Terry Maxon’s Classic 3 Idle Thoughts

This is a bit of inside baseball, thus likely won’t be amusing to everyone.  Terry Maxon has covered the aviation beat for the Dallas Morning News for as long as I can recall.  He’s uber-informed on all things aviation and even got a shout-out in a recent American Airlines earnings conference call when Doug Parker tried to come up with his own 3 idle thoughts.  My favorite from Doug’s list was his #2, as reported by Ted Reed in Forbes, another airline beat guy:

“This ‘idle thoughts’ thing is a lot harder than Terry makes it look.”

Terry has done a “3 idle thoughts” blog post for as long as I can remember.  Today’s gave me a pretty good chuckle:

1. Oh, goodie – an entire week without a new Department of Justice or Department of Transportation inquiry hitting the airline industry.

2. It occurs to me, having grown up on a dairy farm, that milking cows and covering a beat are a lot alike. You have to extract stuff out of annoyed beings that would rather not have you bothering them, and do it in such a way that they’ll let you extract more stuff out of them the next time.

3. I thought about waiting to retire until Southwest Airlines settled its four big labor contracts and American Airlines pilot finished integrating their seniority list, but I didn’t want to work into my 80s.

It may be the only time airline execs are compared to dairy cows.  I’ll certainly miss Terry’s blog when he rides off into the sunset in September.