Time & Perspective Quote by Gerard Arpey

That single clause, "because at that time we still thought", does more work than the rest of the sentence combined. Gerard Arpey is ostensibly recounting a rational, spreadsheet-clean decision: integrate TWA, build an efficient connecting hub in St. Louis, capture network value. But the phrasing quietly admits what corporate retrospectives usually sand down: strategy is a moving target, and yesterday's certainties age into today's liabilities.

The intent is managerial self-justification with a built-in escape hatch. By anchoring the decision to a specific moment ("at that time"), Arpey frames American Airlines' TWA integration as prudent under the information available, not as hubris or wishful thinking. It's a subtle inoculation against criticism, especially given how the St. Louis hub story ultimately reads: a bet on mid-continent connectivity that collided with post-9/11 demand shocks, rising low-cost competition, and the brutal math of hub economics.

The subtext is almost elegiac. "Hard work" signals that integration wasn't just systems and routes; it was culture, labor, and operational friction. "Efficient connecting hub" is industry code for a theory of dominance: feed traffic, control flows, make geography pay rent. Calling it a "profitable addition" reveals the true north - not civic loyalty to St. Louis, not nostalgia for TWA, but the promise that the network could be engineered like a machine.

What makes the quote land is its quiet revisionism. It's a leader narrating uncertainty as foresight, then letting one small temporal qualifier confess the opposite: they believed, they acted, and the market disagreed.