Dan: 0:00

So, Christina, when you tell people at a cocktail party or dinner party what you do for a living, what do they think your job is, and and what do they get most wrong about it?

Christina: 0:11

Well, first of all, they're surprised it is a job.

Dan: 0:14

What do you mean by that?

Christina: 0:15

Well, usually, what I hear is airports have CEOs. What do you do? And that is standard. So, usually, I don't tell people what I do. They say, what do you do? I say, oh, I work at the airport. They say, oh, like what? And I say, well, I'm the CEO. And I'm like, really? Airports have CEOs?

Dan: 0:35

Because their mental model is what?

Christina: 0:37

Their mental model is the airlines run them.

Dan: 0:39

Oh.

Christina: 0:40

That what could you possibly do? I mean, what are you guys responsible for?

Dan: 0:44

Christina Cassotis is the CEO of Pittsburgh International Airport, and here's the answer to what she's actually in charge of.

Christina: 0:52

All of the runways, taxiways, apron area, the terminal facility is on us. The roadways are on us. The parking facilities for garages and surface lots are on us. Ground transportation. We lease out parts of our terminal to Chick fil A and the local hamburger place, right, to make sure that our passengers have what they need. To provide what I would call a dignified journey through liminal space. Seriously.

Dan: 1:20

I love that.

Christina: 1:20

Because airports are the in-between. You're always on your way to something, something super important to only you. And nine times out of 10, people come in pretty stressed out because they don't know what might go wrong. And when things do go wrong, as I say, if you watch Spinal Tap, they go to eleven really fast. Okay?

Dan: 1:39

Mhmm.

Christina: 1:39

So everything that we can do through terminal design, through services, how do we take care of people when they are truly, truly at their most vulnerable and their most uncertain?

Dan: 2:04

I'm Dan Heath, and this is What It's Like to Be. In every episode, we walk in the shoes of someone from a different profession. An aircraft carrier commander, a baker, a city manager. We wanna know what they do all day at work. Today, we'll ask Christina Cassotis what it's like to be the CEO of an airport. We'll talk about where you get the money to build a new terminal, and by the way, it's not tax dollars, why she keeps 250 beehives on airport property? And what's the one place she can't go in her airport? Stay with us. In 1992, the city of Pittsburgh opened a brand new airport and it was designed for one very specific job, to be a hub for US Airways. So a hub airport is one where the majority of passengers are simply passing through connecting to another flight to get to their final destination.

Christina: 3:04

They go gate to gate. They never see the curb. They don't smell fresh air. They just get off a plane, walk across a terminal, and go to another gate and get on the plane.

Dan: 3:13

Atlanta is a hub for Delta. Dallas-Fort Worth is a hub for American. Denver is a hub for United.

Christina: 3:20

So hub operations are different than what's called an "O and D" airport, origin and destination airport.

Dan: 3:29

Oh, I already love the jargon. This is great.

Christina: 3:31

So Boston is an "O and D" airport. San Diego is an o and d airport. So is Tampa. In other words, the majority of passengers begin and end their journeys at that airport. They don't pass through it.

Dan: 3:45

So in 1992, the Pittsburgh Airport was heavily reliant on US Airways for flights. But unfortunately...

Christina: 3:52

In 2004, US Airways, having suffered its second bankruptcy, canceled its leases with Pittsburgh International Airport.

Dan: 4:01

Oh, man.

Christina: 4:02

And two thirds of the operations and passengers disappeared.

Dan: 4:07

So you've got an entire airport built for a function that is no longer needed.

Christina: 4:13

Correct.

Dan: 4:14

So ten years later, Christina gets a call. It's a headhunter who says...

Christina: 4:20

Pittsburgh is looking for a CEO. And I said, that's nice. Do you need names? And he said, no. I think this is a job for you. And I said, I'm not going to Pittsburgh. Nobody would go to Pittsburgh to run that airport. It's been left, and they haven't done much with it for ten years. And once I got here and I saw the community, which I didn't understand. As a New Englander, I didn't have an idea of Pittsburgh that had left the nineteen eighties, candidly. I understood all the components of the community. I said, you're massively underserved from an air service perspective. In other words, you don't have nonstop service into the right markets that this community needs today, let alone that would allow you to build for tomorrow. It was the first case I had seen where an airport was actually a drag on the community's ability to meet its economic and social mobility objectives.

Dan: 5:15

But Christina's challenge was that it's really not the airline's job to worry about that.

Christina: 5:22

There's not an airline executive that gets up in the world, smacks their head, and says, oh my goodness. What are we doing about Pittsburgh? No airline serves an airport. They serve markets.

Dan: 5:31

Where markets are what?

Christina: 5:34

Markets are the region of Western Pennsylvania. How many people are gonna get on my plane at what price and how often?

Dan: 5:42

Mhmm. Mhmm.

Christina: 5:43

So the market is Pittsburgh to Orlando. How many people travel that annually? What's the competition in that market? If I put a new flight in, what percentage of that market could I hope to capture, and what does that do for the economics of my airline, and how does it contribute to its route network?

Dan: 6:03

Right. Right. And you can gather a lot of data about that, but there's also a certain leap of faith factor involved, isn't there?

Christina: 6:11

That's a really good point. The data is something we all have. Airlines and airports all have access to the same data. What they really need is what I call the color commentary. So if you watch sports, right, there's you got the stats guy, and you got the person who's like, and you know what this person eats for breakfast every morning and what his mom did for a living and how she drove him every day to practice. Our job when we go meet with airlines is to talk about who's expanding, what is the nature of business, what's growing. There were a lot of airlines when I first got here who had no idea about the robotics industry in Pittsburgh. Because they were stuck with a mental model that was stuck back years when US Airways left. Again, their job is not to figure out what to do with Pittsburgh. Their job is to maximize their network. And we, as airports, have an obligation to show up and say, here's what you don't know. Let us lift the lid off those and tell you the stories behind the numbers and where those numbers are going and how they compare to every other place you could put that plane.

Dan: 7:20

Oh, this is so good. I don't think I realized much of this. So if you want to offer a new service from Pittsburgh to London or Pittsburgh to Tampa or wherever, you have to go to the airlines and kinda pitch yourself. Yeah?

Christina: 7:33

That's called air service development. And for seventeen years, I consulted to airports around the world on that and a whole host of other issues around competitiveness because we are all fighting for limited assets, and those assets can move overnight. We have to build infrastructure that lasts thirty to forty years, and an airline can come and go really truly as it pleases, and it should since they have a profit motive. And they have an obligation to shareholders, right, to run the most efficient, effective organization they can. So they're constantly, even if we get somebody in, we have to fight to keep them.

Dan: 8:12

So when you make a pitch like that, who are you pitching to? Like, what's the role on the airline side?

Christina: 8:19

So there there's a whole network planning department, and there are conferences. There's actually speed dating conferences that take place globally and throughout the year for certain world regions where airlines bring their route planners in and airports sign up to have meetings. And you sit down and you get twenty minutes to make a pitch, and you hope you get invited to headquarters.

Dan: 8:40

Wow. So it sounds like it's kind of a buyer's market in the sense that the airlines are the ones with the control.

Christina: 8:47

A 100%. We have to take care of our airline partners. Because without airlines, you're not an airport. You're just, like, a lot of land with some pavement.

Dan: 8:56

You're just a really inconvenient food court.

Christina: 8:58

Right. Exactly. That's awesome. That's gonna be my new motto. Like, we cannot be an inconvenient food court. So I look at us as "B-to-B" and "B-to-C". So in a "B-to-B" world, our primary customer client is the airline. No question. The airlines as a group and each airline individually. We have to pay attention to everything from their business model to their route network to changes to changes in leadership. We listen to earnings calls. We are really locked in to what they are up against and how we can help them. But we also have an obligation to our passengers, and those passengers could be on any airline. So we also have to provide services and amenities that the passengers in this market want and need in order to feel like they're being taken care of in our facilities. So, yes, the airlines are our primary customer, but they are not the only ones paying the bills. So let's think of it this way. For an airline to operate at an airport, they have to pay landing fees, which is a charge we set. Every airport in the United States has to have a revenue neutral airfield, meaning we take the expenses of what it costs to maintain that airfield, the snowplow drivers, the snowplows themselves, all the field maintenance equipment, the lawnmowers, and the paint stripers, and then the percentage of our finance team that pays attention to these things. And we say, this is the cost of running the airfield, and we divide it up among the landed weight that's expected, and we charge the airlines every time they land a plane.

Dan: 10:36

The landed weight that's expected. What did that phrase mean?

Christina: 10:39

Landed weight is a 737 weighs "X" amount of tons. And every time a 737 lands, they're gonna pay "X" amount of dollars per ton of landed weight on the airfield.

Dan: 10:53

What a crazy business model. So it's not, like, per flight or per passenger. It's per landed weight.

Christina: 10:59

It's it's really by aircraft type. If you just think of it that way, the way that we charge airlines is by aircraft. And frankly, how much stress they're putting on that pavement.

Dan: 11:09

Alright. Well, that makes like, a 787 is just gonna have more wear and tear than, you know, some rich person's personal jet.

Christina: 11:14

Than a Canadair Regional Jet. A 100%. Right. And an A330 is gonna chew up runway faster. Right? That's what we're always struggling against.

Dan: 11:21

Okay.

Christina: 11:22

That's called aeronautical revenue. So our aeronautical revenue is everything that we're charging the airlines to take off and land. Alright? And everything we have to do to maintain what's called the, airport operating area, the AOA, which is the place that is meant for aircraft to move around. Alright? Then we've got the terminal area, the parking facilities, everything that is not necessarily attached to the plane. So that's our our our concessionaires, our food, beverage, and retail folks. It's the parking operations. It's the roadway. It costs a lot of money to maintain this stuff, as you can imagine.

Dan: 12:00

And that side of things, it's it sounds a lot like just being a a typical landlord. Like, you've you've gotta have good-

Christina: 12:06

Mmm.

Dan: 12:06

No?

Christina: 12:07

No. No.

Dan: 12:07

Okay.

Christina: 12:08

If something goes wrong, they're not calling the third party vendor. They're not walking up to their customer service people because there aren't any. They're coming to us.

Dan: 12:18

Who who's they in this? Like, you're saying who would be complete?

Christina: 12:21

Passengers.

Dan: 12:21

Okay.

Christina: 12:22

So if if if your baggage is late, you're probably gonna find somebody on our staff. If you lost a bag and there isn't a baggage service office that's still open, you're gonna come find somebody on our team.

Dan: 12:34

Mhmm.

Christina: 12:35

So we have a lot of interest and responsibility in making sure that the operations run the way that they should and the passengers are taken care of and that there's a level of service delivered that we can stand behind and defend.

Dan: 12:48

So in the spirit of providing that level of service to passengers, the airport requires things of its tenants, the shops and restaurants, that a normal landlord would not.

Christina: 12:58

So we have mandatory opening and closing hours. You you can't just operate when you feel like it. We're an airport. Right?

Dan: 13:06

Right.

Christina: 13:06

And we we have a you're gonna love this. You like acronyms and terms. We are a heavy R-O-N airport.

Dan: 13:13

R-O-N.

Christina: 13:14

Yes. That means "Remain Overnight". So we have a lot of gates, and aircraft really like to spend the night hooked up to a gate as opposed to parked out on the airfield and having to be tugged in in the morning to connect to a gate.

Dan: 13:27

Mhmm.

Christina: 13:28

So we have a lot of very late night flights, and the airlines do this because they know they can park here. They schedule a lot of flights that arrive anytime between 11PM and 1AM.

Dan: 13:38

Mhmm.

Christina: 13:39

Which means that at three-thirty in the morning, you could body surf in this airport because people are lining up for the 5AM and five-fifteen departures.

Dan: 13:48

Really?

Christina: 13:49

Yeah.

Dan: 13:49

Wow.

Christina: 13:50

Yeah. Exactly.

Dan: 13:52

And do you have an obligation as an airport CEO, or is it just a a financial interest in, like, having people open to serve those customers at one and two in the morning?

Christina: 14:03

That's up to us. That's up to us. So we we set the hours of operation, but we have a lot of our concessionaires that we ask to be open by 4AM.

Dan: 14:11

Wow. And that's a condition of the lease or something like that. If you wanna play here, you've gotta

Christina: 14:16

That's correct.

Dan: 14:16

Okay.

Christina: 14:16

That's correct. So if you don't open on time for you know, we have we have mechanisms to address that performance.

Dan: 14:23

I love mechanisms as a euphemism. We have mechanisms.

Christina: 14:26

We have our ways. But really, truly, a lot of companies here are here to make money, and we're here to make sure that they do it in a way that is consistent with what we believe our obligation is, which is to take care of everybody who needs to get through, regardless of the purpose of their trip, who they're traveling with, their abilities, their language, etcetera. Right? That is actually something that we wanna make sure happens and that you can get coffee at 4 o'clock in the morning.

Dan: 14:57

After a quick break, what a freight elevator can teach you about good leadership, stay with us.

Wendy Zukerman: 15:04

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Dan: 15:35

So I think probably everybody listening to this has been on flights before, and they've probably had a, you know, a handful of normal travel related difficulties. I just wanna go through a few and see, like, what's the airline's fault and what's your fault? Like...

Christina: 15:50

Well, let's talk about roles and accountability instead of fault. But okay.

Dan: 15:54

Let me just try a couple of scenarios with you. So, the thing where you you land the plane and maybe you were right on time, and then you stop short because the gate's occupied or there's not a crew ready to receive you. Is that airline or airport?

Christina: 16:08

That's airline. They're the ones who control their passenger boarding bridges unless unless it's a a charter or something like that. So they would likely have a contract ground handler is what we call it, and we would probably have a discussion around whether or not they had problems getting to that gate because there was something in their way in order to drive that jet bridge out to the plane. But nine times out of 10, it is because of airline crew operations.

Dan: 16:40

Okay. What about your bags take just an unholy amount of time to arrive

Christina: 16:45

That's us.

Dan: 16:45

at the, okay. That's you.

Christina: 16:46

That's an airport. A 100%. Or hold on. But see, this is where it gets tricky. We wanna make sure that the ground handler is not stretched too thin and that the airline has enough staff to make sure that they can unload all the planes at once.

Dan: 17:01

Oh, good point. Right. Right. Right.

Christina: 17:03

And in almost all of these, I'm gonna tell you it could be either of us. It depends. But but for the most part, that would probably be us.

Dan: 17:10

Yeah. So if there's a ground stop on travel because of weather, it's neither of you. Right? We we we have to blame God and the FAA for that. Right?

Christina: 17:19

If I were that powerful, I would be doing something else for a living.

Dan: 17:24

How do you know if you're doing a good job as an airport CEO?

Christina: 17:28

Well, if you're doing a good job as an airport CEO, the community understands what you're doing and why. They understand the value of the airport in the community. The FAA says, yay you on its annual inspection, which is a week long process where they look at every single light on the airfield. They walk every single inch of the airfield to look for any kind of damage, anything that we might have missed. I mean, we are so heavily regulated. It's actually surprising to most people.

Dan: 18:04

How much of your day is kind of thoughtful and future looking versus just careening from emergency to emergency?

Christina: 18:13

It's a fifty-fifty split.

Dan: 18:15

Okay. That's probably better than a lot of CEOs, honestly.

Christina: 18:19

Yeah. Well, listen. I have a very good I mean, we all have teams. I am not the person inspecting that airfield. We have an entire public safety operations and maintenance team. We have a fire department on this airport.

Dan: 18:31

You have your own fire department.

Christina: 18:33

Yes. Yes. We have 55 firefighters because we all have an obligation to be able to respond you ready for this? From the fire station, from the minute we get the call that there's an "Alert 2" or an alert let's just say "Alert 2". That's the one that could result in damage to an aircraft. We get indications that there's an "Alert 2" on its way. The fire department, the first truck has to be to the center point of the furthest runway within a matter of minutes.

Dan: 19:04

Wow.

Christina: 19:06

Within three minutes. And then the two other trucks have to be there within four minutes. So that's every day. And and those are three platoons that rotate and cover us 24/7, 365. So, we have a fire department. We have snowplows and, as I said, grass cutters. We have an entire maintenance team that does nothing but field maintenance and takes care of all of this equipment, let alone IT, HR, you know, Comms and Brand, government and corporate affairs, finance, planning, environmental, wildlife. We have a a wildlife team that makes sure that deer aren't running on the runway and birds are not in danger of getting sucked into an engine and that bees don't swarm a plane wing, which is why we brought in a beekeeper, and now we have 250 apiaries on our property.

Dan: 19:57

You have a beekeeper on staff.

Christina: 19:59

No. He's a contractor.

Dan: 20:01

Okay.

Christina: 20:05

But we were having trouble with bee swarms, and we thought, well, we need to fix this. So let's talk to the person who understands bees.

Dan: 20:12

In the fall of 2025, Christina pulled off a huge infrastructure project, opening a new terminal. It cost $1,700,000,000 and was paid for with bonds, which were floated by the airport authority, and which they now, of course, have to pay back.

Christina: 20:28

Those bonds have an annual obligation of $108,000,000 plus every year. So we wake up in the morning having had no debt for years. Now we are in it for $108,000,000 for capital to pay for the terminal.

Dan: 20:42

Wow.

Christina: 20:42

Okay. Then you put on top of that our "O and M". Right? What does it cost to maintain our staff, to buy chemicals, to buy and service vehicles, and everything that it costs, a cleaning contract, all of that stuff goes into our "O and M".

Dan: 20:58

"O and M" is operations and maintenance. Basically, what it costs to run the airport. So you've got those "O and M" costs and now add these huge payments to make on the $1,700,000,000 project. How do they recoup that? Well, you probably picked this up by now, but airports make money from three key sources, airlines via the gates and counters and baggage facilities they pay for, along with those landing fees we talked about earlier, and passengers via parking and other stuff. And of course, the tenants in the airport, Hudson News and Shake Shack and so on. It's a complicated business made even more complicated by that new terminal. But it was also a huge victory for her to pull off as CEO. I asked her about that. With respect to the new terminal, was there a certain detail that you fought for, and maybe no one else seemed to really care about it, but you pushed for it and and you're proud of it?

Christina: 21:57

Yes. The partnership with the architects. So when we went out to bid for the architects, you know, a lot of our our work is competitively bid. And so we put out a request for qualifications and proposals to the architecture community globally. And we got, I don't know, 20 or 30 proposals back. We got rid of every single one of them that was just like, here's how great we are, and here are our qualifications. And we kept all the ones that said, here's the opportunity for Pittsburgh and why we're excited.

Dan: 22:31

Interesting. So that was, like, the first screen is is are they attending to you and your community?

Christina: 22:36

Right. So what I had said to the team over and over again is we do not want an architect to build their airport in Pittsburgh. We want an architect to build Pittsburgh's airport

Dan: 22:47

Love that.

Christina: 22:48

To the best of their ability. So what we did is we invited in four teams to compete, and that consisted of a ninety minute presentation where they could bring up to 15 people, members of their sub consultants, etcetera, and they could wow us. Now as the CEO, I don't sit in any of those presentations because I don't wanna look like I can be lobbied.

Dan: 23:11

Mhmm.

Christina: 23:11

K? So the team, we have a cross functional team. They've got their selection criteria. They're listening. And then we said, and this is new in the US, we said, please be available for two forty five minute exercises. And they're like, well, to do what? We're like, we'll tell you.

Dan: 23:26

Oh, wow. You gave them, like, a pop quiz of some kind.

Christina: 23:29

We brought in or two organizational psychologists, and we asked them in the first exercise to work with members of our team to come up with some design criteria.

Dan: 23:41

Uh-huh.

Christina: 23:41

And then in the second exercise, we said, just work among yourselves and rank that design criteria. And all we were looking for is who do we think we can work with?

Dan: 23:50

Oh, yeah. That's so good.

Christina: 23:50

People can build buildings.

Dan: 23:52

Yeah.

Christina: 23:52

This was our opportunity to put a new front door onto this amazing community. We wanted somebody who would understand that the community is going to be involved. It doesn't mean that we're gonna design by committee. It doesn't mean that we're going to, you know, have people tell the architect what to do, but we needed the architect to understand how important this was to the community and that they could not just come in and sort of tell us, this is what I'm doing. This is what you need.

Dan: 24:22

Christina also made it a priority to get the airport employees involved with the new design. Because when you don't get input from the right people, dumb things can happen. She gave an example from the old terminal.

Christina: 24:36

There was no freight elevator in the old terminal in the old landside terminal because the architect didn't wanna put one in. So that meant that our cleaning crews would have to wait to go up four stories until passengers were off the elevators. So what does that do for efficiency? Right?

Dan: 24:51

Yeah.

Christina: 24:52

So we made sure that not only was our staff first to hear about the new design, first to give us their opinions, they were involved along the way of how this was going to operate. It doesn't mean they got to decide. It meant they weighed in and we listened.

Dan: 25:09

What's like an everyday example of that? Like, something that maybe wouldn't have gotten thought of if it weren't for their participation.

Christina: 25:16

Well, I can tell you that the paint on the tree columns. So we've got this rolling roof that represents the rolling hills of Western Pennsylvania, but it allows for clerestory light, which is the most energy efficient type of light and makes people feel better. Okay. And the that huge ceiling is supported by structural steel columns that were fabricated to look like tree branches.

Dan: 25:41

Okay.

Christina: 25:41

And they were painted with a very specific color copper paint. And the architects had suggested paint, and we had built a 10,000 square feet at the end of our terminal. We we kinda walled it off, and we used it for testing for materials, everything from the carpeting to the flooring to the seating to the paint. And we built a mock up of the steel column in that area, and we said to the painters, start ramming strollers and baggage carts into it and do patch tests. And the painters picked the paint, and the architect signed off. And the paint that they picked meant that we didn't have to completely envelop an 80 foot tall column with white tarp so that the noxious fumes didn't escape. We were able to pick do you see what I mean?

Dan: 26:33

Yeah.

Christina: 26:34

And our baggage system is brand new, and we made sure that our baggage operators were involved as it was getting constructed and understanding how it was going to work and what they needed to know because now we have all of this digital output. We have data we've never had before. How do we use that? How do we operate as an organization now that we know more about the system? How do we move to predictive maintenance? We have to do that with the people who do the work, not with a bunch of consultants who tell us what we should do. Not that the consultants aren't important, but we can't skip the part where the people who actually get impacted by the change have something to say about how it happens and how they participate in it.

Dan: 27:17

What's something about the way the terminal turned out that would really only make sense for Pittsburgh and not like a similarly sized other city?

Christina: 27:27

So I'm from New England. And when I took this job, within about two months, I understood something about this community that I find really lovely, which is that Pittsburghers pick up and drop off at the airport. They are the people standing, waving goodbye, and they are the people it's like "Love, Actually" every day in our arrivals area. Okay? And we built space for it, like, real. We built space to accommodate that, and we have amenities for people who are there to pick up and drop off.

Dan: 28:03

So, Christina, we always end our episodes with a quick lightning round of questions. Here we go. What's a word or phrase that only someone from your profession would be likely to know, and what does it mean?

Christina: 28:15

Part one thirty nine.

Dan: 28:17

Okay.

Christina: 28:18

That is the part of the code of federal regulations that governs how airports get certified and stay certified. So we have a part one thirty nine inspection. That's what I was talking about earlier. There are several regulations in the code of federal regulations that govern airport security airport security plans. But part one thirty nine is something that everybody in a commercial service airport knows what that means.

Dan: 28:47

What's a tool specific to your profession that you really like using?

Christina: 28:52

My badge. I can get anywhere on the airport, in any facility, to see how things are happening at any time.

Dan: 29:00

Is there anywhere you can't go in the airport?

Christina: 29:04

No. I well, I can't go into the air traffic control tower unless FAA says I can be there. But in terms of our facilities, no. There's nowhere I can't go.

Dan: 29:15

What's a sound specific to your profession that you're likely to hear?

Christina: 29:19

You know, aircraft engines on approach or taking off. I mean, it's just constant between the military and our commercial service operations as well as, you know, private jets. It's there's always activity out here, and it is always tied to an aircraft.

Dan: 29:35

And just for the sake of listeners, like, during this conversation, I've heard several planes a lot of times, the audio processing software is so good, they'll probably be gone by the time you hear it, but it struck me that you are very much a part of the airport experience. It's not like you're in an office 10 miles away or something.

Christina: 29:52

Correct.

Dan: 29:54

Do you have to go through security to get to your office?

Christina: 29:58

Yes. But that's just because we haven't built out all of our offices in the new facility yet. So my offices at the airport are through security, and I have to be cleared to get through there.

Dan: 30:12

Do the TSA agents know you're the airport boss?

Christina: 30:16

Sometimes. Sometimes they do. The ones who see me on a regular basis do, but not all of them. And that's okay with me. I really wanna make sure that I understand what the passenger is going through. So there's a separate checkpoint for employees. Those folks know who I am. But

Dan: 30:31

Mhmm.

Christina: 30:32

You know, one young man, think it was his first or second day on the job, and he was looking because they have to look in every pocket of your bag, and could you please open this? And and he said to me, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I said, this is exactly what you should be doing. You should never ever give me special treatment when it comes to this. And he just kinda calmed down.

Dan: 30:51

What's an aspect of your work that you consistently savor?

Christina: 30:55

I can't even say this without getting emotional, but it's it's that arrivals experience. Like, it's it's true. If you every every holiday season, I make my family watch "Love, Actually" just for the opening scene. That's it. Just for the scene where he says

Love, Actually Clip: 31:10

Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion is starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don't see that. Seems to me that love is everywhere.

Christina: 31:25

It's amazing, and you get snapped back into what really matters fast, and we make that happen. And we make it happen in a beautiful space with a lot of intention and a lot of care for all the people involved.

Dan: 31:42

Would you ever just go to witness that area?

Christina: 31:46

I do that.

Dan: 31:48

Do you?

Christina: 31:49

Yes. I do.

Dan: 31:51

What do you see when you go?

Christina: 31:53

You know, it's it's everything from the little kid with the balloons and the sign. Right? To people who just look like there's one person they're waiting for to come through that door. And when they do, it's like it's like magic. I mean, we've all been there. Right? I remember when my son was in in college. He went to school overseas, and he would come home, and I would think there's there's this throng of people, and I'm looking for this this one person that I need to see. And that that happens every single day in our facilities, and I think that's remarkable to be able to witness it.

Dan: 32:41

Christina Cassotis is the CEO of Pittsburgh International Airport. Have you ever had a good idea at work and then bringing it to life feels like running a gauntlet? Can you convince your boss? What about the other key decision makers? Are your peers on board? Where do you get the budget? It's overwhelming. And maybe you've had the fantasy, I wish I was the CEO so I could just do things without all the nonsense. What I took away from this interview is an airport CEO has to face all that same nonsense. To build the new terminal, Christina had to start with her bosses, the nine members of the board that oversees the airport. Then she had to bring the airlines along because if if they're not on board, the whole thing dies. Then there's the song and dance for the bond ratings agencies, the gatekeepers to that money she needs, and on and on. Here's what struck me. We tend to think power means being able to get your way because of what management theorists call your formal authority. Basically, your ability to direct others because of your role. But notice, Christina couldn't have directed the airlines or the bond agencies even if she'd wanted to. They don't report to her. What she needed was informal authority, influence. That's when people listen to you because of your ideas and who you are rather than because of your title. And that is where Christina shined, not by running people over with power, but by winning them over with her vision. Convincing airlines to offer new travel destinations, responding wisely to weather related and operational emergencies, cobbling together enough revenue to make the books balance, and creating a beautiful space that accommodates adventures, goodbyes, and reunions. Folks, that's what it's like to be an airport CEO. A special thanks to Matthew Cornelius at Airports Council International North America for connecting us with Christina. And I'm a little bit sad to say this is the end of the air travel series. We've done five episodes one week at a time. I'm curious what you thought of it, folks. We've never tried anything like this before. If you wanna share some thoughts either about getting shows every week or about, you know, having a series devoted to one thing or one domain, shoot me a note. I'm at dan@whatitslike.com. I'd love to hear your thoughts. This episode was produced by Matt Purdy. I'm Dan Heath. Thanks for listening.