American Airlines Has Started Issuing Grades To Flight Attendants

American Airlines is rolling out performance metrics for flight attendants. As aviation watchdog JonNYC reports, it’s based on previous 12 months of data looking at:

• customer experience (survey data about the flight)
  
• their role in the operation and reliability
  
• Teams usage, CERS report completion times, electronic flight bag compliance, and a monthly overall score.

AA rolling out me@work scores for flight attendants.
Based on the last 12 months data, things like:
-customer experience (based on Anonymized NPS surveys sent out to pax after the flight + other input.)
-operational contribution
-FA coded delays
other
Strikes me as a problem that…

— JonNYC (@xJonNYC) April 21, 2026

While Jon is correct that it’s problematic for individual flight attendants to “get dinged for actions/faults of other [flight attendants] on their crew potentially” the effort strikes me as directionally right but not as strong yet as it needs to be.

These give crewmembers insight into how they’re doing, but at this point doesn’t really affect pay or work assignments.

• American needs a better way to reward top flight attendants, and identify places where re-training is needed (and even where someone is no longer a good fit).

• And this needs to be backed up by real rewards and performance processes.

This benefits employees – there’s little worse for a flight attendant than consistently working with underperforming colleagues. It’s demoralizing when a crewmember puts their all in a job, the people they’re working with do not. And those people receive the same pay, benefits and recognition – while the dedicated colleague has to pick up the slack.

And it’s good for customers, who receive better service when the right people are in the right role and they’re recognized and rewarded for their efforts. It gets the incentives right. That ultimately benefits shareholders, too, because a key thing American has lacked is an experience customers will pay more for. It’s something that former CEO Doug Parker identified at the airline’s 2017 Investor Day as the key opportunity for differentiation, “making culture a competitive advantage.”

From what’s known so far about how these scores are being calculated, they seem imperfect. That doesn’t make it not a good start, though.

• Customer experience / anonymized surveys. Likelihood to recommend scores and service-specific questions are exactly soemthing the airline should be measuring and looking at in the aggregate. Flight attendants are the primary customer-facing employees passengers are interacting with on the flight. Individual experiences will be affected by more than the flight attendant (delay, food, cleanliness, non-working wifi).

• Operational contribution. Timely sign-in, door-close support, predeparture tasks, use of company communication channels, report completion, having their required materials in compliance all matter. Measuring controllable behavior is important. Keeping electronic flight bags current is non-negotiable. Blending in non-controllable items into a score is both unfair and leads to bad ratings and wrong business intelligence and evaluations.

• Flight attendant-coded delays. Airlines use delay codes to classify causes, and those include crew availability and late boarding. Internal delay codes are toxic when used to assign blame. United moved away from internal delay codes in 2021 because they created employee-vs-employee blame games. (They still reported DOT-required categories, which differ from internal codes used to determine whose fault a delay was.)

  A late report, emergency equipment checks not completed until door-close time, and other responsibilities are meaningful to track. Misassigned blame when the issue is late catering late, gate snafus, wheelchair issues, cleaning, security, or customer servicing issues (passenger conflict) is a problem when attributed to cabin crew.

• Door close metrics. Exact on-time departure matters, every minute of delay can compound, but it’s been used at the airline poorly – American historically didn’t invest in the systems that really supported getting flights out on time with everything ready to go. They’d skimp on cleaning, go out without catering, and try to turn planes too quickly. Judging flight attendants on doors close creates an incentive not to solve onboard problem.

  And passengers seemed like an annoyance that got in the way of an efficient operation. The focus on exact on-time departures (not arrivals) didn’t even get them operational reliability.

  Most importantly, flight attendants are only a small piece of getting to door close on time. Gate agents, passengers, bags, cleaners, tech ops, pilots, wheelchairs all matter.

• CERS report completion times. Filing reports lets the airline track operational issues both for specific incidents and aggregate metrics. Safety and service reports are more useful when filed promptly. But making report timing or volume becomes part of an individual’s score, it can discourage reporting in the first place.

• Electronic flight bag compliance. Flight attendants use an electronic flight bag, and it requires a current iOS and version to be up to date when reporting for flights. Flight attendants have to sync Comply365 before the start of each trip sequence.

Reportedly by the way credit card approvals are score “accelerators” in this new system.

United has used passenger feedback heavily looking at service satisfaction, whether passengers were thanked, whether cabin crew were visible, and whether they were friendly.

Delta’s Endeavor regional subsidiary says flight attendants need high scores on the Flight Attendant Interaction question of the Delta customer satisfaction survey. They’re provided monthly average survey scores by email.

This isn’t new. But it isn’t likely to get American close to where it needs to be. They need a process for moving out underperformers, and they need to reward real performance. I wrote at the time that the current flight attendant contract was being negotiated that historic raises were an opportunity to introduce accountability. They could have gotten ghost riders as part of the deal, evaluating individual flight attendant performance and providing real coaching opportunities. Instead they paid more for labor peace, didn’t really get labor peace (the union is calling for the CEO’s head) and didn’t get service improvement either.