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CEO Siegel digs out US Airways. (One-On-One).

Article Excerpt
At the helm of US Airways for just over a year, CEO David Siegel on March 31 guided the airline out of bankruptcy after seven months of court-supervised restructuring. BTN editors David Jonas and David Meyer last week spoke with Siegel about US Airways' emergence from Chapter 11 and its future prospects.

BTN: Considering the extremely rough road that lies ahead, was emerging from bankruptcy last month a mixed blessing?

David Siegel: It feels better to be out than in, but I guess it is a mixed blessing. We feel good about having accomplished all that we could in the courts. We fixed 'the balance sheet, took a lot of money out of our cost structure and improved liquidity. Now we can focus on growing the business. While everybody else is distracted trying to do some of the things we have done during the past seven or eight months, we can stay ahead of the rest of the industry and Continue on the path of implementing our business plan.

BTN: You seem to have garnered nearly universal praise for the restructuring thus far, but competitors and analysts still question if US Airways' unit costs are low enough to allow for effective competition.

Siegel: It is a fair criticism. Yet, before we restructured we were the number-six network carrier with the number-one highest cost structure, and now we are now the number-six carrier with the number-six cost structure. We'll still lose money this year. The industry will lose money this year. The revenue environment is uncertain.

While we dramatically have improved our relative...

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