Perhaps in no other industry is the brand of a company so closely allied with the brand of its home city and operational hub.
   Spence Kramer, the airline's lead spokesman, said the

Rental investment of both the office and industrial varieties has come to Oakland from APL, which employs 700 in the city as well as 200 longshoremen at its terminal. In 2005 the company signed a 10- year lease extension on its downtown Oakland offices. That was followed this summer by the signing of a 15- year lease extension for the Middle Harbor Terminal at the busy Port of Oakland, with two five- year options. APL opened the terminal in 1974, and has found it a vital conduit for U.S. trade with Asia.    A terminal renovation over the next three years will increase annual container handling capacity from 170,000 lifts to 460,000 lifts. The renovated terminal will complement APL's other West Coast operations in L.A. and Seattle. APL spokesman Mike Zampa says the company's investment in the terminal improvements will amount to $55 million.

company was looking for a place where the Virgin brand would resonate the most. "This is a forward- thinking city," he says of San Francisco, "with a lot of companies and a lot of technological innovation. Those are some of the core values to the Virgin brand."
   While Kramer says the nature of such marketing assistance is not quantifiable, it's a natural for all parties to want to parlay all available marketing resources. Those parties include the city and county, as well as locally based organizations ranging from Stanford University to the San Francisco Giants – what Kramer calls "big- name identifiers."
   "We plan on being pretty robust, beyond what the city and state provide," he says.
   One element the state will provide is another $10 million toward training workers, whose number may reach as high as 1,200.
   Todd Pawlowski, vice president of airports and customer service for Virgin America, says training rooms for flight attendants and pilots are just a part of the layout designed by Lundberg Design and built by Venture Builders, in addition to an operations control center that "looks like something out of NASA.
   "We need to get a bunch of people in there now," he says. "We've been hiring on a strategic level, focusing on people with subject matter expertise in FAA certification and the DOT certification process. Department heads and a couple layers of management are in place. We hired our initial cadre of pilots for proving flights, but we have not yet begun to hire the bulk of our employees.
   "We also have been made aware of various agencies that would like to help us when we crank up our recruiting," he continues, as well as various colleges that may partner with the airline as it develops its training curriculum and work- and- learn program.
   Pawlowski says the site selection process started in July 2003 and included CFO Bob Dana, Virgin USA CEO Francis Theroux and two consultants.
   "We sat in a room in a loft in Soho in Manhattan and had a business plan put together by our CFO, outlining the major markets we wanted to launch into," he says, though no further information about those markets has been released by Virgin. From a dozen cities, the group narrowed it to six: L.A., San Francisco, Northern Virginia near Dulles, Philadelphia, New York and Boston. At that point the outreach began to local and state governments, developers, brokers and airport directors.
   "We set out on a fact- finding mission, trying to understand their real estate markets and facilities already in close proximity," says Pawlowski. "We got into the weeds of demographics of work force, unemployment levels, cost of living, CODB in each state, taking corporate taxes into consideration. We talked to the government officials about incentives, and spoke at great length about opportunities to partner on marketing and advertising efforts."
   That mattered competitively, as Virgin looked at whether the competition was already at one of the six locations – for instance, Independence (now defunct) and US Airways were already ensconced in the D.C.- Virginia area. Meanwhile, California had not had an airline based there since PSA was acquired by US Airways in the 1980s, despite being home to the nation's largest and arguably most diverse total state population.
   And yes, it turns out that the climate referred to by Bechtel's Marshall was actually a factor as well: Maintenance can be performed outdoors.
   "That rules out Kennedy and Boston," says Pawlowski, "because it's difficult to conduct maintenance on the ramp out there in February and January."
   In fact, the airline had initially announced New York as its headquarters destination while keeping its operational base in San Francisco.
   "We tried to launch the airline with that structure in place, and after five or six months, trying to start a company – particularly a company with national ambitions – from a bicoastal standpoint was proving too challenging from a communications perspective. Trying to get people together as often as we needed to was proving challenging. So in the early spring of 2005, Fred decided that it made sense to try to consolidate operations and HQ in one location, and San Francisco won out in that decision."
   "There is so much 'us and them' mentality in the airline business," Kramer adds. "We didn't want that, we had a chance to start fresh and all be in this together."
   But the move doesn't just facilitate better meetings.
   "San Francisco is a unique airport," says Pawlowski, identifying it as one of few in its category with room to grow and plenty of terminal, parking and gate space. What's more, it just opened a world- class international terminal.
   Operational efficiency was paramount as well.
   "We focused primarily on the West Coast because of our type of model in terms of route network and aircraft utilization," says Pawlowski. In this case, "we were going to achieve utilization going from west to east, with red- eyes working in our favor and aircraft in the sky during more hours of the day."