Biography|Doug Parker — The World's Largest Airline Closed in This Building on 9 December 2013

On the morning of 9 December 2013, employees filled the headquarters campus at 4333 Amon Carter Boulevard in Fort Worth. AMR Corporation came out of bankruptcy. US Airways Group disappeared into a new holding company: American Airlines Group. The ticker on Nasdaq became AAL.

Parker, who had run US Airways from Tempe, became chief executive of the combined carrier. Tom Horton, the outgoing AMR chief, moved to chairman for a transition period. Parker later took that title as well.

The gathering started before 8 a.m. Central. Parker and a group of executives and labor leaders rang the Nasdaq opening bell from the Fort Worth stage. FlightGlobal, Skift, and the Associated Press all dated the close to that Monday.

The new group was billed as the world's largest airline by several measures: about 6,700 daily flights, more than 330 destinations, more than 100,000 employees. Integration of certificates, websites, and workforces ran into 2015.

This is not the Skyview campus at 1 Skyview Drive. That complex opened years later, after a 2015 decision to replace the aging Amon Carter buildings. In 2013 the company still sat in offices built from the late 1980s, just south of Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport.

Parker had started in American's finance department in 1986 after a campus interview in Nashville. Twenty-seven years later he walked into the same company's headquarters as CEO of a carrier that had absorbed his two previous ones.

He stepped down as CEO on 31 March 2022. Robert Isom succeeded him. Parker remained chairman into 2023 and later joined the Qantas board.

Photo: Josh Freed, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.