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 customers 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.
I used to fly stand-by often as my sister ( retired ) spent almost 50 years working for AA. I have never run into an outright rude FA. I have seen and flown with rude or overbearing fellow passengers. I once saw a family of six board with backpacks and everyone of them had a large carry-on. The smaller children couldn’t even lift theirs. We ran out of overhead space very quickly.
Go Learn from JAL and other Asian airlines what is customer service and put your own problem and keep own attitude home away from work.
American airlines are full of old workers that feel they have union backing and comes with all those combative attitude rather than de-escalation.
As an ex Pan Am flight attendant I believe the person in question may have had bad experiences before with passengers getting drunk and obnoxious. Surely she did not barricade herself for no reason, but rather because she felt threatened in a way.
FA clearly has mental issues and should be removed from flight duty
@Mark R. Moscicki — “Burn her! She’s a witch!”
As American Airlines rapidly climbs to the bottom of the list… “Complain to the union!” Boy, what a stupid remark that is! Why? So the union can berate a crappy management and the crappy management can berate the stupid union all the while the people that actually CREATE THE SALARIES are finding other airlines to use. Ignorance is fixable. Stupid isn’t!
She sounds like a really crazy person. Just what we need in. Enclosed tube 8 miles high.
I landed in San Juan about two years ago on a Delta flight and had San Juan police expecting me. Why? Because I had the nerve to complain that the flight attendants had the galley cart blocking access to the lavatory in first-class for the captain and first officer even though the cart was there for a whole 20 minutes before the captain came out to use the bathroom. I had to go and just wanted to get in and out. I was also told I couldn’t get up and walk to the economy lavatories. The San Juan police laughed when they were told why they were meeting me at the plane.
@Win Whitmire — No, unions are not the issue here, but nice try. And, an occasional small business owner in the front of the aircraft aren’t the problem, either. Are you trying to make us all poorer and worse off by bashing what little remains of organized labor in this country? C’mon, man, no one wants to be your serf.
There are a few crazy FAs, some very benign. One gal used to take all the extra bread and food off the plane to feed the birds, squirrels or whatever varmint she could find in Paris. eventually one of the crew ratted her out for taking food into France. She was stopped and retired shortly afterwards.
Some are angry crazy, and the union protects them. God help you if you have to fly with them. Write them up, might get them transferred out of base.
97% are good, hard working folks that have pride in the job they do.
Trying the Hertz model I’m aviation. Nice.
Offered miles?
I would sue the shit out of the airline for false arrest, unlawful imprisonment (not letting you off the plane), emotional distress, libel (names over the PA) and other things.
How many miles can you get for about $1,000,000 I wonder.
@Mickey Mouse — Garsh, that seems like a frivolous lawsuit, Mickey. Beware of sanctions. Oh-duh-duh-dear!
@1990
Calm down, Karl.
Unions sucks. Proof: Police Unions, Teachers Unions
Unions keep crap employees on the job more often than they benefit good employees. This article is yet another example.
P.S. I’m a lefty liberal. I’ll gladly sacrifice all other unions to end the two listed.
I’ve seen many “first class” passengers treat FAs with disrespect when I’m sitting in FC. After hours and days sometimes it probably just gets old. I don’t understand people. The experience at the moment is a small sliver of your life,..get over yourself. If the service is bad just say something quietly afterwards or better yet, don’t use them again. Making a scene of any kind is unnecessary.
@1990 and @Mickey Mouse, as for a lawsuit it all depends. In this case it does sound as though the responding officers were excellent, and saw the situation for what it was (berating the AA FA and presumably letting the PAX walk). That said (and perhaps this is what @Mickey Mouse meant), if this had resulted in being cuffed, fingerprinted, and getting a permanent Police Record, absolutely I’d sue the living daylights out of American. Bottom line, AA needs to get really serious about stopping this behavior now (and that FA needs to be fired immediately).
Please, pilots, do not enable these petulant children (who think they are safety workers).
I also think that the flight attendant has mental illness problems and needs to be assessed by professionals, not burned. Further, American Airlines needs to be charged fees for the unnecessary deployment of police personnel, the same as any false alarm. Maybe then American Airlines will train personnel on spotting mental illness problems with fellow employees.
I no longer fly AA. Awful experience with customer service via flight attendants. It’s been a problem for years. Hope that FA is disciplined.
@Alexander Castleberry — Right. And you know me, a conservative… in favor of organized labor… good one!
@TexasTJ — As a legal matter, you could’ve just stopped at ‘it depends,’ because in law, yeah, it often ‘depends.’
@jns — And, here I thought @Mantis was the doctor; either way, I’d prefer a second opinion than trust either of you.
I have been flying almost exclusively on Asian carriers for the last 10 years. I’ve never encountered the slightest rudeness or even negligence from a flight attendant. If one acted as described here, they would be out of a job five minutes after landing.
The DOT doesn’t give as much detail about consumer complaints that they used to but they still give total numbers of complaints.
In July 2025, AA had the most complaints of any US carrier, twice the number of complaints that UA had, 2.5 times the number of complaints from DL passengers and 8X the number of complaints from WN passengers. All are comparably large – but AA is clearly doing something very wrong. These trends are in place. ALL. THE. TIME. AA simply has many more disgruntled customers.
Interestingly, Frontier has more complaints than DL and B6 has almost twice the number of complaints that WN gets despite the obvious size differences.
AA’s revenue disadvantage is directly related to its service (or lack thereof) and its employees that don’t get it.
The fact that some people say they don’t see it doesn’t change the fact that real data shows that AA significantly underperforms all of the big 4 and many smaller airlines in customer service.
It is now a fact that American has 100% outsourced their flight attendant recruitment to a third party company. No person within AA has any say on who is hired for training except the people in HR that decide the DEI quotas. That means folks from the likes of Spirit will get selected and just make American worse than it already is.
Here’s my experience with an AA’s old flight attendant on an international flight to Tokyo. I didn’t realize how thirsty I was so when the drinks were passed out, I promptly consumed my cup of water, and was still thirsty, so I, very politely, asked for a 2nd cup. The attendant berated me, with a very condescending tone, that I was wasting her time, and next time I should ask for 2 cups at once. Needless to say that was the last time I flew AA international. I’d rather pay a little bit more to fly the foreign airlines with much superior service, especially Asian and Middle East airlines.
@Steven Raasch
I don’t follow your complaint about the family of six. Each had an overhead carry-on bag and a personal item as permitted, so how was it any different from six single travelers? And it’s completely normal that children need more packed than they can carry themselves and/or cannot reach the bins, so parents assist with their bags. Now, if you mean the backpacks weren’t properly treated as personal items and placed under-seat, that could be a legitimate complaint, assuming the family wasn’t seated at a bulkhead.
Oh, I can totally see this happening exactly as it played out. My final straw was a flight from SNA-DFW. Pax next to me expressed frustration that there was not food available for purchase and made an off-handed comment about the decline in standards on AA.
Lead FA came back and chastised the woman saying the FA was in the galley crying. Come on, snowflake!
When we landed police met the woman at the end of the jet bridge. I stayed back to very her story and make sure she didn’t get in any trouble.
I determined right then and there that AA had granted their employees open season on pax.
@Parker — Truth remains the most valuable thing we have, and is often in short supply. If you thought that you witnessed an abuse of power, whether by a crew member or a passenger, then thank you for staying behind, giving your time to act as a witness, and attempting to defend the truth.
This sounds like something beyond poor service by a flight attendant. More about someone mentally unbalanced (all too common), which is being buffeted by hate of one’s job. Should not be flying.
I used to fly AA a lot. Now its Delta preferentially. The experience is just so much better.
AA really does treat you badly across the board. They and citibank are a perfect fit
She was apparently AA… Says it all.
@Charles — You may have just made our pal @Tim Dunn’s day…
We had a UA FA who was outright rude to my wife in Business Class on a flight to Paris this spring about meal availability. Then she was rude to me when I suggested that we could work out different arrangements, literally throwing her hands in the air (you had to see it) “FINE, she can have MY MEAL”. I was going to suggest my wife and I simply switch.
We were not sitting together – I have to wonder if she felt she could treat my dressed-for-a-comfortable-red-eye wife poorly because the FA felt she didn’t ‘belong’. I have personally never had anything but great service.
It made for a crappy start to a highly anticipated and very expensive trip but Paris was lovely.
@Tim Dunn – We got another one… Folks are upset with AA (and now UA). Looks like good news for DL (anecdotally, uh oh…)
@1990 I cannot sit back watch people get mistreated. I was raised better.
Sad thing is AA talks about how they are trying to move premium again with better planes, better lounges and better food. They need to start with better people. The lot they have right now is toxic.
@Parker — Clearly, you were raised right. I will say, this story is surprising to me, because, lately I’ve had mostly good experiences with crews on American, Delta, United, jetBlue, and many foreign carriers, alike, though, these days, I’m typically flying via NYC. Even when I was based in SoFla, it was rare to see misbehavior, even during the pandemic, yet, back then, it was mostly about facemasks. So, whenever I see these unsettling stories at VFTW and elsewhere, it makes me grateful for all the flights and trips that simply go well.
Pilot: I’ve got your back
Translation: We’re still getting together at the hotel, right?
God forbid economy class got served before first. Hope they didn’t get glass instead of plastic
The AA Board of Directors needs to grow a pair and find a replacement for Robert Isom. AA suffers from overly woke, irresponsible, and uninspired leadership and has so for the past decade. The roots of this nonsense go straight up the chain of command.
Gary, as you’ve apparently decided (erroneously) that inserting stock photos in the middle of your stories is somehow enhancing the printed words, would you at least do it in a smart manner and use photos that have some legit bearing on the story? This article is about an FA being rude to passengers and then barricading herself in the galley and refusing service. Why in the world is that accompanied by multiple stock images of smiling, apparently happy-go-lucky flight attendants? How do these photos in any way help to tell the story? Better to not use any images at all if they don’t match the storyline.
Do you see some of the grammatical mistakes in today’s post.? It changes the meaning completely. “No rudeness should be tolerated?”That means rudeness should be tolerated. Unfortunately, it is not that uncommon. The flight attendants performing well. I think you meant unfortunately, it is not that common. You gotta be careful because you change the meaning completely when you do these things.
When you have the SVP of Inflight and Premium Guest Services, Brady Byrnes, going on CNBC and saying “It doesn’t really matter what you serve, the number one outlier that is important to our customers is an on-time operation” this what you should expect. Management doesn’t care about the service so why should the flight attendants. Never mind the fact that their on-time record isn’t so great either.
@Joe – I was a pretty fierce critic of Brady Byrnes but he really didn’t say that, it was very much taken out of context.
Gary- you’re 100 percent correct. I’ve had amazing FC flight attendants on AA but they are unicorns. AA has done nothing to encourage or enforce a higher standard and now the flight attendants at AA are collectively at the bottom. My last flight to PHL(5+ hours) in FC, was so dismal, the MC passengers got more to drink than we did . The flight attendant literally acted like we were an imposition. Only Delta from here on out.