 also caused problems as well with the entertainment systems which not only saw the death throes for Swissair but also for the MD11
The MD11 didn't have a chance. The reputation of the DC10 was so bad nobody trusted it. The ETOPS rules changed to make twin engine operations remove the need for a third engine. Then the fuel consumption was not as good as was promised, causing Singapore to cancel their order. Finally, the 777 entered service and made the MD11 obsolete. 111 didn't kill the MD11. The MD11 was a failure before it entered service.
Well, you must be hinting at the Swissair III crash in 1998. Very likely caused by a cable fire behind the cockpit, part of their new IFE system, though it seems there were issues with adequate cabling standards across the airline generally. Although, I was not connected with any of that, I was the producer for the system's audio content. This was the era of airlines wanting to adopt huge IFE systems now that they had fleet wide seat-back entertainment screens. Unfortunately, the airline went bespoke and commissioned its own, unique system. Nothing wrong with that, maybe, there wasn't a rigorous enough bedding in process. They would have been much better off buying in an off-the-shelf system that had been road tested.
@@hewhohasnoidentity4377 > *nobody trusted it* I mean, between at least half a dozen carriers, it did fly into the early 2000s, I wonder if the media scare mongering really did as much as some say... it might have, I really don't know, but it defintely still was a workhorse for a long time following the more notable crashes.
Awesome, thankyou! Interesting that Swissair invested in South African Airways as far back as 1999, could've warned them that's where the rot would really set in!
If you want the Asia Pacific version of it is this Philippine Airlines PAL- Plane Always Late. Better experience try competitors of PR in the region take Skytrax 5 Star rated like Swiss International Airlines Star Alliance partners OZ🇰🇷 NH🇯🇵 SQ BR🇹🇼 followed by Oneworld Alliance CX🇭🇰 and QR Skyteam Alliance KE🇰🇷.
A wonderful aircraft. My dad - a huge aviation fan - would often wax lyrical about full squadrons of Lightnings going supersonic over the crowd at Farnborough and Biggin Hill air displays. Incredible. Wish I'd seen them too.
As a retired employee of an airline that went through bankruptcy, but continued to operate (under US bankruptcy law) I see many of the same mistakes made in both cases. Swissair had some handicaps that were going to be difficult to overcome in the best of circumstances. Competing against Lufthansa, for example, is not feasible. Just the states of Hessen (where Frankfurt is located) and Thuringia have a larger population than all of Switzerland. That small a customer base can not support the expansion plan they had. Political factors like not joining the EU did not help, but the final "nail in the coffin" was hiring McKinsey. Investing in a group of other failing airlines was not good advise in any way. It is like going to the hospital and inviting a group of other sicker people to join you hoping it will make you better! My company was luckier in hiring Bain & Co to help and getting a CEO that had vast experience in both airlines and working for Boeing. We went from "worst to first" in less than three years.
The one and only step that might had helped Swissair was the offer of the then-CEO of Lufthansa, Jürgen Weber, Swissair to become a member of the Star Alliance and to quit the co-operation with American Airlines (in which AA took far more advantages than SR). But exxagerated obsession with indepedence finally broke SR's neck.
I worked for Anderson Consulting, a McKinsey twin in this period. Most of their consultants were only a couple of years out of college, with next to no professional experience. I pitied our unsuspecting clients. Anderson went out of business a couple of years later, as it deserved to do.
I worked at a company that was Mckinsey'd in the mid 2010s. Their approach was simplistic, gimmicky, potentially damaging and they had no idea of how the basics of the area they were in functioned. The impression was of a handful of 6th form management students doing a project for school. It all ended well for me but boy they were a distraction. Often management have already decided what they want to do and bring in consultants who they can blame when it all falls apart. It then becomes an expensive sham.
The concept of Low-Cost Airliners now has spread to High Speed Train Travel in the form of SNCF's Ouigo (Oh we go) TGV service and more recently in The UK Lumo service. Sorry i went completely off topic there even so it is a shame that of the times i flew overseas i never flew with SwissAir maybe it was because they did not serve Australian airports who knows. There were other airliners to choose from though. It's a shame that SwissAir went the way of the dinosaur like Ansett Airlines did.
I flew Swissair in the early 70s. The inflight service was absolutely excellent. BEA service by comparison felt much less professional. Thus the demise of such a wonderful airline was a tragedy. One has to admit that the design of Swissair's aircraft tails was a big plus. (Sorry!!)
Shaking my head at the consultant's concept of diversification is based on #1 investing in other airlines and #2 horizontally integrating in to other air service operations. Diversification generally involves investing in enterprises that are not related to your current business..
I fondly remember the in-flight complementary chocolates and leather seats. But I also remember the hugely bureaucratic and expensive consequences of them not being in the EU.
@@emilyadams3228 Actually, since that time they have joined many EU structures on a piecemeal basis. Personally I think they would be better off joining the EU and having a democratic say in the regulations that in practice they are forced to implement anyway.
Sabena, Al Italia, SAA,... This is the bottom of the barrel. Would have been great if they invested in catering or air freight instead. When SwissAir was losing money, why didnt they do an equity offer before becoming bankrupt?
Great video as always! Quick question though. What on earth happened to your microphone? It used to sound 10 times better, much clearer. It sounds so muffled and rolled off now. I suggest going back to your old microphone or however you recorded your voiceovers before. Keep up the good work!
@@mdhazeldine I agree the videos used to seem crisper looking as well. Shame. But YTs video compression is generally terrible especially content that has gone thru many stages of compression iterations progressively getting worse.
4:10 The vote in 1992 was not about joining the European Union (EU) but about joining the European Economical Space. It was far less binding than joining the EU but this refusal was a clear sign that Switzerland was not ready to join the EU.
I only take issue with the idea of “instinct or intuition”. No, the real problem is intelligence - most airlines are run by highly intelligent and experienced people who can very early and easily identify issues within their business or the industry. With intelligence and experience comes the humility to know what your own airline does well, what is does poorly, and what deficiencies it makes sense to address and which ones you simply have to live and do business with. McKinnsey has never understood this, and their people can literally come in and look at a route and declare you should cut it or add it with no real knowledge of the booking factors in such a route - I have watched McKinnsey literally say a profitable route should be cut from 3 flights to 1 or rescheduled to times that lose all connecting traffic because they do not understand this industry.
There's a rumour that regular York - Wolverhampton trains might be using the Stalybridge - Stockport line, with a reasonable amount of stops for Reddish South and Denton. This is dependent on more bi-mode units and pathing.
@@mikehindson-evans159 Oops. I had been watching our glorious leader's earlier post on least used railway stations, and thought I had put it on that one!
Wait. None of the 9 board members had any airline experience? 😂 they would've been far better just recruiting a manager from each actual department rather than that stupid board
Zasto se komplikuje-SWISS -AIR je propao zahvaljujuci padu Swissair 111-koji je pao usled nestrucnog montiranja zabavne elektronike-doslo do pozara.Vise niko nije imao poverenja u njih.
Не е само до тоа, да знаеле Бругисер и компанија што прават(додуша не е само Бругисер крив, другите околу него си се извлекле без проблем), немало никакви проблеми да има по Свисер, па и 11 септември немало да влијае. Едноставно немале пари, колку несреќи имале Американ, Делта итн па ден денес постојат иако во одреден период биле пред банкрот. Според бивши менаџери, Свисер и Сабена би постоеле денес ако се реструктуирале паметно и ако имало волја.
Wondering about how many in McKinsey made a killing on Sabena shares? For access to the Belgium hub, and only a 49% non-controlling share, loss-making Sabena should've paid Swiss Air those millions instead of the other way around!
I loved flying with Swissair, though I was almost ejected mid-flight once, when I told the cabin crew I was surprised that the Swiss wine they were serving "was actually nice"! 😬🤦♂️
Swissair should have never invested in all those failing airlines like Sabena. They wasted so much money in doing so. Had they never made those investments, they could have still been flying for more years
Odd thing about the Swiss Air Qualiflyer is that they have SN TP LO OS🇦🇹 which are still operational and switched to Star Alliance with UA🇺🇲 AC🇨🇦 TG🇹🇭 LH🇩🇪 NH🇯🇵 CA🇨🇳 BR🇹🇼 and OZ🇰🇷. If Swissair didn’t collapse they are likely to join Star Alliance with LH A3 LO TK. They had their own Pan Am 103 situation Swissair 111
Too' bad that companies who " out source", didn't learn from the Valujet disaster. If you have to out source, then quality of your product is not regulated. Eventually, your company will suffer.Also, why was there no mention of the crash of Flight 111? This incident seemed to be " the straw that broke the camel's back". It's very annoying when someone posts what appears to be a " documentary" but vital facts and events are omitted. Before posting something, how about checking to make sure that you have ALL the information. Not mentioning the crash, also dishonors the people who died. Shame on you.😡 There was a couple on this flight that attended a church affiliated with mine. Their memories, as well as the other victims, deserved to be mentioned.
Anything than the real truth! SR abused his interests - it had no interest in cooperation with his acquired partners. Rather let them bleed to death. Agreements of payments not to be executed. Far from the real reality you summary.
