They began the flight to recovery as US Airways, and now bail out into friendly skies upon selling the employees along with the planes and the furniture in the frequent fliers' lounge.

Gangwal was in our offices three months ago, at the nadir of negotiations with the airline's flight attendants, with a grave augury to employees: "Either we survive and be a vibrant carrier in a brutally competitive business or we will no longer be. There is no middle ground."

The option to "no longer be" apparently had been lurking in the hangar for some time. You don't work out a $4.3 billion cash purchase overnight. Spring it overnight? Yes.

For instance, Chris Beebe, who heads the Pittsburgh US Airways unit of the Air Line Pilots Association, was in Washington on unrelated business this week. He was called to a 5:30 p.m. meeting where he got the word at the same moment it began leaking to the rest of us: US Airways had worked a deal to sell to United.

It could all be a lesson in realistic expectations, a parable about work forces that ask too much, if the corporate potentates who delivered it three months ago weren't about to depart with parting gifts worth 84 percent of US Airways' 1999 earnings.

Wolf is about to become the most gainfully unemployed of the airline's management. He is entitled to $85.7 million, most of it in stock options.

Being that US Airways shares were selling at about $25 immediately before the sale, and United will offer $60 a share, you can see how being and nothingness have finally taken on new and wonderful meanings in the corporeal world, to say nothing of the corporate world.

Measured another way, US Airways flight attendants, with benefits figured in, were earning $49,000 a year or, assuming a 40-hour work week, $23.56 an hour. Wolf, if his deal goes through, would get $162.61 for every minute of the year 2000.

Gangwal, who worried that giving flight attendants anything above the parity formula US Airways had developed would open the door to a payroll rampage by other unions, will, should his employer cease to exist, be forced onto the street with $58.3 million.

In all, the US Airways executive corps is covered by $165.8 million in severance packages. In 1999, the airline earned $197 million.

Perhaps I am missing something, but it seems to me that killing your own company shouldn't pay so well.

There is little sense in this redux of the Gilded Age in railing against the salaries of corporate executives. The skills of the deal maker have become so sought after as the world marches down the road to corporate oligarchy that to attempt to restrict the profits of the men who buy and sell companies would be akin to demanding a song from a stone.

We can, however, ask that the people who lecture about sharing sacrifice to guarantee a company's future share some of the risk that goes with selling it off.

Executives routinely appeal to their employees' long-term vision as a hedge against unrealistic demands. When the payroll bloats at the front -- US Airways complained of featherbedding and inflated wage scales -- the company can asphyxiate from a choked cash flow.

But when the cash flows so voluptuously for the folks empowered to decide when the patient should become a large donor organ, it's time to change the names of the beneficiaries on the insurance policy.

Copyright © 2000 PG Publishing

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