Passengers on board American Airlines flight 3286 from Las Vegas to Dallas on October 4th witnessed surprising levels of hostility in first class and ended with police meeting the aircraft, but reports suggest that the police could never figure out quite why.
According to one Executive Platinum customer seated in first class on the 2.5 hour Airbus A321 flight, the pilot began the flight during boarding with an announcement that “no rudeness toward flight attendants would be tolerated.” Passengers shouldn’t be rude! (Really, nobody should.)
Service in the forward cabin sounds like about what I’ve come to expect on many American flights, unfortunately. Some are great – there are some amazing flight attendants who deliver impeccable service because it’s in their nature and they take pride in their work, even if it doesn’t benefit them in any way to do so (or harm them if they don’t). Unfortunately this is not all that uncommon in my experience,
The flight attendant serving first class delayed service for over an hour while economy was already served. When a passenger got up to request a drink, she chastised him, then began serving slowly—one drink at a time—while apologizing profusely for the lack of ground service, even though no one had complained.
When she reached my row, she leaned over me to confront my seatmate (who hadn’t spoken at all) and accused him of being upset and having reported her to the captain. I calmly clarified that the frustration wasn’t about ground service—it was about the delay and her handling of the situation.
That’s when a passenger says that the flight attendant contacted the captain, saying customres were:
- “mean”
- “belligerent”
- “probably drunk”
- “not first class”
She was then reported to have told passengers that she would “call the union” and that “an officer would meet us on landing.” She then “barricaded herself in the front galley, refused to complete service.” Other cabin crew stepped in to take her duties.
The pilot came out, patted her on the shoulder, and said “I’ve got your back.”
Upon landing, she announced over the PA that police were waiting for specific passengers—listing 8–10 last names…We were escorted off the plane by police, who asked, “Why are we here?” and laughed when we explained. They also later told the AA employees that they shouldn’t be used as a threat, or in this manner.
According to American Airlines,
Our goal is to provide a positive travel experience for all our customers. Our team has been in touch with several customers from this flight to learn more about their experience and address their concerns, and we are actively investigating the matter.
I understand that my reader was offered miles, which he declined. I believe other passengers have been offered compensation as well. I view American here as (1) taking the issue seriously, and (2) not disputing the basic account.
I’d like to give some benefit of doubt to the flight attendant here. I flew Lufthansa in first class one time where I was desperate to get off the plane, and considered asking to be downgraded to business class, because of a hostile crewmember.
We were refused our choice of appetizers, my wife nad I were left to share food, and items were skipped. She wouldn’t place items on trays, handing us hot plates, and left us stacks of utensils. She huffed and puffed when asked for items she’d skipped over, and served the wrong drinks seemingly on purpose, and refused to tell us what was available for dessert eventually offering only one of the available options. We were scolded for not having trays out in advance of meal service. It turned out that the flight attendant was dealing with an undisclosed medical issue of some kind.
On the other hand, I do think there’s something systematic that American Airlines should be doing here.
- United did post-David Dao de-escalation training, this served them well during the pandemic. American diverted flights far more often – flight attendants were given mask rules and little guidance on how to handle the ensuing conflict. Conflict with passengers seems more common on American than other large airlines.
- American flight attendants said service would improve once pay improved but they got a record-breaking contract and that hasn’t changed the experience. While United crews are highly variable, even in the absence of a raise in four years you don’t see this as often there. It seems like they understand the assignment in terms of delivering a premium product (even if service is sometimes lackluster) while American flight attendants really haven’t been sold on a service vision.
I think that Delta has a service advantage as a non-union carrier. They pay flight attendants well but don’t have a union trying to get flight attendants like this one at United re-hired. However, the one thing that Southwest really has going for them is their employees and they’re heavily unionized.
What I think is going on here is that Southwest is simply better at talent selection and better at selling a culture (at least they were, we’ll see whether that really lasts through the Elliotization of the carrier, making Southwest just like the legacies).
American Airlines used to say that getting hired as a flight attendant was tougher than getting into Harvard. They rejected a greater percentage of applicants than the Ivy League schools!
But this suggests to me that that management is not very good at picking talent! If they have such a broad field to choose from, surely they’d wind up with great talent across the board!
Ultimately though there needs to be leadership explaining what kind of experience they’re trying to provide, explaining exactly what’s expected, and holding employees accountable. As I wrote at the time, last year’s new flight attendant contract negotiations were a perfect opportunity to pair accountability with big raises but there was little attempt to do so.
Gary, your conclusion is right: Whenever there are issues, the company leadership needs to take responsibility, to investigate, and to come up with solutions. Yes, there will occasionally be outliers, bad actors, and folks who simply ‘do not perform,’ but, perhaps, better training, setting of clear expectations, etc., is the solution, not the usual go-to hyperbolic automatic termination of workers or banning of passengers. For the most part, on most airlines, there are great crew members, keeping us safe and comfortable. Likewise, most passengers are decent people, just trying to get to where they’re going safely, timely, comfortably, and rarely do any of them instigate or experience serious incidents on-board or on-the-ground. We should be grateful for all the ‘good’ flights. Thanks for sharing this with us!
I’ve been retired 20+ years, but was a road warrior before then. I don’t recall ever encountering a rude FA like what we hear about today. Even now, I typically take 15-20 flights a year, and airline personnel behave themselves better than passengers. That said, I’ve never flown Frontier or Spirit.
@Kirk — That’s the thing. Much of this is hype. I’m mostly DL, UA, AA, and B6, or foreign carrier, and I cannot think of a recent real-life incident with crew or passengers. Most folks do behave well.
I am a million miler Ex Plat with AA and 700K miles with United. I average 10 flights per month, 70% domestic and the remainder in Europe, Asia and South America. In all my flying I have NEVER witnessed any confrontations between passengers and flight attendants. I have experience great differences in service or lack thereof between the attendants. Since the new AA FA contract I have seen improvements in pre-flight beverage offerings (frequency and selection). My more positive experiences have been with younger (under 50 years) FA’s (male or female). I’ve noted no significant differences between AA and United FA’s.