American Airlines Chief Operating Officer David Seymour went on the Airlines Confidential podcast this week to talk up his airline’s response to last week’s major storm. American was hit far harder than other airlines, cancelled far more flights – nearly 10,000 – and took much longer to recover.
Seymour’s message, three times during the interview was that the airline’s “technology worked.” He claimed that they didn’t “lose track of our crew members in our system” and he also claimed that no flight attendants were stuck sleeping in airports – despite what his airline’s CEO says, and what flight attendants themselves say.
Now, in terms of, you know, I’ve seen the media reports about crew members sleeping, but I’ve asked the team on multiple occasions because there’s a mechanism for which they sleep. have to, you know, they can report these issues.
I will tell you that our crew members probably waited for hotel rooms longer than normal under normal irregular ops situation. But over the course of that time, we secured 6,000 additional hotel rooms in our hub locations in advance, knowing that we would have some cancellations that we would have to get them hotel rooms. We went to a manual process and used that 1100 times to get hotel rooms for our crew members.
…So I tell you, I haven’t seen the reports of them sleeping on floors and all that. I will tell you that they waited longer..to get, you know, the hotel rooms to get their new schedule, revised schedule. That’s sheer volume. But the fact that we came up as quick as we did once the storm had passed shows that we have the capability, but our technology worked as it should.
I’m not sure anyone but Seymour would characterize American’s recovery from meltdown as ‘quick’ but I’m genuinely having a hard time reconciling his comments with what employees went through over the course of the storm.
Delta used to go long stretches without cancelling a flight – by simply ‘delaying’ a flight by 18 hours or three days. By the same logic, I suppose, flight attendants aren’t forced to sleep in airports if they eventually get a room 18 hours later?
Flight attendants did report sleeping in airports, because the airline didn’t have rooms for them. Pilots are comfortable coming out of pocket for a room and waiting to get reimbursed. Many flight attendants are not (or aren’t in a position to). And pilots often get priority.
They also reported not being able to get through to scheduling, the airline thinking they were in a different city than the one they were actually in, and being schedled to work flights that they weren’t legal for – pilots and planes with passengers were waiting on flight attendants, and operations didn’t seem to know that the flight attendants had been delayed hours getting into a hotel the night before so hadn’t yet had their legally-required rest.
American’s CEO – Seymour’s boss! – acknowledged flight attendants without a place to sleep in his remarks to employees after last week’s earnings call.
I know throughout the rest of our system, some of our crewmembers didn’t have a place to stay last night.
Here’s how the New York LaGuardia flight attendant base President describes things,
Flight Attendants were left without hotels, stranded for hours, sleeping in unsafe and unacceptable conditions, unable to reach Crew Scheduling, disconnected after hours on hold, and forced to navigate a collapsing operation with little to no support.
…I have served as Base President for five years. During that time, this base has endured approximately eight major irregular operations, each followed by nearly identical assurances that the next one would be different. It never is. At some point, apologies without action stop being apologies. They become deflection.
Management continues to characterize these events as “unforeseen” and “not normal days.” That claim is simply false. Irregular operations are not rare. They are predictable. Winter weather, system strain, hotel shortages, staffing failures, and call center overload are not surprises. They are recurring events that management has repeatedly chosen not to adequately plan for.
Flight attendants were stuck overnight in airports over the summer. In 2021 American flight attendants were stuck sleeping in airports and again in 2022.
This happens during irregular operations – usually bad weather – but the airline is supposed to staff up to ensure rooms are made available to their employees. They promised that their own employees would back up the hotel and limo desk, too, to make sure flight attendants could get help. It’s not the first time this has happened. American has even made promises it wouldn’t happen again but it seems to keep happening with them.
For years, American Airlines focused on the bet that if they got their operation in order everything else would follow and they’d make money. That wasn’t true – the operation is table stakes, and then they have to compete for business. But American never got its operation in order. And that’s not just completing flights on-time. They’ve been the industry laggard in mishandled bags. They’ve been the industry laggard in mishandled wheelchairs. They have involuntarily bumped more passengers than anyone else.
So when Seymour simply says that operational failures are outside of their control and that everything worked, I simply don’t know what airline’s operations he thinks he’s been running for the past decade.
I have to wonder about willingness to acknowledge operational failures, and therefore whether meaningful improvements will ever follow repeated apologies.
Perhaps if David Seymour and Robert Isom had to spend 36 hours trapped in an airport wearing their custom $5000 suits and custom $1000 shoes, without lounge access or credit cards, they’d have a better appreciation of what their employees experienced. That’s my challenge to them.
The fact the CEO states something completely opposite to what David Suckmore says just tells you there are serious issues within AA…
just waiting for the hammer to drop and some C-suite cucks to go.
@steve — Nice use of ‘cucks,’ sir.
There’s no guarantee that flight attendants would have been reimbursed. They typically don’t expense items as everything is prepaid and they get a Per Diem to take care of things like meals. Hotel rooms would have been outrageously expensive. They would have had to risk paying $500 out of pocket, a lot of money for flight attendants, particularly if no one from crew scheduling told them that they would have been reimbursed.
Come on. Every flight attendant out there has credit cards. If you are gonna cross your arms and “That’s not my job to book rooms” then expect rooms to go poof as others pilots, passengers, smart flight attendants book those rooms.
I don’t know why the great irony never hit me before, but AA’s focus on reliability and timeliness is a hoot. Their ops performance is at the bottom of the industry and appears to be eroding. Imagine if it hadn’t been a focus.
Which of the two execs is Abbott and which is Costello?
I am openly questioning this mans sanity – as someone who was at DFW on Monday of that week from 9:00am to 1:30am and experienced total chaos; who watched one flight be listed but at a VIRTUAL gate…I can only conclude he is not living amongst his clients or has any experience doing so. That the PR team allowed him on a podcast to defend what happened – WHAT WORKED SIR?
The fact that he went on a podcast to presumably toot his own horn is… impressive, in a way.
I’ve never seen someone make such a clear, concise case for their own dismissal.
we’re living in the age of alternative facts and zero accountability
isom can’t allow the truth of a needed 1 Trillion dollar systems rewrite get to the analysts
nothing is going to improve with respect to american melts because the systems CAN’T improve
american has stage 4 cancer of the skeleton – southwest had it too – but that’s another topic
the entire airline, all of american, all of the software, the operations, all of the systems, have been scaled and scaled and scaled from a fleet of 500 doing 77m pax miles w/ 2000 daily flights in 1990 to a fleet of 1000 doing 249m pax miles w/ 6000 daily flights in 2026
southwest has always had a simpler operation so in a way their 22 melt was more egregious
but again that’s another topic…..
the automation of the airline business did start with the green screen reservation systems (the “GDS”) in the early 60s but really got underway with the advent of less expensive distributed computing in the 10 years either side of ’95…….. american’s cancer diagnosis is this: they have never rewritten or upgraded anything….. they only add new systems and new layers which exponentially increase the complexity of the overall architecture, exponentially increase the cost to add new functionality and exponentially increase the cost to rewrite and replace the shambling mound in use today – this is why the ua and dl “apps” deliver functionality that aa can only dream of and southwest can’t even conceptualize
there is the potential of another ‘y2k problem’ for mainframe technology in 2038
fujitsu has announced the end of mainframe manufacturing in 2030 and end of support in 2035
ibm has announced roadmaps for mainframe technology in to the 2050s
but i wouldn’t invest miles-earning spend in any airline without a cunning plan to be in front of the 2038 problem
of the 4 major us airlines, delta and united are confirmed as having taken a proactive approach to this situation having spent half a trillion each over the past decade+ albeit 100 million at a time, chipping away at it writing their own PSS systems that will eventually run without any mainframe tpf code whatsoever
the dallas carriers are cooked – the only solution to prevent half the us air travel industry from catastrophic melts will be the merger of the dallas carriers with atlanta and/or chicago
@timdunn please have kleenex handy when you unzip – your keyboard thanks you
Seymour is doing a trumpism.. “It’s a competitor airline HOAX, the FA’s were not sleeping on airport floors , what you are seeing is just a few uniforms piled up.. don’t believe your eyes! ” Rich people sometimes are just the worst.
@hagbard celine — You had me at “unzip”… LOL.
no kleenex necessary, sweetheart.
It hasn’t been lost for quite some time that the two Texas carriers are seriously undermanaged compared to other carriers… but then Spirit is Florida based and JetBlue is New York based and they’re a mess.
I am very glad to see that you are acknowledging that DL has invested in its IT just as much as UA has and at enormous expense.
I am not really sure of your credentials but I know that a lot of people don’t understand how much DL is invested in IT and I am glad that you are saying so.
Seriously, why the sudden change in your tune to start recognizing that I have been telling the truth?
There is absolutely NO written agreement that the company will reimburse a FA for a hotel if they pay. It’s ASSUMED you will get your money back based on the situation, but sticking a new hire with a hotel bill on starting salary is a huge question mark. As a lawyer once told me, if it’s not in writing, it didn’t happen.
You use that word a lot. I do not think it means what you think it does.
Mr.Gary these are lies because the bad publicity is getting out that it wasn’t just weather and they dropped the ball. Yes we had flight attendants on hold 10 plus hours I myself was on hold 3 and trying to call anybody at dfw to answer.there’s pictures of fas sleeping on floors in the terminal and crew rooms. Also the fact they offered VLOA for January that also set us up for failure too and then they offered time and a half but by that point word had gotten out about people being stuck for days . And its “part of the business “ no absolutely not Mr.Isom. Sorry doesn’t cut it and its a disservice to our passengers as well. So embarrassing.I think the DOT needs to start fining us but that wont happen. Nobody has faith in us anymore such a disgrace to a historic brand. But itll be the usual so sorry will never happen again and the union will blast them and nothing changes. Every day is a circus
@Alex
Reminds me more of the “Three Stooges” Biden, Harris, Mayorkas telling the American people that the Southern Border is secure.
@Tim Dunn — I understand Spirit’s woes, but, jetBlue is not a ‘mess.’ Personally, I think you’re threatened, because jetBlue’s Mint has better food and operates lie-flat on routes even more than many Delta flights (like transcon). If anything, DL could learn from them on that (and I bet behind the scenes, the folks in Atlanta get that). Sure, operational reliability is an issue for all airlines.
For better and worse, let’s be honest, here, Tim, profitability is really because of the cards/loyalty programs, not the actual flying, anymore. (In fact, these airlines would love it if we’d all just stay home so they can sell more points, play accounting tricks, get more public bailouts, and buyback their own stocks, while forcing retirements, and pretending they’re too poor ‘on paper’ to pay anyone anything anymore.) So, yeah, B6 could do better than Barclays; no one uses their cards for everyday spend, like, apparently folks still do with Amex.
Good to know that when American Airlines cancels my first-class flight and abandons everyone without hotel accommodations (again, thanks to a mechanical failure), at least I’ll be sharing the freezing, sticky airport floor with the entire flight crew. Nothing brings people together like a 3 a.m. game of “Guess That Stain” and fighting over the last outlet with my new best friends in a flight crew uniform. Last year, American Airlines flight attendants were awarded $18 million for being mandated to wear their toxic uniforms. Read more: https://prettybusinessworld.com/american-airlines-flight-attendants-awarded-18-million-for-toxic-uniforms/
@1990 – I’ll vouch that B6 is an operational failure that threatens the very foundations of the business. They run late, not because of normal stuff like weather, but because they don’t have the backend operations setup to be efficient. On a perfectly normal day last summer, for example, I took a 3h delay on B6 flight ORD-JFK because ops had a delay for our flight’s original pilots and spent literal hours getting a backup crew for our inbound and return. There are ways to be proactive about that. JetBlue doesn’t use them, for whatever reason.
On the other hand, they have a great product and I otherwise like the employee culture. They’re very chill in stressful situations, Mint looks fantastic (haven’t flown it yet), the seats are reasonably spacious, snacks are tasty, everybody gets live TV, the screen knows the name of the pax in the seat and can even *save your media preferences across flights!*
They have some amazing passenger tech they’ve invested in! But then… they can’t get the planes out on time. I just checked 12 months of data (Oct 24 to Sep 25, latest 12mo available) at aviationdb.net, and they’re not the worst amongst the majors (Spirit, Frontier, AA, DL, UA, Southwest, AS, and B6), but they’re consistently bottom 3, basically tied with AA for second worst after Frontier.
Gary, I’m glad you posted this. I was listening to the podcast last night and was wondering if Seymour was talking about the same event he was being asked about.
Even the hosts were talking with each other after the interview about how they expected something more forceful from Seymour.
You’ve been the COO of HOW many airlines?
@DesertGhost – enough to know not to contradict my CEO!
@Gary Leff — Zing! Got’em!
In the 38 years I was part of AA I got to tell you , I tought I heard everything well nearly but definitely one thing I can tell you this DUO let’s call them BUFONS cause they’re both they don’t have a clue of what they’re doing NONE they are complete incompetent I wonder how many sausages and cream they had to get there. Horton was stupid but this mother flowers are way WORSE
Justs another example of the bunch of incompetent fools trying to run(down) American Airlines. Someone needs to get a gag on Seymore or, better still, escort him off the premises. If Isom doesn’t do it after this fiasco it just confirms the foxes are (trying) running the henhouse!!
Not sure ypu can expect better from American, they send me a “time to check in,” “save money pay your baggage in advance,” and a link to their “trusty app,” for my documents. Now, I can’t pay international flight luggage in advance, I have special baggage ie. Dive equipment that has to be checked at airport in the special services line (and I have to wate 45 minutes every time I check in at a kisosk because the moron guarding the special services line makes me go to the kiosk that didn’t work on any of my last 15 flights to the Caribbean, and the app (which as far as I can tell has never worked on android) and is completely useless. In two hours, I leave for the airport to get on what will be my last American flight. While Inlove the convenience of not having to pass through Atlanta (or having my soul delayed in Atlanta on its way to heaven should I perish on a Delta flight), I do NOT care enough about convenience to fly an airline that is barely a step above Frontier and whatever other bargain airline is trending. I gave American a shot, but it is back to Delta.
By Saturday morning AA had already cancelled ALL of their Sunday JFK operations! When I looked at Flight aware around 10am Sunday both UA and DL were operating there with flights coming and going. B6 and Spirit were flying, too. I’m no airline ops expert but when you say you’re being proactive in the airline industry I don’t think that’s what you mean.
@denver refugee
i should /sarc my comments
i will use the real number going forward
but 100 billion vs. 1 trillion are meaningless in this conversation – american will never spend what is needed until the entire architecture has a chernobyl collapse from which there is no return
Even though I am an AA Flyer for over 40 years I will never apologize for the ignorance and flat out stupidity of the C Suite. The entire situation rests with the AWA Tempe Mindset in running an Airline. I used to fly the REAL USAirways (the rendition created by Stephen Wolf) and once the Clown Show from the Desert (AW) got their hands on the larger US Operation things began to take a turn (iirc2005) fast forward to 2011 when AA entered BK and then eventually merged/combined/ WTF you want to call it, the same Circus Clowns from AW were attempting a Huge Airline in the mindset of a small regional airline like America West. I was never a fan of Doug Parker but he was 10x better than this buffoon Robert Isom who talks out of both sides of his mouth and is as genuine as a $3 dollar bill. I have had many Employees tell Me they Hate Him and the dysfunctional mess of an operation they run. I have been very fortunate not being impacted by much disruption and most of the Employees have always treated Me well but as far as the Management of the AIrline…………….They all need To Go!