American Airlines plans to bring back TVs at seats on most narrowbody aircraft after beginning to remove them for cost saving back in 2017. They’re finally repudiating the Doug Parker era – Parker famously hoped he could get away with not even adding seat power to planes.
These investments, along with adding Starlink wifi to around half their fleet, is great news for customers. Flight attendants – who complained about screens being removed in the first place – are already grousing about the change:
- They see it as one more problem they will be expected to manage.
- The screens will break. Passengers will complain.
- Crews will have to troubleshoot them.
- And flights will take delays over televisions that nobody really needs because everyone carries a phone.
Screens might break, and that passenger at that seat on a five-hour flight may be unhappy. But the overall conclusion is backwards. Seatback entertainment should make the cabin easier for flight attendants to manage, not harder. And the reflexive pessimism some crewmembers show says more about American’s culture problem than it does about the merits of screens.
The Complaints Have Already Started
One crewmember complained in this discussion of American’s announcement: “The maintenance, how damaged they’ll get… How many will complain when they don’t work.” Another commenter argued that American should put the money into working power outlets and figuring out how to operate on time.
Under a local Facebook page’s story, a self-identified 12-year American flight attendant, wrote: “This is news to me and I’ve been a flight attendant with AA for 12 years. We got rid of them.”
- American does tell employees what they’re doing!
- Many flight attendants don’t find out what’s happening from the airline.
- They learn what they’re supposed to be doing from peers.
- Norms develop amongst flight attendants, who play by their own rules, rather than even listening to the company (and sometimes even tuning them out).
A Broken TV Is Not Going To Ground The Airplane
American is not going to hold a loaded Boeing 737 at the gate until the screen in 27A can play Ted Lasso.
The FAA’s minimum equipment guidance gives entertainment systems as an example of equipment installed for passenger convenience. Since it doesn’t affect airworthiness, it can be handled under the airline’s approved deferral procedures rather than being addressed before departure.
That can mean rebooting a screen, deactivating it, placarding it, documenting the defect and fixing it later. A passenger might receive miles or a travel credit if they’re lucky.
If the entertainment system is also used for the passenger safety briefing, the safety function has to be addressed under the aircraft’s minimum equipment list. Flight attendants currently perform the demonstration manually.
This @americanair flight attendant knows how to get passengers' attention. Brilliant! pic.twitter.com/k8UYVCGzx7
— nycphotog (@nycphotog) August 18, 2026
Delta, United and JetBlue already manage large fleets with seatback screens. Only JetBlue’s on-tie performance is consistently worse than American’s, and screens aren’t the reason.
Screens Should Mean Fewer Demanding Passengers
An occupied passenger is usually an easier passenger. Children have something to watch. Nervous flyers have a distraction. The moving map answers “where are we?” and “how much longer?” without a trip to the galley. A customer can watch a movie while using a phone or laptop for something else.
Boredom and stress can make a cabin harder to manage, and entertainment reduces both. Plus they can advertise the credit card on the screen, and that helps flight attendants get passengers to take and complete applications earning them more moey.
When American was removing screens in 2018, employees argued internally that older passengers and children did not always bring devices, crews ran out of headsets, and a screenless product could not compete with Delta. Flight attendants told me that screens kept passengers occupied and made them less likely to come to the back for additional drinks and snacks.
And just six months ago, during flight attendants’ protest against CEO Robert Isom, an American flight attendant complained that the airline had removed screens and fallen behind Delta and United. “They’re relying on us, the flight attendants, to be the product and we can only do so much.” Now American is giving them more product!
Flight Attendants Can Stop Doing Most Mainline Domestic Safety Demonstrations
Screens let American use safety videos again across most of its mainline domestic operation. On a normal departure they no longer have to repeat the synchronized seat belt, oxygen mask and life vest pantomime in the aisle.
Is it weird that I actually miss the 2012 video, “there are so many places to go in this world, and so many airlines that can take you there.” It was professional. It wasn’t ambitious in scope or cinematography. I knew several of the crewmembers featured.
The Next Turnaround Has To Be Cultural
American’s new plan is bigger than televisions. They’re increasing premium seating, investing in airports and lounges, and improving food – and policies. They’re installing Starlink. These are great investments, but to get the value out of them the turnaround has to be cultural.
For years, employees watched the airline remove screens, squeeze seats, and shrink lavatories. Front line employees became increasingly cynical. And that didn’t begin with current management.
Management needs employee buy-in to deliver a premium product. The first step is eliminating the confusion over what product they’re trying to deliver. The airline has spent years saying the focus is on the operation, not the customer. Now they’re giving employees the tools to deliver a quality product.
They need to show frontline employees have a strong future, and that they’re in a fight where crew make the difference and whether the investments matter. Employees have a direct economic stake in making the strategy work. The current flight attendant contract improved profit sharing from the old 5% formula to a pool equal to 10% of American Airlines Group pre-tax earnings up to $2.5 billion and 20% above that. When American earns more, flight attendants share in it. When American barely earns anything, there is little to share.
Seatback screens aren’t a threat to flight attendants. They are a tool that should occupy passengers, reduce cabin friction and eliminate most live safety demonstrations on mainline domestic flights. The airline needs to make sure that flight attendants see this as a positive, as an investment, and as a tool – along with all the others they’re finally giving to crew – and that if employees get onboard with the new vision they’ll generate the revenue premium they need and employees benefit too.
For the second time today, this is why I avoid flying US airlines whenever possible. Yeah, blame the CEO, or blame the stockholders, or blame the FAs, or blame the GAs. It seems like few people at US airlines actually want to make a great airline. Everyone’s just trying to scam the system.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Send the FA’s back for retraining every 3 years to get some sense re-instilled. You fail the course you get the bread line.
The U.S. based airlines should contract the big 3 ME’s or Asian carriers for training. Oh, right, that would cost money.
@Stephen
As I keep on saying, even if they could afford all the changes, the it FA’s will trash it.
Seat back screens? Just another totally unneeded PITA for a domestic flight. The American travelling sloth is unable to sit 1.5-3.5 hours (or a very rare 5 hours) with being further electronically drugged by a tv screen? Such a sad telling on the mental state of an unfortunate number of the public. Plus for those of us who enjoy reading and/or looking out our window during flight, it’s one more annoyance of the person(s) sitting beside us whiz, mean and complain about refusing to close our window shade because the light glares on their insipid tv screen. Ha! Too bad! Enjoy the beautiful bright sunlight, all you Karens and Petunias
A complaint not limited to just American.
On the other hand, whatever did we do before screens and devices? You could read the SkyMall catalog only so many times…
@Denver Refugee — Even though @Tim Dunn will just blame ‘the weather’ (or ‘FAA’), seriously, operational reliability (clean, working aircraft) is a business decision (and many carriers are not prioritizing or investing in that, probably because they’d make more profit just selling points, not flying, but ultimately, they do still need to fly, or those points are worthless…)
@Thing 1 — Bit of a false equivalence there. First, Gary’s taking a few outliers (FAs hate the screens!) and making them seem like all frontline workers are just ‘lazy’ or ‘ungrateful’ for the under-appreciated, often underpaid, overworked daily existence they deal with. Second, yeah, I’d go out on a limb and blame management (then Wall Street) before anyone else.
@alanZ — Very few IFE/AVOD (nearly all-BYOD) on intra-Europe flights. Their goose is cooked!
Anything that will take them away from their real job. To sit in a jump seat and either complain or watch their phone.
“Safety at Scale”? Clearly!
@Denver Refugee – I’m old enough to remember when there was only one or two movies for the whole section of cabin you were in, along with those awful air tube headphones. It was pretty awful. American’s first iteration of personal screens featured something like 10 (?) or so channels that played on a constant loop. That was back when J was 2-3-2 and full recline put you at something of an upright angle.
We really have come a long way.
Way past time for them to shut up and get off their lazy kiesters and provide what they are paid for…good customer service!!
@Mike P — Wait, no calls from you to ‘abolish the government’ this time? Huh… did you return your “Civil Peace Flag” too?
@Mike Hunt – “Air-tube headphones.” I remember running into those a handful of times when I first started flying and had to deal with the occasional United 727. Pretty awful indeed.
Personally, I’m more of a music/podcasts person. Back in the day, I’d usually either listen to “Channel 9” on United, or XM Radio when I was flying AirTran on a semi-regular basis.
As a fa for AA, I can tell you the majority of us are happy to bring back the inseat IFE. Don’t let the few naysayers speak for the majority. We have 30K fa’s and I’m willing to bet at LEAST 90% see this as a positive move. American is FINALLY taking the steps to improve their product. Yes, some of the screens will go down, but we as a company have to decide if we are going to compete with UA and DL or Allegiant and Frontier. For years, many of us warned the company was making the wrong moves with cutting everything that was nice. In the end, I always said they will only change when it hit’s AA in the wallet. And it has. When your margins are as abysmal as AA’s compared with UA/DL, things MUST change. Anyone poo pooing positive changes need to STOP! Or leave!
Gary Leff writes, “A broken TV is not going to ground the airplane.” On the other hand, a broken airplane will ground a working TV.
Lazy, militant union flight attendants at a failing airline. The script writes itself, with the expected outcome to follow.
@Denver Refugee, @Mike Hunt — You guys talkin’ about the ones that’d rip your inner ear? Very 1990s.
@Brent – BOS-SFO and MIA-SEA rival the amount of time it takes to fly BOS-LHR. The US is a big plane and there are some long flights that are done using standard domestic equipment. I was on a plane from BOS-SFO for 9 hours from boarding to deplaning because of ground delays on both ends. I was happy to be able to watch two World Cup games.
I think not having screens is a sign of cheapness. I’ll use them for the moving map if I’m not watching anything. And if you get one that doesn’t work, you’ll get some bonus miles.
What? You found like 4 flight attendants complaining about this and turned it into “flight attendants are complaining?”
Pretty much every FA is very happy about this. Our only problem is we have to sit here and watch a company that cries poor constantly spend a ton of money to undo a problem they created, and FAs begged them not to do in the first place.
Run an on-time airline. Communicate with and treat employees right, and they’ll communicate with and treat customers right. Basic stuff. Over the head of many, if not most middle management and above.
This is effectively an indication that FAs don’t trust management. I quit flying AA for much the same reason post-pandemic, even with lifetime status. I use Avios as my primary flying points accumulator. I rarely fly on domestic flights anyway and BA Gold status is more valuable to me than AA Executive Platinum ever was.
Fat, lazy, grannies
American only let FAs know literally an hour and a half before it was dropped to the public. That’s why that FA didn’t know. I checked the time the message was dropped to the public versus the time they put it in our crew messages. About an hour and 20 minutes so don’t blame her!
That 2012 safety video was a blast from the past! Says something that I still knew every word. And I agree…much better than the current weird synchronized thing.
Who remembers the UA in-flight movie thingy where they distributed tapes to F passengers to play a movie at their seat? The good ole days!
If many of the young ones were not busy in the galley doing influncer posts of selling their feet pics on Only Fans service and attitude would be better. The union is horrible and AA needs to break the union or negotiate for new leadership .
I also don’t like them. The only good use for them would be as external monitors for my laptop.
@jon kimnach — Me thinks (jon) doth protest to much… so, you’re into feet, huh? *trying hard to not kink shame* (c’mon, 1990, keep it together…)
Honestly, fire them all the old (and I do mean old) US Scareways witches and start over. Quit whining and do your job. I see the new hires at AA are truely out performaning the hag bag that need to retire.
BTW, this applies to male and females. Then let’s get the gate agents at PHL, CLT, PHX out the door. . .the worst.
@sunviking82 — Yikes, there’s probably a better way than collective punishment, ageism, and… but, you know, well, eh… *throws hands up*
Personally, I do not have a dog in this race but I thought there were rumors that the new screens might have new service features other carriers have used, like ordering beverages, food, assistance and the whatnot. The FAs might wind up working more and playing with their phones less. Sorry, facts. If you look at a FC FA how he/she is solo, and on their feet servicing the passengers for a majority of the flight,working, versus the ones in the back that make two passes of drinks and biscoffs and call it a day. No wonder they are upset, who wants to work when they go to work?
I thought they weighed too much and added to fuel costs? So that was a lie?