American Airlines’ Doug Parker will retire from the CEO position at the end of March and hand the job to long-time president Robert Isom, the company announced Tuesday morning.
Parker, who has been CEO of Fort Worth-based American Airlines since 2013, leaves a legacy of cobbling together struggling airlines and merging them to become what is American today.
Parker will stay on as executive chairman and American President Robert Isom will take the CEO job on April 1, a succession plan that has been apparent since at least 2016.
“This transition is the result of a thoughtful and well-planned multi-year process overseen by our board, dating back to Robert’s elevation to president in 2016,” Parker said in a letter to employees Tuesday. “In fact, it likely would have happened sooner, but the global pandemic — and the devastating impact it had on our industry — delayed those plans.”
The transition will come just two months after Dallas-based Southwest Airlines transitions into a new leadership team itself, with CEO Gary Kelly retiring on Feb. 1 to make away for executive vice president of corporate services Robert Jordan as the company’s new CEO.
Parker, 59, started his career at American Airlines in 1986 in the finance department before moving to Northwest Airlines and then onto America West, where he would become CEO just days before the September 2001 terror attacks.
Isom, 58, meanwhile, met Parker America West in the mid-1990s and the two have ridden a wave of mergers at struggling airlines until they became the leaders of the largest airline in the world by several measures, including the number of employees.
American Airlines is headquartered just outside DFW International Airport and has about 125,000 employees at its mainline and regional carriers, including 30,000 in North Texas.
Parker’s tenure at American Airlines has been tumultuous since the start, when Parker used American’s bankruptcy and brokered support of debtholders and unions for a merger with American Airlines in 2013.
The company has struggled at times to piece together the pieces of two massive operations, two groups of disjointed employees groups and competing strategies into a cohesive company and has only recently claimed that the integration started eight years ago is fully complete.
But Parker led the company to seven consecutive years of profits between the merger in 2013 and 2019, just before the COVID-19 pandemic would upend the air travel industry and again force billions in losses at American and nearly every other major airline.
Since the merger, Parker has battled with unions over new contracts, fought through operational issues with poor on-time and cancellations rankings and tried to reorient the company so that it could be profitable in the long run.
Isom has been the apparent successor to Parker since 2016, when American Airlines jettisoned President Scott Kirby, who would leave to take the same job at Chicago-based United Airlines, even though Kirby still maintains his primary home in North Texas.
Isom grew up outside Detroit, Michigan and went to the University of Notre Dame to study mechanical engineering before taking his first job at Proctor and Gamble. He started working at Northwest Airlines in the early 1990s and followed Parker to America West in Phoenix before eventually taking a job struggling mortgage firm GMAC to lead restructuring there.
But Isom came back work with Parker at US Airways in Phoenix during the era of consolidation within the industry, eventually lining up the company for an eventual merger with bankrupt American Airlines in 2013.
“Being CEO of American Airlines is the best job in all of commercial aviation, and Robert will fill the role exceptionally well,” Parker said in the letter. “I’ve worked closely with Robert for two decades, and we have known each other even longer. He is an excellent team builder who has worked to bring people together throughout his career.”
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