UNLIKE THE THEN TREND TO FLY OUT TO THE U.S. for a master’s program, I chose to begin work,” recalls Subodh Karnik, the senior vice president of network and revenue management at Delta Airlines in Georgia. After a “traditional” engineering in the “traditional” mechanical engineering stream Karnik joined TCS. “And after a year you can only do programming so much,” laughs the VP. He went on to join the Unilever subsidiary Brooke Bond, which at that time was transitioning from the “typical plantation” company to a true consumer goods company.

In the four years that Karnik spent at the Bangalore offices of Brooke Bond, he was part of a four-member team that helped in the transition. Operations, process, systems and so on were being established and Karnik was a key player in the team, which acted as an internal consulting team. “After four years of frequent traveling and Bangalore life, Mumbai beckoned,” remembers Karnik. He left Brooke Bond to join Tata Burroughs in Mumbai.

Tata Burroughs—after years of being a traditional body shopper—was attempting to set up a consulting division in India, and Karnik was assigned to the project. In a month, the group realized the futility in the plan, and Karnik was back on a traditional project in Michigan. Ernst and Young was overseeing the project, and not surprisingly Karnik was offered a job with them. E&Y was also the merger consultant for a Minneapolis deal between Northwest and Republic airlines. For close to a year, Karnik was working at Northwest and was given a ringside view of the inner workings and dynamics of an airline company. At the end of the merger, Karnik realized that the airline industry was where he wanted to build his career. In the meanwhile Karnik was also picking up an MBA from Michigan. It was all coming together—an MBA, an airline in transition that needed his skills, and an industry that was just beginning its boom.

The Northwest stint remains one of the most memorable ones for Karnik. “It was a time when the unheard was being explored—two big airlines, Northwest and KLM Dutch were working on a joint venture. It was the first of its kind in history and probably the last of them. There were a millions issues on which this deal rested, and the project’s success was an intensely satisfying one for me,” recalls Karnik.

From Northwest, Karnik joined Continental Micronesia, a joint venture in Guam. “I started in the strategy area of the airline industry, and in the Continental job grew to handle revenue management, M&A and so on,” says Karnik. The “bubble” had just burst in Asia and particularly Japan—bad news for the island country which was like the Caribbean for the Japanese tourists. Karnik and his future wife—who was the chief marketing officer of Continental Micronesia—were running the entire operations of the joint venture and managed to turn it around and integrate it with Continental. After that stint, he left to join Delta.

“Delta has 900 aircrafts and over 5,000 seats. People fly from point-to-point and we fly an aircraft from sector to sector. I handle the responsibility of mapping the flights, scheduling the seat pricing and generating revenue from the network,” explains the Delta vice president. “Planning in these uncertain times has been a thrilling experience. The most important element in all this has been the strong sense of integrity—you need to come across as reliable. The other aspect is to be totally honest.”

Karnik rues the fact that he is slowly but surely losing out on his reading and his golf handicap. “I did dream of playing a round every once in a while, but it has remained a dream,” laughs Karnik. “An airline is a new company everyday for the employees—the problems are never the same, the issues are never familiar. But I am surrounded by a group of hard-charging managers who all pull to take this airline to the top, and working here is like firing on jet fuel.”

Karnik lives in Georgia with his CMO-turned-professional photographer wife and two children. “We came from competing airlines and didn’t think it wise to continue that path,” comments the vice president. When he is not calculating the price of your seat on a Delta flight, Karnik says he spends time reading Thomas, the Tank Engine (laughs).