American Airlines Doesn’t Update Customers About Delays Even When Fuel Spills Out of the Wing

by Gary Leff

It’s been over 3 years since I wrote about American’s ‘Goldilocks Problem’ boarding planes too early (before stated boarding time on boarding passes) and updating customers about delays too late.

I find that American won’t post flight delays until boarding time for an aircraft, even when those delays are blindingly obvious. And they won’t update delays until revised departure times have passed. That’s an issue because it wastes customers’ time.

If there’s no aircraft at the gate at scheduled boarding time, the plane isn’t leaving on time. It certainly isn’t boarding on time. But unless you’re watching the inbound aircraft (something you always need to do with American) you’ll leave the club lounge, stop working, and go to the gate. That’s lost productivity.

I tweeted about this last week, along with my experience with American’s chicken meatballs, predeparture beverages, and Tortas Frontera’s choriqueso.

It seems a passenger on an American flight with fuel spilling onto the tarmac yesterday discovered American’s penchant for not providing status updates to customers. At least it’s the lack of updates that stood out to me in this real-time passenger account, others were more focused on the fuel issue.

According to American, “A mechanical issue was encountered during the fueling process, which resulted in a minor fuel spill at the gate.”

(HT: Tommy L.)

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. Like this every week for me. This week it was ORD-DTW, they changed the incoming plane for no reason which arrived at ORD early, the incoming flight they changed us to was not even scheduled to arrive until 4:55 PM, we were supposed to board at 4:59 – they never updated the app or the website to delay us even though it was quite obvious that there was no way we were going to board 4 mins after the arriving flight arrived.
    The week before I called the PLT PRO line to see if I could change my flight from ORD-MSP I was supposed to leave at 6:00 Friday morning, I called to see if I could switch to a flight the night before that left ORD at 10:40 PM, they would not waive the change fee even though the weather Friday morning at ORD was calling for thunderstorms. After that I vowed to submit a complaint and ask for 5K miles every time they screwed me over, I did it after the Sunday debacle and they gave me 5K miles.

  2. “…fuel is spills out of the wing….” Can you please edit before posting????

  3. Last week our AA plane got hit by a baggage cart. The pilot deplaned us within 10 minutes and the gate agents started rebooking everyone. It showed still as an ontime flight for 1.5 hours (with a hunk of the wing still laying on the ground) until they finally cancelled it, well after the time we would have arrived. AA is the worst at being honest on flight delays.

  4. A few observations. Fuel (not gasoline) spills are a frequent occurrence at airports. This spill was probably caused by the automatic system not shutting down when one of the tanks was full since it looks like it is coming out of the over flow vent. If that was the case the aircraft can be flown with that condition after the overfill condition is relieved and manual control of the fueling is done.The “paper towels” are actually fuel absorbent mats. Just to allay fears, jet fuel is not some extremely flammable fuel like gasoline. It is basically kerosene and you can throw lit matches into it and it will not ignite unlike gasoline. Mainly what you see here is an environmental issue and someone not paying attention to the fueling.

  5. My favorite American delayed text that seems to happens with some regularity is delayed 15 minutes at a time for 6 hours. It’s one of my rubs.

  6. American’s problem here, unless it’s changed (I left in 2004….yikes), is that updating an obviously incorrect departure time requires a person to input a new departure time in the computer. At 10 minutes past posted departure (at least it used to be 10 minutes), SABRE will begin to “auto update” in 10 minute increments. It’s annoying as hell when it happens. The only solution I can think of is to hold operations personnel accountable for inputting honest departure times when known delays first appear, or to install some kind of predictive software that will do this on its own. Whether that exists or not is something others may be better versed in than me. In any event, I find Delta to be way better at this than AA. I couldn’t tell you if it’s just a focus for their personnel or if they have software that automatically does it.

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