Aviation watchdog JonNYC notes that American Airlines has removed access for nearly all employees “to a gate agent boarding tool that would allow them to see boarding progress, miss connections, and many other vital tools.” As one pilot describes it to Jon,
Yeah. It showed a seat map and would show when people boarded
You can see where the connections are coming from. What seats they were. The ground time and if the plane made it. It was read only for pilots and FAs but they took it away.
You could also see where the frequent fliers were.
The info is still accessible but scattered. This management team is putting emphasis on NPS scores but takes away the tools to do your job properly
Pilots were told during a class to use it prior to them taking access away. Many pilots do use it to take care of customers.
Also management said in a podcast it’s not coming back
And another,
"You could see so much info in one spot. Who has boarded, who hasn’t checked in yet but booked ticket (seat, no name), what pax are connecting, from where, if that plane is late, when it’s landed, what gate it arrived to, large connecting groups, elite pax, the list goes on. Was…
— JonNYC (@xJonNYC) June 30, 2026
My very first thought was that a pilot seeing misconnecting passengers might do something with that information like waiting just a couple of minutes to be ready for doors-close. And JonNYC notes this as well,
Speaking personally/editorially, I can think of endless scenarios where a pilot could make great decisions based on this info.
— JonNYC (@xJonNYC) June 30, 2026
However that’s exactly the kind of behavior that American Airlines has actively discouraged. American recently rolled out an automated tool that will decide sometimes to hold a flight for connecting passengers based on whether doing so will delay other passengers, risk connections, crew duty time, and other factors.
Pilots have been specifically told in the past that this is a decision they should never make themselves for passengers.
When a Dallas-based captain asked then-CEO Doug Parker about this at an employee Q&A session, Parker explained that pilots and gate agents should not decide to hold a flight because the centralized IOC has the full network picture.
He said employees may think “you can make up time in the air” or that “this is the last flight of the day,” but IOC may know about gate conflicts, downstream connections, and other network impacts. Parker later told employees that gate agents lacking this authority is what customers want because ‘D0’ exact on-time departures is what passengers really need.
That’s why the airline only lets gate agents hold the door instead of closing it at 10 minutes before departure when a customer is running up to the gate and in the agent’s direct line of site, or for the last flight of the day they’ve been allowed to wait until 5 minutes to departure for doors close.
Employees, though, also used this system to figure out whether they might make it onto a sold out flight as a nonrev, looking for flights that were likely to have misconnections. This strikes me as a good thing, since employees only make it on after customers are taken care of. It’s better to move an employee in an otherwise-empty seat than to have the seat go out empty and an employee sit and wait or get stuck.
one example "it was helpful for nonrev because you could see likely miscons in realtime via seeing all the inbounds"
— JonNYC (@xJonNYC) June 30, 2026
While the system includes passenger information, there’s some disagreement over how much information it shows and I haven’t been inside the system myself. JonNYC passes along comment that it only shows the customer’s name and fllight information and it was read-only information, with all sensitive details restricted.
If that’s incorrect – if there actually is access to sensitive information – it seems like locking down that information would be the best approach rather than taking the easy route of removing employee access to useful information. Letting pilots and flight attendants know about misconnecting passengers seems helpful! Nonetheless, this tool appears to be gone from most employee access.
crewmembers do not ever need to know where passengers are connecting to/from or have any tool to game their non-revving chances. That is why AA and other airlines have hub coordinators (or some similar term and function) that make the decision about whether to hold for connections.
that said, gate agents should be able to see where passengers are connecting from. All the data in the world can’t tell you that some people will defy every data point – someone that manages to run fast, is at the front of the plane etc.
AA might well be moving toward a completely automated boarding process which can be run on big data so ignoring the ability of some people to defy statistics might be “ok” but in no form should pilots and FAs be making decisions about who to hold for and not hold for.
those same hub coordinator functions consider (or can consider) flight factors such as flight time/expected taxitime and airplane rotations.
A for-profit, multi-billion-dollar US corporation “taking the easy route” at the expense of workers and/or consumers… no, you don’t say??
The biggest issue is there seems to be no sense of urgency with late arriving flights. The number of times it’s a late arriving flight and the gate is not open or there’s no marshal crew so the plane sits while flyers realize any chance of making their connection is now gone.
It’s perfectly fine to coordinate this all centrally but there needs to be systems and resources in place, which AA has been slow to invest in. Pilots can help in that effort (flight attendants less so) but the failure to have an open gate for a late arriving plane at a hub is mind blowing.
Pilots do regularly try to get short cuts or better routing once in air to reduce flight time but that ask may or may not be honored by ATC. They can ask for a runway closer to the terminal but again that request may or may not be honored.
Two steps forward, one step back…or for AA, perhaps, it’s one step forward, two steps back.
AA view is , the more employees can see , the more control they have .
Less information, more control AA has in not having their decisions interfered with.
Several years before I retired, I saw 3 EPs with a tight connection from Austin and brought it up to the captain as our flight was last flight of the night to Buffalo.
Agent was on the aircraft to close the door and we could see these 3 were waving to get our attention.
The agent and the tower were livid.
I didn’t care. These guys were so appreciative. And we felt good that
we made sure they got home that night.
AA took away our RES capabilities that legacy AA FAs had, and US FAs didnt.. These were the tools I and some others who were good at the functionality to pull up connecting information for inbound customers
So we could ask that the passengers with the stated cities deplane first.
As irritating as it was to some, we gave the tight connection passengers a greater chance of making their flight.
But no more.. its all about control and AA took the tools away so they have complete view and control themselves.
It would be OK if the operation was efficient. But it is a messed up Clusterf$k and has been under Parker and Isom for 13 years.
With no real improvement in sight unless Isom is fired.
He is an idiot
Whatever else this is, giving flight attendants this kind of information is obviously a violation of GDPR in the EU.
Even if assisting with connections is a legitimate purpose, the GDPR’s data minimization principle would apply. If all a flight attendant needs is that a passenger has a 25-minute connection departing from Gate B18. They do not need to see the passenger’s complete itinerary or other travel details. They would also need to routinely provide this service (rather than passing the buck to ground staff) which is dubious with the AAwful crew they employ.
Using this information to identify likely no-shows so employees can non-rev is clearly unrelated to the purpose for which passengers provided their itinerary information and therefore a flagrant violation of GDPR.
This comment section perfectly illustrates the category error at the heart of AA’s operational philosophy: confusing centralized decision-making authority with information asymmetry. They’re not the same thing, and treating them as such has long-term consequences.
The argument that IOC should hold flights because it has the “full network picture” is sound in principle. The execution here assumes that removing crew visibility somehow preserves IOC authority while improving outcomes. It doesn’t; it merely creates information silos that degrade the overall system’s responsiveness.
Consider a concrete scenario: An inbound connection from Austin is predictably 8 minutes late due to ground stop in the northeast corridor. The 787 pushing back from that gate needs precisely four minutes to achieve doors-closed, pushback clearance, and initial movement. The gate area clears at +3 minutes. IOC may see that late inbound in aggregate with 400 other operational variables, but the flight attendant working that gate sees the three EPs sprinting across the concourse with 90 seconds to spare. Giving crew the ability to see this situation (not the authority to decide about it, but simply to see it and escalate rapidly) costs nothing operationally and creates a feedback loop that IOC actually needs.
This isn’t “crew gaming the system.” This is crew functioning as the sensory organs of a distributed network. A system that deliberately blinds its operational frontline while concentrating decision-making upstream is slower, less resilient, and less adaptive than one that distributes information while maintaining centralized authority.
The nonrev comment is a red herring. Crew looking for legitimate jumpseat availability doesn’t require removing their visibility into actual operational status; it requires better nonrev protocols, which Continental and (for a period) UA both managed effectively.
American’s management conflates operational latitude with operational visibility, then solves for the wrong variable.
This would require big-picture thinking, which no one at America West is capable of.
AA used to care about customer service. Their actions lately tell the opposite story. My favorite so far has been the 40 percent only refund on downgraded seats that we’ve paid 100 percent for.
They have become a Ryanair or Spirit wannabe.
And you wonder why people are accumulating points on non-airline credit cards.
The fact is all of that information is still available to crew members. All of it. However, it requires multiple text entries or accessible links to find. It also all comes out in a textual format. The ACE system (which is what we are no longer able to see) just puts it into a viewable format. Much like Windows vs MS DOS. There is not, in either form, any passenger information other than their name and inbound/outbound flights. No personal data (other than name). The ACE system was fantastic at allowing us to get the big picture of the operational aspect of the flight.
Welcome tp 21st century American capitalism. Only profit matters, not the customer. NO giant corporations view their customers as people, only as revenue. Once AA has your payment, the dont care if you actually get the product or service ypi pay for.
AA’s continuing race to the bottom… Are we sure Spirit didn’t buy AA? Years ago AA was my go to, now my “option of last choice” and only use when I absolutely have to. I still have several hundred thousand points with AA and have not even thought about using them because I hate AA that much.
There is no more customer service!
@Mike Hunt — So which is your preferred LLM? You a Grok guy?
Everyone wants to be the exception, not the rule. This doesn’t bother me. What bothers me is when tech fails – like when AA bounces you from a connecting flight when the flight you are connecting onto is the exact same aircraft that you flew in on.
And this isn’t just AA. Was on Delta yesterday. Passenger forgot their purse in the gate area, FA asks the gate agent about it, gate agent says “I could go look for it, but then you’ll possibly be late, so i’m not going to do that, and the passenger should file a claim when they arrive at their destination.” Would we have been late? Nah, this was 10+ minutes before push back, and we pushed back 5 minutes early as-is. But it doesn’t matter – gate agent priorities are to get the planes moving, not help individual customers, and they don’t want pilots or FAs to have the easily accessible information to potentially do otherwise.
@1990 – Sorry to disappoint you, but I don’t use an LLM for my comments on this site. That would be pointless and rather boring. Also, structure and precision aren’t hallmarks of AI. They’re hallmarks of someone who’s thought about a problem long enough to explain it clearly. Either engage me on the substance or don’t. (Although I’ll probably just ignore you if you do.)
Another fine example of how the executive level America West trash at AA DFW headquarters is quickly taking the company out of business. Another bankruptcy filing in 2027 is in the making. Hopefully Robert Isom & Team will one day burn in Hell for destroying a once iconic American brand.
So AA management removed a brilliant capable tool from the hands of the people who could use it best. Sounds about right.