Oscar Munoz
Oscar Munoz is an American business executive who served as chief executive officer of United Airlines from September 2015 to May 2020, and as executive chairman for a further year. His tenure was marked by two events that would each have defined most careers: a heart attack five weeks after his appointment, followed by a heart transplant and a return to work within five months, and the forcible removal of a passenger from a United aircraft in April 2017, which became one of the most widely viewed corporate crises of the era.
Early life and education
Munoz was born in 1959, one of nine children in a Mexican-American family, and grew up in California. His grandfather had come to the United States from Mexico as an agricultural labourer and his father worked in a meat packing plant. He was the first in his family to attend university.
He studied business at the University of Southern California and took a master's degree in business administration at Pepperdine University.
Career
Early career
Munoz worked in finance at PepsiCo and at Coca-Cola Enterprises, and subsequently at AT&T and at the telecommunications company US West, holding senior financial positions.
CSX
He joined the railway company CSX Corporation in 2003 as chief financial officer, became chief operating officer in 2012 and president in 2015. The twelve years at CSX gave him operational experience in a network business with heavy fixed assets, complex labour relations and a direct relationship between operating discipline and profitability, which is the closest analogue to an airline in another industry.
During this period he also served on the board of United Continental Holdings, which is how he came to the airline's attention.
United Airlines
Appointment and illness
Munoz was appointed chief executive of United Continental Holdings on 8 September 2015, succeeding Jeff Smisek, who resigned in connection with a federal investigation into the airline's dealings with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, an inquiry that concerned a route reinstated for the convenience of a Port Authority official.
United at that point was the least well regarded of the three large American network carriers. The 2010 merger of United and Continental had been poorly integrated, with incompatible systems, unresolved labour contracts and persistent operational unreliability, and employee morale was low to a degree that was visible to passengers.
Munoz's early approach was to listen. He travelled the system, held meetings with employees in large numbers, and made explicit that the operational and service problems were a consequence of how staff had been treated rather than of the staff themselves. The reception was positive and he was named communicator of the year by a trade publication shortly afterwards.
On 15 October 2015, five weeks into the job, he suffered a heart attack. He received a heart transplant on 6 January 2016 and returned to work in March, a sequence without evident precedent among chief executives of large public companies. The company was criticised at the time for the vagueness of its initial disclosures about his condition, a recurring difficulty in the treatment of executive illness under securities law.
Flight 3411
On 9 April 2017 a passenger, Dr David Dao, was removed from United Express Flight 3411 at Chicago O'Hare after declining to give up his seat on an overbooked aircraft so that airline crew could be accommodated. Aviation security officers dragged him from his seat and along the aisle, injuring him. Video recorded by other passengers was published within hours and viewed hundreds of millions of times worldwide, with particular intensity in China, where Dao's treatment was widely interpreted in racial terms.
The company's response was, by general agreement including Munoz's own subsequent account, badly mishandled. The first public statement described the airline as having to re-accommodate customers, language that became immediately notorious for its detachment from what the video showed. An internal message to employees defending the crew's actions and describing the passenger as disruptive was leaked. The share price fell sharply and the company faced boycott campaigns.
Munoz issued a fuller apology within days, accepted responsibility, and the airline subsequently changed its policies: it ceased requiring seated passengers to give up seats, raised the compensation offered to volunteers to as much as ten thousand dollars, reduced overbooking substantially, and required crew to be booked well in advance rather than at the gate. A settlement with Dao was reached quickly on undisclosed terms.
The board had previously indicated that Munoz would become chairman in 2018; that plan was abandoned. The episode is now a standard case study in crisis communication, generally used to illustrate the cost of a first response that defends process rather than acknowledging what has plainly happened.
Subsequent tenure
The years that followed were, by the airline's own measures, successful. United's operational reliability improved markedly, customer satisfaction scores rose, and profitability improved relative to competitors. Munoz pursued a strategy of rebuilding domestic connecting traffic at the airline's mid-continent hubs, which had been reduced after the merger on the reasoning that it was unprofitable, and which proved more valuable than the analysis had suggested.
Scott Kirby, previously president of American Airlines, joined United as president in 2016, and the operational and commercial improvements of the period are generally attributed jointly to the two.
Munoz stepped down as chief executive in May 2020, in the first weeks of the pandemic, having announced the succession beforehand. Kirby succeeded him. Munoz served as executive chairman until May 2021.
Subsequent activity
Munoz published Turnaround Time: Uniting an Airline and Its Employees in the Friendly Skies in 2023, an account of his tenure that treats the Flight 3411 episode directly. He has served on the boards of several companies, including CBRE, Salesforce and Univision, and became chairman of the electric aircraft developer Archer Aviation.
He has spoken frequently about Hispanic representation in American corporate leadership, an area in which the numbers remain very low relative to the population, and about organ donation, following his transplant.
Assessment
Munoz's tenure is unusual in that its most famous moment was a failure and its overall record was a success.
He inherited an airline that had merged badly, whose employees were demoralised and whose operation was unreliable, and left one that performed comparably with its competitors and had substantially repaired its relationship with its own staff. That was the task he was appointed to do and he largely did it.
Flight 3411 was nonetheless a genuine failure, and its interest lies in why. The initial response was not callous by intention; it was the output of a process designed to defend the company against liability, applied to a situation in which everyone had already seen what happened. The subsequent policy changes, ending the removal of seated passengers and raising compensation until enough volunteers come forward, were obvious in retrospect and were adopted across the industry, which suggests the practice had persisted only because nobody had been made to look at it.
The personal dimension, returning to run a large company five months after a heart transplant, is remarked upon in every account of him and is not incidental: he has said that the experience changed how he thought about what the job was for, and his subsequent emphasis on employees rather than on process is consistent with that.