Flight Of Fancy
by Tom Belden

I'll have a turkey sandwich, please." "NO TURKEY!" the ARA Services employee behind the counter booms. "OK, I'll have a hamburger and French fries," the customer says. "NO FRENCH FRIES!" the employee yells. The customer pauses and stares back, contemplating abandoning the tray and walking out. "Then I'll just take a hamburger," he says.
The employee turns and yells over her shoulder into the kitchen: "HAMBURGER!" As the customer waits for his food, no other orders are taken; no one else is served. The employee begins a loud conversation with a co-worker. The hamburger arrives and is presented to the customer, wordlessly. As the customer pushes his tray down the line, he notices that turkey sandwiches are among the selections of food already prepared and wrapped-no waiting required. From the cashier, there is no greeting or thank you or "Have a nice day." Her only words are the price of a hamburger, chips, small soda and a piece of cake: $9.47. The first place you go when you get to Philadelphia is, for many travelers, the last place you want to be. It is Philadelphia International Airport. This is where a hot dog costs $3.50, where parking can cost the unwary $30 a day, where you have to hike 10 minutes to get from the USAir gates in Terminal C, where you can't park next to baggage claim but you can park three deep in the traveling lanes, where you can't remember the last time something wasn't under construction. This is not a place that makes people happy. Of 34 major U.S. airports rated in a passenger survey last year by the Survey America research firm, Philadelphia International ranked dead last in the quality and price of its food, and close to the bottom in speed of baggage delivery, cleanliness and convenience of parking. Mary Rose Loney, this is your stop. The Boss of the Airport is on the phone, and she is not pleased. "I understand we got some complaints over the weekend about the lack of bathrooms in Terminal E, that they were taken out of service because of the construction," Loney is telling one of her engineering chiefs. "And we had people, on at least four different occasions, relieving themselves outside? I didn't realize they had taken them out of commission and we didn't make any provisions for portable toilets to be brought in." She pauses for the reply, her jaw set and her eyes fixed straight ahead. She interrupts. "Bob… Bob! I just don't know how that could happen that we didn't make any provisions. We can't go through another holiday weekend like this one without bathroom facilities! Your people are saying it's going to be another month? We're going to need some signs. Now get back to me on that. Let me know what's going on." From restrooms to runways, Mary Rose Loney misses nothing at Philadelphia International. If it's true that the devil is in the details, then Loney is hell on heels. After 15 months as aviation director, she is building a reputation as a tireless workhorse, demanding, cajoling, pleading, sweet-talking her way toward a modern, working airport. The city-owned airport is one of the region's biggest economic engines. It has a $121 million budget, funded largely by airlines and other airport tenants. More than 9,000 people work there, including 560 city employees. More than 20,000 other workers have airport-related jobs: driving cabs, making beds in nearby hotels, running off-airport parking lots and selling food to the airlines. It's one of the most centrally located major airports in the world, easily accessible by road and rail. It has nonstop or direct flights to more than 100 cities. Last year, more than 16.5 million passengers took off or landed on flights at Philadelphia International. That's roughly equal to the number of cars that cross the Ben Franklin Bridge in a year. At least 60,000 people, including employees, are at the airport everyday-the same number that fill the Vet for Eagles games. (By comparison, fewer than 400,000 people will attend meetings at the new Convention Center in all of next year.) The total economic impact of all travelers, airlines, vendors, nearby hotels and restaurants is $3 billion a year. As the overseer of this 2,200-acre empire, Loney is the second-highest-paid city employee ($120,000 a year); only the city medical examiner makes more. At 42, she has worked her way up from Las Vegas grocery cashier to manager of one of the nation's busiest airports. Mayor Rendell's chief of staff, David L. Cohen, calls her "a spectacular person…the model of what a modern manager should be." But her task is every bit as daunting as her credentials: If Philadelphia doesn't do something dramatic to improve the quality of its airport, it can kiss goodbye the notion that it can save itself economically by becoming a major tourist destination. "When I first got here, someone said to me, 'Philadelphia's been screwed up for so long, you can't change things overnight,'" Loney says, relaxing for a moment in her office. "I said, 'Well, give me a year…' I consider myself a change agent, this is the place to be." Is it ever. Over the decade ending in the late 1990's, $1 billion in capital improvements will have been made to the airport. Loney oversaw the completion in September of a "cosmetic renovation" of much of the airport's public space, work that has brightened the airport enormously but caused almost two years of disruption and plight. That work was finished just in time to start a three-year project that will put the first moving walkways into some of the airport's long concourses, and consolidate and beautify USAir's cumbersome facilities that sprawl over two terminals.
	Loney also is determined to abolish the $3.50 hot dog. She plans to replace concessionaire ARA Services and to create a mini-mall in the heart of the airport. Part of the renovations of USAir's complex in Terminals B and C will include a food court and retail shops, with nationally known brand names and less than stratospheric prices. "The concessions here are outdated," Loney says. "They aren't what the customers want. They want to buy a Big Mac or a Whopper."
In addition to the capital improvements, another kind of cosmetic renovation is high on Loney's priority list. She wants smiles painted on the faces of airport workers. She wants greetings. She wants friendly. "With the airport under construction, employees who work in that situation day in and day out don't start the day with a pleasant attitude," she says. "All it takes is for a passenger to be mistreated by one person in the chain, by a parking cashier or a surly ticket-counter agent, and it shapes [the passenger's] attitude toward the airport." Loney believes in the direct approach. Any airport worker treating Loney's domain with the same disrespect with which many Philadelphians treat the streets in their own neighborhoods should expect to be reprimanded by the boss. "We need an attitude transplant around here," she says. "Just the other day, I ran after an ARA employee who I saw throw a gum wrapper on the floor. I caught him, and he was extremely apologetic. And I see the skycaps working out on the curb, checking in people's bags, and they throw all their trash, all the old luggage tags, on the sidewalk. Who do they think is going to pick that up? We need to get hold of this problem. I've never seen anything like it in any other airport where I've worked…All of this renovation of the airport we're doing will be wasted if we don't change our attitudes." In the trek through the terminals at the airport, something is missing. It's that fine white dust that for years had clung to footwear, cuffs, luggage, anything near the floor. The dust was the legacy of almost two years of messy, ear-splitting construction work in Terminals B, C, D, and E. A stroll down the Terminal B concourse now is a small wonder. Much of it looks-amazingly-like other modern airports. Wires no longer dangle from the ceiling. Ceiling tiles and lighting fixtures are new. Floors are polished terrazzo instead of that oh-so-attractive mixture of concrete and carpet joined by gray duct tape. Most of the directional and informational signs are a uniform brown and white. Most restrooms are clean and functional. The same is true in most of the C, D, and E concourses. The walk between Terminals B and C is still a bit of a time warp, even though an espresso coffee bar has recently opened. The rest of the shops, bars, and restaurants there remain vintage 1960s and '70s. Loney gets up about 5:30 a.m. in the twin house she rents in Andorra. Her uniform for the day is standard-issue Loney: black skirt, white, high-collared silk blouse, black-and-white plaid jacket, adorned with a small silver pin in the shape of an airplane. Her blond hair, cut in a pageboy, covers simple gold loop earrings. Her only other jewelry are silver and turquoise rings, and a silver bracelet. Her shoes are three-inch black heels-she seldom wears any shoe or boot that doesn't have that much elevation because they help her overcome the only thing about herself Loney admits she doesn't like: at 5-foot-2, she thinks she's too short. Just before 7, fortified with a cup of strong tea, she drives her city issued Ford Tempo through Roxborough to the Schuylkill Expressway and the airport. She checks in at her office, one floor above Northwest Airlines' ticket counter in Terminal E., and walks across the main corridor of the concourse to a long rectangular conference room, for an 8 a.m. meeting with the business-development committee of the Mayor's Airport Advisory Board. At 9, American Airline's top Philadelphia officers, Nick Cicalli and Joe Doyle, arrive. They are pleasant and friendly but complain that their outbound baggage-sorting space is too small, the flight information display monitor system in Terminal A inadequate, international customer service at the Immigration and Naturalization Service counters lousy, rental rates in Terminal A too high. But Cicalli and Doyle also have some good news about American's new Philadelphia-London service that started May 26. It is exceeding expectation, with more than 80 percent of the available seats sold throughout the summer. Loney takes notes each time something needs a follow-up. By the end of the two-hour session, a theme emerges: service to the public. Loney vows it's going to get better. Over the next eight hours, Loney's pace quickens. Shortly after 10 a.m., she is back in her office, checking messages and answering staffers' questions. By 10:30, it's back into the Tempo, driving herself to City Hall for a private meeting with David Cohen about the forthcoming decision on a new concessions contract. At 1:30, a session with Carolyn Wallis of the Turner, Colley & Braden firm that's planning a new runway at the east end of the airport. Her lunch is a small bag of pretzels and a Diet coke in the middle of the session. At 2:30, she welcomes a group of accident investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board who are attending a three-day course in airport emergency procedures. From 4 to 6, it's a private gripe session with the operator of a limousine service who doesn't like a new system of allocating the curb space where limos can wait for customers. Then more paperwork. She runs out of room on her desk and starts piling papers on the floor. Just before 7 p.m., Loney hitches a ride with Jay Beratan and Bob Molle, the airport's chief planners and engineers, two miles to the Eastwick Free Library on Island Avenue. The purpose is a meeting of the Eastwick Project Area Committee about plans to build a 2,400-car employee parking lot at Island and Bertram Avenues. Four years earlier, other airport officials met with the group, which represents the airport's nearest residential neighbors, about the same parking-lot plans, and the reception was downright hostile. But since then, the staff has fielded the neighbors' concerns about preserving gardens, ball fields and homes, and tonight, the two dozen residents in attendance are inquisitive, but friendly. By 8:30, Loney is back at her desk, and it's almost dinnertime. She and assistant Grace Ransom debate, Chinese takeout or McDonald's? They decide on the latter and Loney requests a Big Mac Extra Value Meal with a Diet Coke. "I love McDonald's french fries," she reveals. There's no consideration at all of going to one of the snack bars in the airport. Lights out at 11. The first woman who gave Loney a chance to dream of spending her life around airplanes was Sister Raphael, her second-grade teacher at St. Valentine's School in Bethel Park, a Pittsburgh suburb. Sister Rafael asked her students to write an essay about what they wanted to do when they grew up. "It's a pretty distinct memory," Loney recalls. "I was going through my mother's fashion magazines, and I saw this ad for stewardess school. It said, 'Romance, travel, and excitement.'… What I wanted to do when I grew up [was] be a stewardess so I could experience romance, travel, and excitement." Dreams of travel and romance were just what Loney's mother, Rita, was instilling in her children. Rita had dropped out of college to marry Mary Rose's father, John, a cost analyst for U.S. Steel, becoming a fulltime homemaker and giving up plans to become a kindergarten teacher. That compelled her to make high achievers of Mary Rose and her siblings-one older sister, two younger sisters, and a younger brother. When all the kids were in school, Rita Loney went back to college, got a degree in education, and, finally, became a kindergarten teacher. "From a very early age…I grew up believing I could achieve anything in my life, which is a wonderful deck of cards to provide a child," Loney says. She pauses and falls silent for just a few seconds. "If there were anything I would change," she says, "it would be that my mother had lived. I think she would get such a vicarious thrill out of seeing what has happened to my career." (Rita and John Loney died within five months of each other 11 years ago.) Loney started her workaholic ways early, as a waitress at a neighborhood restaurant in high school and as a waitress and a grocery store cashier during four years at the University of Pittsburgh. She abandoned dreams of becoming an artist after a professor dismissed as amateurish a painting she had worked particularly hard on. She wound up majoring in sociology and philosophy. After graduating from Pitt in 1974, she took off for what she thought would be three months of fun at the Grand Canyon, pursuing a passion for hiking. "I became fascinated with this little Grand Canyon Airport, and these amazing air tours of the canyon," she recalls. "I got a $2.50-an-hour job selling air tours and then became the office manager for the fixed-base operations. It was this compact little airport in the most beautiful place in the world." That was her introduction to airports. After two years, she quit to move to Las Vegas, where she worked as a night manager of a grocery store, a community college teacher, and a county personnel manager before finding her way back to the airport business: She was hired in 1979 as an administrative assistant at Las Vegas' McCarran International Airport. Loney became known at McCarran for learning quickly, being an excellent writer and being willing to take on any task. She moved up the ladder rapidly. She earned a masters degree in public administration at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas and became only the third woman in the country to complete a series of professional-training courses to be certified airport executive. As her career soared, Loney decided in 1982 to end her marriage of four years to Ronald H. Elrod, a colleague from her supermarket management days. She describes Elrod as "a wonderful guy" with whom she had "a great friendship," but who had different life goals. In 1984, she moved to Albuquerque to become assistant aviation director. In 1986, it was on to San Jose as assistant aviation director, where she not only acquired more airport planning and operating experience but learned what she says was a hard lesson in keeping watch on the public's money. Loney, the aviation director and five subordinates were publicly reprimanded by the city manager for failing to keep better records of a contractor caught padding accounts of airport-shuttle buses. The contractor went to prison for defrauding the city. The incident didn't slow Loney's rise, however. She was hired in 1989 for one of the most demanding jobs in the business: Chief Operating Officer at Chicago's O'Hare. In early 1992, Loney moved to Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, as deputy director for finance and administration, to give herself experience in one area of airport management where she determined she was weak. It was a tough atmosphere. She had to direct an experienced, self-confident staff accustomed to ever-expanding budgets at a growing airport, at a time the airline industry's financial troubles were cutting into airport revenues. Some of the staff found Loney out of her depth in financial matters and an imperious, overly harsh budget-slasher. According to one source close to some of the airport officials, after she left DFW for Philadelphia, some of the staff held "a very quiet but well-attended 'Ding-dong, the witch is dead' party." Those Loney worked for, however, have nothing but praise for what she accomplished. "She's a taskmaster, and sometimes organizations need that," said Vernell Sturns, Dallas-Fort Worth's administrator from 1991 to early 1994. "DFW had been in a building mode…and a couple of years ago we stepped back and looked at ways to be more efficient…That's the kind of daring commitment she took on. She may have rubbed some people the wrong way, but that makes strong organizations." You're whizzing past the Vet on I-95, heading to the airport, thinking about the last time you made this trip, almost a year ago. It's time to start paying attention. You grip the steering wheel: You're about to enter the Parking Twilight Zone. As you zip off the airport exit, you notice that they finally put up big blue signs over the road that say "Arriving Flights" in one lane and "Departing Flights" in another. It only took a decade or so since I-95 was finished for PennDot to get around to that. As you sweep off the bridge, you find more new signs that say "Baggage Claim" to the right. But let's see, where is USAir? Which terminal? You've been given no help on that so far. You cruise slowly in the outside lane because all the others are filled with double- and triple-parked cars. At Terminal A, all the airline signs are hard to read, with the names spelled vertically, but USAir doesn't seem to be among them. Creeping down to Terminal B, you spot a small black sign that says USAir. There's even more double parking, but you manage to find a space next to the curb. Your arriving passenger is nowhere in sight. So you ignore the sign that says, "Driver Must Stay With Vehicle," dash across three lanes of buses and taxis and head into the terminal. In only a minute or two you learn the flight is running 30 minutes late. So it's back to the car to find a more permanent parking spot. Your pace quickens as you notice that they mean it when they say don't leave your car: A Philadelphia police officer is right behind you, ticket book in hand. Trying to get back to the parking garages is another adventure. There's no easy way to get there from here. You find "Return to Terminal" signs, and enter a single-lane road where you creep along with an assortment of buses and vans. As you loop around you see the signs for "Short-Term," "Long-Term," and "Economy" parking. Economy? What does that mean? In most airports the signs say hourly, daily and long-term parking. Now, flying by over your head, but impossible to read as you navigate, are signs that tell you how much each type of parking costs. Short-Term sounds like what you need. You enter what turns out to be a cleverly designed maze of loops that wrap back in on themselves as you hunt for a spot. Finally, you find a space near Terminal B and head back into the bag-claim building, where you discover the flight now is arriving at Terminal C. Finally, a little less than an hour later, you and your passenger are back at the car. You get to the cashier's booth, stick your ticket in an automatic reader and gasp: That'll be $5, please. At least the signs for your escape routes from the airport are clear. On the way home, you ask your passenger if she has ever considered taking Amtrak. Scandal does occasionally visit the airport. Last month, the city said employees of a contractor to the Philadelphia Parking Authority were skimming more than $1 million a year from parking receipts. It was the first big financial scam since former City Councilman Isadore Bellis went to prison in the 1970s for accepting bribes for influencing airport contracts. Through the 1980s, though, the airport suffered mostly from neglect. Things didn't change until Loney's predecessor, James C. DeLong, came to Philadelphia from Houston in 1987-and was stunned by what he found. "I was appalled," recalls DeLong, who now runs Denver's airports. "I was the guy who had to bring in the color-coordinated, architecturally designed buckets to catch all the leaks in the roof. Only half the heating and air conditioning worked. The elevators and escalators only worked 40 to 50 percent of the time. We had major electrical failures on a quarterly basis, which would lead to flight delays…because we didn't have any runway lights. I only had so much energy and money, so I was into bricks and mortar. By 1990, even the bricks and mortar were endangered. With the city nearly bankrupt, the only pool of money left that summer was the airport's capital improvement fund, and the airlines had to threaten a lawsuit to keep the Goode administration from using it up to meet the city payroll. Rendell solved the financial crisis, and when DeLong quit in February 1993, the vacancy gave the mayor the chance to look for an aviation director who not only could run the airport and get renovations done, but also understood how vital it was to make it work in tandem with the new Convention Center. Loney was a good match. "In addition to her aviation and technical skills, which were significant," Rendell chief-of-staff Cohen says, "she brought the best perspective on the importance of the airport's tourism and economic-development potential…There's a much greater recognition on my part now of the relationship between economic development and the airport." Indeed, the nexus between dramatically improving the airport and the regional economy has become abundantly clear to the political and business leaders all over the city. The taxpayers ponied up $523 million to build the Convention Center. If the airport is ugly, no visitor who flies in will want to come back. Convention planners won't recommend the city as a meeting place. Business executives thinking of relocating or expanding here will go elsewhere. "This is about as acute a situation as I've seen in terms of an airport's overall perception being poor in the community," Loney says. "I don't know how the airport ever became so disconnected from the community. From the moment you get off the jet bridge, you don't know you're in Philadelphia. It hasn't been used to showcase any art from local institutions. It's not a source of pride in the community. And that's very different from Chicago and Dallas/Fort Worth." Loney has already made progress on the art front. Within months of her arrival, large color photographs of familiar Philadelphia scenes-from the Liberty Bell to Lenny Dykstra hitting a home run-adorned temporary construction walls throughout the airport, with similar, more permanent exhibitions planned. With the help of the city's Percent for Art Advisory Council, paintings and new large-scale sculptures have been installed. And the airport is working with the Please Touch Museum to create a "Kidport" in Terminal E. The time has also come, Loney declares, to stop talking about the problems that have been identified and are being worked on, and start talking about the improvements. Philadelphia International, she believes, is actually wearing an elegant ball gown under its dirty frock. "I know very well what the shortcomings are, and we have to work on those," Loney said. "But it's about time we recognized the asset we have in this airport." It's a blustery winter morning and snow forecast. In the predawn darkness, Loney, in jeans, a heavy sweater and high leather boots, is in a yellow maintenance vehicle between the airport's two main 10,000-foot runways, monitoring the progress of the "conga line" of snowplows running up and down the strips of concrete. She shuttles between the runways, taxiways and the airport's Communication Center in Terminal C, where a TV is always tuned to the Weather Channel and cameras constantly scan the runways. A dozen other airport officials and airline reps are there, sipping coffee and jumping from one topic to the next: How much snow is building up, are pilots reporting poor or nil braking conditions as they land, is the air-traffic control tower reporting deteriorating visibility? Loney mostly commands by asking questions about what's going on. Her subordinates give the actual orders to the work crews. But all the vigilance, the careful attention to detail, pays off. During the bitter winter of 1993-94, it snowed on the airport 15 times, and only once-for 45 minutes on Feb. 11 when a small plane was lost after landing and got stuck in a snowbank-was Philadelphia International completely shut to aircraft. It was the best record of any airport in the Northeast. At Philadelphia International, especially in Loney's first few months on the job, some of those who saw her in action say she had such a strong need to direct her domain that it sometimes hampered her ability to delegate. "Communication between the airport and downtown is very rigid," one city official, who asked not to be identified, said last winter. "It's up and down to Mary Rose. The agenda of her meetings is very rigid. She is very controlling…She's not someone you want to mess with. I've seen her cut down people with a glance…grown men." But it's hard to find members of Loney's staff who resent her. Many of them say they are being challenged for the first time in their careers. Her breakneck pace may exhaust them, but there's an exhilaration in trying to keep up. "She gives people credit where it's due," said one airport staffer who has worked for half a dozen aviation directors. "Maybe she is harsh sometimes, but that may be called for. You can't just be a mediocre director…and I get more of her time than I have with any other director." For her part, Loney makes no apologies for her style of what she asks of employees. "I am demanding," she admits. "But I never demand more then I expect of myself. I'm impatient, too. I like to see results. And there's a positive aspect of being demanding. It means we're not going to be satisfied with just good enough…especially when we're dealing with a facility that touches so many lives." Loney is moving through her domain under full sail, heading briskly from one meeting to the next, her heels clacking on the terrazzo floor. Glancing at her watch, she is mentally preparing for what lies ahead. But suddenly, she stops in mid-stride. She turns to a young man leaning against a wall. He has just lit a cigarette. And he has just lit Loney's fuse. Smoking is banned in all but a few designated areas, and this is a personal affront to Loney. She doesn't look for a cop or an aid to help her out. "You can't smoke here," she says sternly. "There's no smoking in the terminal." Sheepishly, the man looks for a place to stub out his cigarette. "Thank you," Loney says evenly. She resumes her rapid pace up the concourse, having struck the blow of the day for a user-friendly airport. There are about a thousand more to go.