“Really, where’s Amtrak when you need them?”
– WSU’s Joe Kleinsasser, who experienced several issues with United Airlines on his Tuesday return from Washington where he helped release the school’s Airline Quality Rating, which ranked United as the worst-performing airline out of 14 on its list
“I’ve been called a lot of things, but angel is not one that comes readily to mind.”
– Spirit AeroSystems CEO Jeff Turner, who was called an angel on Monday for helping restart restoration of a historic B-29 named Doc
“No, but we’re always looking for new products.”
– The response of Todd Winter, owner of the aviation instrument and avionics company Mid-Continent Instruments & Avionics, when asked if his company sells tubas
UPDATED — Which is a bigger crisis for an aircraft company or an airline to deal with: An EF-3 tornado, or Alec Baldwin getting kicked off a flight for playing Words With Friends when he’d been told to shut down all electronics?
Turns out they’re both big deals for crisis communicators, so Ragan’s PR Daily recently awarded Spirit AeroSystems and American Airlines an award for best crisis communications.
“I was totally blown away,” says Spirit spokesman Ken Evans. “I thought we had a 10 percent shot.”
He figured no matter how dramatic the April 14 tornado was, it’s hard to top a celebrity crisis.
PR Daily says Spirit won because it lost all its traditional communication tools – e-mail, its website, even desk phones – but still managed to keep the public, the media and employees informed.
“We were kind of forced to think outside the box for us,” Evans says. “We’re a fairly conservative communications group. … I know that’s shocking to you.”
Twitter became one of the company’s chief communication tools. It also used YouTube and Flickr.
Evans says Spirit’s communications team made a case to management that it needed to reach out immediately, particularly to the media, “so that all of our local stakeholders wouldn’t panic.”
“One of the best results of the week was that our stock did not take a major hit even after that EF-3 tornado.”
He says the company learned lessons from the crisis as well.
“The one audience we didn’t spend (time) keeping up to date was an internal audience at other Spirit sites around the world. They were hungrier for information on a daily basis than we thought they would. They felt left out.”
Evans says the company is using some social media more these days than it used to.
WICHITA — Who is Marvin Autry, and why did he wish Warren Theatre East moviegoers happy Thanksgiving?
That’s what some Warren visitors wondered when they saw, “Marvin Autry says happy Thanksgiving,” on the theater’s marquee last week.
The marquee is the latest in a little joke between theater owner Bill Warren and Autry, who owns Midwest Corporate Aviation.
A couple of years back, Warren lost “some stupid bet” to Autry. Warren claims he can’t remember what it was for, but he had to give Autry his own parking space at the theater, complete with his name on it.
“People over the years have asked about the parking spot,” Warren says.
Then, when Warren named parking lot poles after movie stars to help people remember where they parked, he named one for Autry.
“And so he started getting phone calls and texts and e-mails asking what’s going on,” Warren says. “We told people it’s Gene Autry’s younger brother.”
“We don’t want to mess up the paint Steve put on the plane.”
– Retired Air Force One pilot Col. Mark Tillman commenting at Wichita Aero Club about how Secret Service agents can shoot anyone who gets too close to the plane without authorization but how no one would want to mess up Boeing Wichita site leader Steve Wade’s paint job
WICHITA — B/E Aerospace has signed a lease for 15,000 square feet at 8110 E. 32nd St. North in Northrock Place.
No one with the company is sharing details yet, but it sounds like B/E may be adding as many as 60 engineers.
Calvin Klaassen of Utter Commercial Real Estate and Ted Branson of Landmark Commercial Real Estate handled the deal.
Branson also just did a lease for B/E for an 80,000-square-foot warehouse at the Greenwich Industrial Park near K-96 and Greenwich.
B/E currently has a 50,000-square-foot warehouse in Comotara Business Park.
“When you handed that to me, I just froze with fear.”
– Jeff Turner’s comment to Gov. Sam Brownback when accepting Butler Community College’s Corporate Diversity Award for Spirit AeroSystems Friday. The award was handmade Karg Art Glass, and Turner explained he once accidentally knocked over and shattered a large piece of glass at Karg’s Kechi gallery.
“Soooo, what time do you have to be back at work?”
– Machinists international president Tom Buffenbarger after no one asked questions at the end of his speech to the Wichita Aero Club Sept. 27
WICHITA — A reporter with Flight International, an aviation trade journal based in London, is in Wichita this week to do a spotlight on the aviation cluster here.
Talk has circulated that the story may be an examination of “the demise of Wichita,” which makes writer Stephen Trimble, who is based in Washington, D.C., laugh.
“I can confirm that rumors of my story of the demise of Wichita are greatly exaggerated,” he says. “There’s no real preconceived agenda, to be honest.”
Trimble says his publication regularly does country reports, which focus on the aviation industry in various countries. The United States, he says, is “just too big to have any real context,” so the publication looks at individual clusters.
So how does he find Wichita is faring?
“I’ve been trying to figure that out,” Trimble says.
He’s visiting all the major aircraft companies and a number of subcontractors. Naturally, not everything is rosy with Boeing’s planned departure and Hawker Beechcraft’s uncertain future.
Trimble also is visiting the National Institute for Aviation Research and the National Center for Aviation Training, and he says those programs are offering hope.
“That’s very encouraging.”
In other struggling places he’s visited, Trimble says, “They don’t have this kind of thing.”
The story will come out late next month, just before the National Business Aviation Association annual convention.
“There are some definite bright spots,” Trimble says of Wichita. “The question is where things go from here.”