Casey at the Controls

No airline has been fighting through more turbulence than American Airlines: in the past two years it has been buffeted by two scandals (involving alleged kickbacks from the airline's magazine printers and illegal campaign contributions), a pilot slowdown, the fuel shortage and a financial downdraft that last year brought it a record loss of $48 million. Searching for a new president to steady the controls, chairman C.R. Smith reached completely outside the airline industry and picked a newspaper executive Albert V. Casey, 54, president of the Times Mirror Co. of Los Angeles.

An easygoing Irish Bostonian who is described by friends as a "fiendishly good domino player," Casey earned a M.B.A. from Harvard and started out as a railroad executive with the Southern Pacific. Later he became a vice president of the railway Express Agency. For the past eleven years, he has guided the Times Mirror into ventures ranging from cable television to the manufacture of flight-training systems. The White House considered Casey for the $65,000-a-year chairmanship of the U.S. Railway Association, a government agency that will administer the recognized Northeast railroads. But American got him for salary, bonuses and stock options worth about $250,000 a year.

A crack financial man, Casey says, "My job will be to create a climate for change."

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