These Sun Country top bosses went 'undercover' as flight attendants

Some people took up breadmaking or mountain biking during the pandemic. Sun Country's chief executive Jude Bricker went to flight attendant school.

Becoming a flight attendant seemed to Bricker the best way to get out from behind a desk and better experience what's happening at the Twin Cities-based airline, he said.

"It's a little bit humbling," Bricker said, "I'm worse at that job than most of our staff — all of our staff, quite frankly."

After taking the company through an initial public offering earlier in the year, Bricker and the company's chief operating officer, Greg Mays, over the summer completed every lesson and training drill required of flight attendants by the Federal Aviation Administration.

The government agency issued an exemption that gave them 90 days to complete the work. Sun Country's training typically lasts four weeks.

They hopped into a swimming pool and hoisted new-hire classmates onto rafts for the emergency water landing exercise. They jumped down a giant yellow slide for the evacuation drill. And they had to memorize safety reviews and checklists.

"The thing that opened my eyes a bit is the volume of info that comes at the flight attendants [during training] is pretty overwhelming," Mays said.

The COVID-19 crisis hit airlines and employees hard last year. At the lowest point in the summer of 2020, Sun Country was flying less than 10% of its prepandemic passenger schedule. The airline compensated in part with charter service and expansion of its cargo service, helped by a new contract to fly for Amazon.com's Prime Air service.

Meanwhile, as passenger service recovered this year, flight attendants at all airlines have contended with more unruliness by passengers, particularly people who are upset by mask mandates and other restrictions.

"Being a flight attendant can be a grind, particularly now," Bricker said. "There are more passenger disruptions and it's just a tense environment. There's more anxiety with traveling. I think a lot of flight attendants are just hanging it up because the job is harder than it was in the past."

The likelihood of a Sun Country flight managing a disruptive passenger — defined as behavior that affects a flight's schedule or requires removal by law enforcement — has doubled since before the pandemic.

"There's no better time [for a CEO to do this] in the sense that there's never been a worse time [for flight attendants]," said Bob Mann, a consultant and former airline executive.

Coming off the IPO, the experience gave Bricker and Mays a turnabout in focus after spending months dealing with investment managers and bankers. Earlier this month, Bricker sold some shares in a secondary offering that resulted in a payout exceeding $30 million. He still owns about 3% of Sun Country, the second-biggest stake among U.S. airline CEOs in their companies.

Barbara Mikkelson, Sun Country's manager of inflight training and flight attendants, said she saw new sides of her bosses as Bricker and Mays immersed themselves in the training program.

"They knew when to be serious," she said. "They were in it to be a flight attendant. But we can also have a lot of fun in training — and they took that on."

Bricker, when studying the curriculum and company procedures, came across some things he didn't expect.

"There were a couple policy issues that were a surprise," Bricker said. "A couple things I wrote down that we need to change, that didn't make sense to me."

Peter Cappelli, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, said efforts by leaders to show they care, or stand up for employees in tough situations, can build bridges. Completing a full training certification, he said, is "a really smart thing to do."

"It's such a good idea that extending it to other jobs would be smart, too: baggage handlers, gate agents, and so forth," Cappelli said. "CEOs get a much better sense of what is really going on that isn't filtered by their marketing people. Also, it does a lot for the company's employees to think that the CEO cares about the jobs they do."

Southwest Airlines co-founder Herb Kelleher was beloved by many employees for valuing workers and demonstrating his appreciation. When he was CEO from 1982 to 2001, Kelleher regularly worked shifts on the baggage ramp or restocking peanuts on aircraft. He built, and encouraged, relationships and empathy across work groups as Southwest grew from a regional carrier into the nation's No. 4 airline by revenue.

Today, relations between airline management and their employees are often riddled with tension over pay, hours, outsourced work and treatment.

Bricker is just now entering the first contract negotiation with Sun Country's pilots union since he joined the company in 2017. So far, that process has been amiable, but it's still in the early stages.

Several times a month, Bricker — who regularly dons company-branded cotton polos and fleece vests — tries to get out into various parts of the airline's daily flow, whether it be in hangars, on tarmacs or inside aircraft.

Bricker and Mays brainstormed ways to get deeper into the airline's operations. "I couldn't just go and be a mechanic — their school is long — and of course pilots' [training] is multiple years," Bricker said.

Flight attendants make up the airline's largest labor group and they see — or hear about — any of the airline's quality or service issues. Bricker also already had some in-flight experience: He also attended flight attendant school when he was an executive at Allegiant Air.

On the first Sun Country flight Bricker worked this summer, he said he spilled some drinks and heard some complaints from passengers. He did not tell them he was the airline's CEO.

"I'm out there serving drinks and you hear, 'Hey, this power unit for my phone isn't working and the last time I flew it wasn't working either,' " Bricker said. "So, you know, I have to look into that. Do we have the right reporting for service discrepancies, cleanliness?"

He plans to work one round-trip every quarter, but as an additional crew member rather than taking another flight attendant's spot.

As much as Bricker would like to be considered by crew members as a colleague and a regular flight attendant, they know they are working with the boss. There are no cameras, nor disguises, as the CEOs who appear on the TV show "Undercover Boss" rely on.

"They're probably going to act different," he said. "I wish that wasn't the case, but there isn't anything I can do about it."

Passengers on his next flight might also know who he is because, Bricker said, "There's only one 'Jude' in the company."