American Airlines’ CEO Gerard J. Arpey’s letter to the editor (Quality Digest, January 2006) shows exactly why the U.S. airline industry is in trouble: “We carry about a quarter of a million people every day,” writes Arpey. “Inevitably, there will be mistakes that impact our customers.” Nowhere does he even mention the idea of doing closed-loop corrective action to discover the root cause of the problems, as discussed by James Harrington in his columns, “A Crash Landing for Airline Service Quality” (October 2005) and “Lost in the Service Quality Void” (November 2005). Harrington’s columns, in fact, are examples of the common-sense principle that Henry Ford described in My Life and Work (1922): “If the machine does not give service, then it is better for the manufacturer if he never had the introduction, for he will have the worst of all advertisements—a dissatisfied customer.”

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