Changing at the Speed of Flight

A sign hangs on the breakroom door in a nondescript building on the fringes of Hartsfield International Airport in Atlanta, Georgia. Business Elite was Delta Air Lines Inc.'s U.S. $100 million move to meet customer demand in merging first-class and business-class service on international routes into an upgraded business class called Business Elite. The humor of the sign on the breakroom door is a subtle indicator of enormous cultural change at Delta that predates even the September 2001 terrorist attacks that decimated the airline industry.