Jim Butler had little time to celebrate becoming president of American Airlines Cargo.
It’s a busy time for AA. The carrier’s merger with US Airways became official on Dec. 9, 2013, creating the world’s largest airline, and AA veteran Butler became president of the cargo organization.
“I’ve been here a long time, and given what the airline industry has seen over the past 10 or so years, I feel like even longer,” Butler jokes in an interview with Air Cargo World.
He first joined AA in 1996 and has worked in revenue management, sales planning and finance. In 2013, Butler was one of six to be named to the core integration leadership team responsible for the integration of AA and US Airways.
“While I arguably do not come in with a lot of direct cargo experience, as you can probably see, the places that I’ve focused on and have had experience in are key to the cargo business,” Butler says. “So really my background I think lends itself well to come here into the cargo organization.”
In his new position, Butler works to further the relationship between the cargo side and the rest of the airline, overseeing nearly 3,800 freight employees.
“I think cargo does as well as it possibly can when it is directly in concert with the rest of the airline,” he says. “We are a big part of the business, so I think cargo will be a major, major focus in the new American going forward.”
In 2014, Butler’s primary goal is to seamlessly integrate the cargo organizations of AA and US Airways.
“That’s not saying we won’t have a bump here and there, but we’ve spent an incredible amount of time so far really planning out what we believe is a solid way to get to a point where the customers see one airline,” he explains.
This year, Butler expects AA Cargo to benefit from the new American starting Hong Kong and Dallas-Shanghai services. The carrier also is expanding on its facilities, such as the cool chain, and moving forward with its e-air waybill initiative.
Butler feels positive about the outlook for the worldwide airfreight industry.
“We’re certainly seeing some very, very good returns the latter half of last year, and things continue to look positive,” he says. “The global economy is looking like it’s doing relatively well, and I knock wood certainly, but the indications are that hopefully we’ll see a continuation of the past couple quarters and that we’ll continue to see that going forward. There’s nothing that’s telling me right now that there will be a softening to the great results we’ve seen so far.”
Though Butler has served as president for only a few months, he already could name the aspects he enjoys about the job: digging into something new and touring the airline and its warehouses globally.
But every job has challenges, and Butler’s stem from working at the biggest airline on Earth.
“One of my most important aspects of running an organization is making sure we can communicate, making sure we understand what our employees think top to bottom,” he says. “When you start at a job, you’d love to be able to talk to all of them immediately, but obviously there’s some travel I need to continue to do and get out there and being able to communicate as much as possible.”
He also says the integration isn’t easy, and the airline must stay attuned to customers’ needs in order to anticipate any issues.
“The only thing you know about a plan is it’s not going to go exactly how you planned it, so that’s a challenge,” Butler says.
In 1999, Butler learned that lesson when he went to Argentina to lead yield management at Aerolineas Argentinas, AA had a strategic partnership with the carrier.
At the time, it was a small airline with little technology compared to AA.
“I got down there and I saw stacks and stacks of printed out dot-matrix paper and said, ‘My gosh, how can we be in this situation and maximizing revenue without the tools that I was used to seeing?’” he says. “But [I] sat back, pulled up a chair behind a lot of the folks that worked in that organization down there and what I found was that the knowledge that each and every one of those folks had in their head was doing a pretty darn good job of maximizing revenue. And I learned a lot from that because what I found was, yes, the technological tools that are available ease business. They make it easier to make smart decisions, but they’re not the only way to make smart decisions.”
When Butler isn’t leading AA Cargo, he enjoys skiing. He also is involved in the arts, having minored in theater and concert lighting design at Cornell University.
Butler obtained his private pilot license as a teenager. He says one day, he wants to become active in flying again.
As a newcomer to the air cargo industry, Butler says he didn’t expect the collective industry’s focus on modernizing the business.
“As I’ve talked to people, what I’ve found is there’s a real energy within the cargo industry to move forward to what the next steps in cargo really are,” Butler says. “Now whether that be technology or partnerships with airlines and really sort of modernizing the business, that’s a very energizing place to come into, and it’s something that I’ve very, very excited about and very focused on.”