A Seasoned Point of View
Blake Fish talks about industry changes, training, customer focus
By John F. Infanger, Editorial Director
September 2001
Blake Fish, Signature Flight Support
DAYTONA BEACH, FL — Blake Fish is a man who has lived the FBO circuit. Back once again with Signature Flight Support, he helps direct the array of aviation businesses in the network from the company’s glass-paneled headquarters in Orlando. It belies his comfortable demeanor, which is more evident after a regular commute home to New Hampshire. The aviation services business is one about which he can talk.
Fish, 53, is currently the senior VP of
marketing and business development for Signature. He started his career
working as a passenger services rep while attending the University of
Maine and it soon turned into his first full-time aviation position. From
there, he...
• worked as refueling supervisor at
Atlantic Aviation in Philadelphia;
• served as ground services manager
at Atlantic Wilmington (DE);
• served as operations manager at Combs-Gates
Hartford and GM at Page Avjet Rochester;
• got into cargo development for Airport
Systems/U.S. Airports;
• became regional vice president for
"the new Butler," which was subsequently integrated into Signature
Flight Support, formed by the merger of Butler Aviation and Page Avjet;
and,
• headed up the flight support division
of Atlantic Aviation for two years before returning to Signature.
Fish took a break during a Signature Flight
University management training session to talk with AIRPORT BUSINESS.
SFU is a joint training initiative of Signature and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical
University. Here are his edited comments.
The Changing Face of FBO Training
Signature Flight Support, which operates
the largest chain of fixed base operations as well as maintenance
bases and a large airline service division, several years ago embarked
on a major revamping of its employee/management training. Today,
its extensive program includes a companywide safety training effort
and an initiative with Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University at the
Daytona Beach, FL, campus. FBO veteran Blake Fish recently shared
his thoughts on the industry’s approach toward training.
"Traditionally, many FBOs had in place a process
where they handed new hires all the videotapes and said, go watch
them. But no one can assimilate training that way.
"The concept should be, I’m
going to show you a video of what I’m going to go teach you.
And then show you the video that gets you familiar with the procedures,
and then we go out and do OTJ (on-the-job training) with a trainer.
So in the morning you see a video; in the afternoon, you go out
and do what you saw and what you learned on the video. And then
the next morning when you come back, the first thing that you do
is we review what you did yesterday, and then we start on what we’re
going to do this afternoon.
"It was a constant re-enforcement.
And when you turned a guy loose, you had to have somebody there
watching him. And you didn’t turn the guy loose. And we used
to say if you can get a guy fully trained in two weeks, you’re
doing real well. And you know, for the next six months, the guy
really wasn’t fully trained. I mean, he was trained, but you
always were concerned. You always made sure that he got special
attention as opposed to just cutting him loose.
"I think if you hired a lineman,
in two years that guy would today be exposed to most of the scenarios
he’s going to run into in his career. At that point, it’s
an unusual thing to find something different.
"You’ve got to train and
train and train, and that still doesn’t guarantee that you’re
not going to have incidents."
AIRPORT BUSINESS: I think you’d
agree that in the last 10 years or so the industry has changed, in terms
of the airport environment. You talked earlier about the accreditation
that the airport managers have now, and in the FBO business a lot of the
folks, whether they’re second generation or totally new, are coming
in with business degrees and the like. Talk a little bit about how the
industry has changed in the last 15 years.
FISH: Clearly the people that are coming into our business maybe initially come to a place like this (Embry-Riddle) and think they want to be a pilot. They decide that’s not really what they want to do, but they want to be in aviation. And so they come out with more of a business focus.
I think my generation was really the first
generation of people that were businessmen first and pilots second. And
I think that’s become even moreso as time goes by. We’ve got
a lot of guys still that are GMs and pilots, but don’t fly anymore;
they just don’t find they have time. So it clearly is becoming a
much more professional environment.
My first GM job was with Page [Avjet], and
you went in there and they said okay, here’s your numbers, do your
budget. And that was about it. There wasn’t a whole lot of oversight.
The corporation didn’t really spend any time saying, let’s talk
about where we’re going as a company, as a division. It was always
base-specific. And so there wasn’t that broad overview that said
this is what Page Avjet or this is what Butler stands for. With one exception,
probably with Combs-Gates.
And Combs at that time said, this is what
we stand for, this is what we are. I was only with Combs for 18 months.
When you went to work for them they said okay, you’re going to go
to Indianapolis, you’re going to go to Denver, and you’re going
to learn what Combs stands for. You clearly understood that you were working
for the best FBO chain and that these were the standards.
Now, of course, we’ve gone much further
from that. I think today there’s a tremendous amount of corporate
oversight, and a tremendous amount of corporate support. The communication
has just dramatically improved. Today, everything’s email. It’s
real simple to say, effective immediately, we’re going to do this
and send it to 43 bases that day. You can change the direction of the
company pretty quickly.
AB: I don’t know of anyone who
predicted the economic surge that this country went through during the
’90s after the Gulf War, or the growth in fractional ownership. Those
things kind of came together. How do you think those two factors have
changed the business?
FISH: There’s a little nuance on the economic surge; one of the things that’s happened is that having guys like Warren Buffet in fractionals contributes to it. Whether it’s a shuttle airplane that’s moving a bunch of engineers and middle managers back and forth, or whether it’s a sales tour where
there’s four or five guys on board, it’s now a corporate tool.
Just by virtue of that occurring, you’re
creating more demand for aircraft because you’ve got more people
that it’s serving.
The fractionals are just a new world, a
new industry. It’s something that nobody ever thought of before.
And it’s so logical and makes so much sense; I’m not sure when
it will stop.
AB: One of the things that fractionals
has done is significantly change the makeup of the fleet that comes into
FBOs. Do you see this new makeup of the fleet as something that is impacting
how the customer views the FBO and how the FBO views the services that
it provides?
FISH: You’re seeing bigger airplanes, affecting the size of our ramps and the size of our facilities. And how are we going to accommodate that, particularly as we get in places where [Signature tends] to be, which are the heavy hub airports, where there’s more and more pressure for space just to serve the normal airlines. And
[airports] start to covet GA areas. And I think that’s an issue that
we in business aviation are going to be very seriously concerned with,
in the not-too-distant future, in the next few years. Certainly we’re
seeing it in Boston, LaGuardia, places like that where there’s tremendous
pressure on us from a space perspective.
There’s more types of aircraft, more
requirement for training. We don’t have any choice but to do a tremendous
amount of in-depth technical training just because of the complexity of
aircraft and the numbers of aircraft that we’re now serving.
I think in the old days, and part of it
was because of regulation but part of it also was just I think things
were a little bit simpler. You didn’t have quite the same in-depth
technical requirements for training that we do today.
AB: If you talk to the insurance
companies, they will tell you a direct cause of the dramatic increases
in insurance lately has been the new fleet that’s out there. A ding
today costs a lot more than a ding did ten years ago. So, a two-fold question:
One is, how has that impacted your business’ insurance? And how do
you see it impacting the overall industry?
FISH: Well, we’re paying more in insurance premiums. That means our costs go up; that means we have to charge for it. Being a big company is a double-edged sword. First of all, because we’re (so-called) sophisticated and knowledgeable of our costs, we recognize those things and we price to cover them. That’s
why we’re higher priced than most guys; we really do understand what
our costs are. We work real hard to make sure that we’re getting
a return on them. We have investors that expect it.
Some smaller FBOs don’t necessarily
understand the risks and don’t necessarily charge for it. The [insurance]
market’s tightening and costs are going up and it’s going to
be tougher and tougher to get insurance. And it’s going to be tougher
and tougher to keep costs down. And again, it’s training.
AB: One of the things that we’ve
heard for some time is the word consolidation. And you are working for
what some consider the consolidator, or one of them. Interestingly, I
remember having conversations about this when Van Dusen was buying up
the FBO world. Yet, today it’s not hard to find people who say, who’s
Van Dusen? So in terms of consolidation, is it really a trend?
FISH: I talked to a guy who runs a single business at [the NATA convention], a sophisticated and knowledgeable guy in our industry. He said he’s absolutely scared to death that there won’t be mom and pop FBOs down the road for a number of reasons. It is becoming so expensive to train, so expensive to insure, so expensive
to keep up on the customer databases and all of the things that you as
a big company can take and spread over 43 locations. The costs are much
less. For a single guy to try and do a point-of-sale machine from scratch,
it can’t be done. They just can’t afford it.
And so, today I think it is weighted towards
the chain. Having said that, the big challenge is to ensure that you don’t
lose sight of that individual transaction. The danger for the chains is
that we get so big that we lose the ability to deal with one person, one
customer, one day at a time.
The ability to take advantage of the savings
of spreading your costs and still providing focused service to the customers
is the challenge.
AB: We ran an article relating the
concerns of airport managers, and number one was capacity. And capacity
is really a two-fold thing: it’s capacity on the ground, in terms
of airport infrastructure, and it’s also capacity in the air, in
terms of the air traffic control system. What are your thoughts on capacity
and its impact on FBOs, on the ground and in the air?
FISH: I’m not really technically competent to talk about in the air. But on the ground there is clearly an issue. The BBJ is 2.4 times as big as the old G-II. That was the queen of the fleet and we built most of our ramps for the G-II, maybe the G-III. Now we’re seeing the IVs, the Vs, the BBJs, and the Airbus. And these
are just dramatically larger.
And, there’s a requirement now for
brand new GSE. You’ve got to get new tugs, new towbars. If they’re
carrying a lot more people, we’ve got catering kitchen requirements.
It’s just everything’s bigger.
We’re concerned also about the ability
of ramps to handle the weight. Just a couple of years ago, you’d
lay out a new facility and say, okay, I’m going to carve off this
much space and this can be my 727 sports team parking pad. To conserve
capital, you’d say this is where I’m going to handle those wider
body aircraft. The wheel load for a 727 was the most you had.
Now, EJ’s going to have, what, seven
BBJs by the end of this year? We’re going to see those airplanes
everywhere. They’ve done a heck of a job working with Boeing, analyzing
airports, and I know they’ve gotten heavily involved with airport
managers. A lot of them didn’t necessarily want to hear what they
needed to hear, but then it gave them validation to go and get the funding
that they needed.
The unfortunate thing with the BBJ and the
Airbus is that they’re fighting an irrational fear of big aircraft.
People see those airplanes and think noise, and that’s not the case.
We’ve got a lot smaller aircraft that are flying in and out of our
facilities that are much, much noisier. But there’s that irrational
neighborhood-type fear that’s going to be an issue.
AB: Often, the first thing the anti-airport
groups do is take a picture of a DC-10 and put it on a leaflet and say,
"Do you want this coming into your community?" And it seems
that now they might have some validation in the public’s mind that
bigger airplanes are coming in, and people don’t tend to equate newer
airplanes with less noise. They tend to tie bigger airplanes with more
noise.
FISH: But so much of it is emotional.
I remember when I worked for Combs in Hartford. Hartford used to be a
diversion point for the Concorde. One time, because of freezing rain and
snow in New York, the airplane diverted into Hartford. They shut down
the trip and bussed the passengers to New York, and it hit the news because
it was the first time the Concorde had landed at Bradley International.
They announced that they were going to leave at 1:00 the next afternoon.
And at 1:00, one of the main carriers with probably a 727 took off and
the switchboard immediately lit up with all the noise complaints. And
the Concorde left at 3:00.