American Airlines Apologizes For Declaring Flight Attendants At Company Headquarters A Threat

by Gary Leff

There are elevated terrorism threats with Hamas calling for attacks on Jews today. The world is in a state of crisis, as Iran and Hezbollah try to draw the U.S. into war in the Mideast, after Hamas massacred Israeli civilians.

American Airlines, though, saw the real threat: flight attendants visiting corporate headquarters, looking to deliver at letter of no confidence to CEO Robert Isom as contract talks between their union and the company drag on.

This was the alert, to ‘be on the lookout’ for employees wearing red union t-shirts and lanyards.

The crewmembers didn’t find CEO Isom, but they did track down Senior Vice President Brady Byrnes, himself a former flight attendant, and they delivered the letter and they shared a photo of the hallway meeting on social media.

Flight attendants complain that Byrnes is inaccessible to them and indeed last year chastised a crewmember who contacted him. His shoes have become something of a meme among flight attendants, with the union contrasting the cost of their own shoes with his.

The story also made it into this flight attendant meme making the rounds about the incident:

American, for its part, has sent out an apology to flight attendants calling the security alert “unauthorized” and saying that it has been “rescinded.”

I’m not sure what it means for the alert to have been ‘unauthorized’ other than it wasn’t authorized by anyone who realized that it was a bad idea.

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  1. What are the signs that Iran and Hezbollah are trying to draw the US into a war in the Middle East? Everything I see suggests Iran is not trying to do that and is instead currently doing the exact opposite of that. I would expect that Israel and the neocons would be more eager for a war like that than Iran.

    The Iranians talk a lot of hot air and play bloody dirty games, mostly via proxies, but they want their regime to survive and have been playing along the limits so as to avoid a heads-on state-to-state war with the US and thereby maintain themselves in power across all of Iran and be a regional power.

  2. Gary: “I’m not sure what it means for the alert to have been ‘unauthorized’ other than it wasn’t authorized by anyone who realized that it was a bad idea.”

    Bingo!

  3. Fire every single one of AA union flight attendants and hire at will employees that want to work and respect customers.

    Pay based on performance. This isn’t 1920. Unions are a thing of the past set out to destroy corporations and expecting more and more compensation for less performance and expect the union to support them when they F up

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