On Fri, 22 Jun 2007 11:10:18 -0700, Jay Honeck
wrote:

It also appears that Mr. Bass has fostered good will with those whom he
leads. That is not a typical characteristic of a "slash & burn"
executive.

Yes, Mr. Bass spent much of his speech telling us how wonderful his
labor relations were now, even to the point of breaking the union.
(They supposedly voted themselves out of existence, because they are
now so happy.)

In the very next segment of his speech, however, he complained about
the absurdly high cost of doing business in Florida (thanks to those
pesky hurricanes) -- and made it quite clear that he was willing (and
planning) to move Piper, lock, stock, and barrel, to whatever state
offered him the most "incentives".

Last time I heard him talking about this kind of stuff was when I was
at Simcom for my Malibu training and he was having some off-the cuff
musings about the analysis of where to put the jet plant due to cost
of facilities, lack of room, and anticipated difficulties in finding
the additional skilled employees that will be needed for jet assembly
in the VRB area. Since it's also been said that the 25 year comments
were also in the context of future airframe (composite?) life
expectency, perhaps context has been lost. It seemed like staying in
VRB for the piston/Meridian line (which seemed quite active when I was
there, with a number of Meridian, Mirage and Saratogas in various
stages of assembly, with the occasional Seminole and Seneca sprinkled
in. I can't say that to my eye there appeared to be any excess room
for airframes which could have been in process if they wanted to be
building any more right now) wouldn't be that big an issue.

But that's just my two cents.