Why Delta decided to stop being the mean airline

Delta has spent the past year trying to shake a reputation as a bruising antagonist that fought with other airlines and bureaucrats alike. As Delta’s Ed Bastian reaches his first anniversary as CEO this month, aviation experts and former regulators say they see signs that the Atlanta-based airline is stepping away from an in-your-face posture that sometimes rankled competitors and annoyed bureaucrats under former boss Richard Anderson. The change in attitude can be traced to the personalities of the CEOs. “Richard was a litigator,” said Mo Garfinkle, a longtime aviation consultant. “That litigious, strong, ‘I’m right’ approach of Richard is not the same approach that Ed has.” Take, for example, the time in 2014 when Atlanta business leaders were considering a state tax increase for roads and Anderson goaded them not to be “chicken” about supporting it. Or the February 2015 CNN interview in which Anderson brought up the Sept. 11 terror attacks while discussing US carriers’ long-standing policy disputes with Persian Gulf airlines, which prompted a public apology from Delta. The spats ran the gamut—with the government about alliances and landing slots, with lobbyists about whether its interests were being served, even with its own allies in the airline industry. Delta in recent years “viewed every issue as a bet-the-company kind of case, and they fought it tooth and nail,” said Kathryn Thomson, a former general counsel at the U.S. Department of Transportation. She senses now, a year into Bastian’s tenure as boss, that Delta may be becoming more like other airlines that tend to “pick and choose which issues are most important to them and fight for them.’’<br/>