American Airlines flight attendants called for the ouster of its CEO in a new letter on Tuesday. The airline’s operations have been melting down for days, with significant consequences to flight attendants. But the union’s focus is on the poor financial performance of the airline – and what that means for profit sharing. They complain about “a pattern of failure under the leadership of CEO Robert Isom” and call for “new leadership.”
Delta Air Lines flight attendants are getting a month’s worth of extra pay as profit sharing. American Airlines flight attendants are getting a 0.3% bonus, which is often $150 – or less. And they have the same profit sharing formula as Delta’s non-union flight attendants under their 2024 contract. Delta is profitable, American Airlines is not.
The union complains that American is falling behind. Strikingly, the letter comes out as American’s operation has been melting down with around 10,000 flight cancellations around the winter storm even as other carrier operations have recovered. It’s a crumbling system now worse than what Delta experienced after the CrowdStrike incident in July 2024 and is now approaching Southwest’s 2022 holiday breakdown.
Flight attendants are sleeping on the floor of airports, as American has lost track of its crews, doesn’t know who’s eligible to fly based on rest times, and front line staff haven’t been able to get hold of the airline. They’ve been waiting on hold for 12 hours – only to get disconnected.
“AA may have its southwest moment soon, Computers are starting to give up/show error messages and crew schedulers are now hand building sequences in IOC.”
— JonNYC (@xJonNYC) January 28, 2026
Yet the union’s focus here is only on last quarter’s financial results, and not what its members are currently going through.
While Competitors Surge Ahead,
American Falls Further BehindTuesday, January 27, 2026
Today, American Airlines released its fourth quarter and full-year 2025 earnings—and once again, the results disappointed employees, investors and Wall Street. While we are pleased American achieved a small profit, our airline continues to lag its competitors by a significant margin. This is no longer an anomaly, but rather a pattern of failure under the leadership of CEO Robert Isom and the American Airlines Board of Directors.
American’s workforce is not the problem. Leadership is.
Employees have a vested interest in seeing American succeed. Our jobs and our futures depend on it. Yet while employees deliver every day, American remains a distant third behind Delta Air Lines and United Airlines, and at or near the bottom of the industry.
While Competitors Finances Surge Upward,
American Continues to LagThe contrast is undeniable.
These results reflect priorities—and American’s priorities are being exposed by comparison.
Wall Street Journal 2025 Rankings Show American Airlines at the Bottom
In October of 2025, we communicated concerns about American ranking dead last in overall customer satisfaction in the J.D. Power North America Airline Satisfaction Study and hoped that we would see improvements in all areas. Sadly, that is not the case.
Last week, the Wall Street Journal released its 2025 Best and Worst Airline Rankings for 2025, and American Airlines was once again left behind our competitors in almost every measured category, with performance worsening in many categories year-over-year. For Overall Best Airline, American slipped from fifth place in 2023 to last place in 2025. American ranked in the bottom three for on-time arrivals, mishandled baggage, and involuntary denied boardings. American ranked dead last in canceled flights. (Source: The Wall Street Journal)
It is easy to see why employees, investors, and Wall Street are deeply concerned, and it is no surprise why CEO Robert Isom has ended all Labor-management meetings, employee town halls, Crew News sessions, and, perhaps most telling, the question-and-answer session at today’s State of the Airline.
They don’t have answers, and the excuses have run out.
Employees see the reality every day. Long-overdue upgrades to onboard products are welcomed, but they cannot make up for poor strategic decisions or an uncompetitive hard product. While we are happy to see leadership upgrade our premium cabins, our coach cabins, where many of our most loyal customers are seated, are outdated, uncomfortable, and far from competitive.
Lack of investment in the product has left American years behind its competitors, forcing employees to absorb the consequences and apologize for management’s inaction as leadership delivers the same lackluster results, quarter after quarter.
To management we ask: What is American’s plan to compete? Why are we not hearing from the Board of Directors as American continues to fall further behind?
The status quo is indefensible. The bottom of the rankings, quarter after quarter, is unacceptable. Accountability at the top is long overdue.
American’s hardworking employees want nothing more than to see this airline lead the industry, and we are ready to make that happen. But leadership has failed to clearly define our brand, articulate who we want to be as an airline, or provide the staffing, tools, and resources necessary. Quarter after quarter, executives leave employees to carry the weight of their mismanagement while American falls further behind.
For years, CEO Robert Isom and his team have solely focused on Accountability, Reliability, and Profitability, ignoring investment in our product and the overall customer experience. During that time, our competitors focused on all aspects of their airlines, while American now stumbles to pick up the pieces.
The employees at American Airlines, our passengers and the investors can no longer wait for Robert Isom and the American Airlines Board of Directors to deliver on their empty promises.
As the entire industry leaves American Airlines in the dust, it is time for new leadership and a new vision for American Airlines.
American is a financial laggard in the industry, and seniority rules enforced by union contracts lock flight attendants into the employer they select at the start of their careers. They can’t just go work for another airline, because they’d start at the bottom with lower pay and much worse schedules.
The strategic missteps of management have surrendered positions in markets like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles – which has meant their cobrand credit card has fallen behind Delta and United in spending (and it’s that credit card that’s the driver of profits).
They retired too many planes and walked away from most international flying of their own, preferring to outsource to joint venture partners. And they chased ultra-low cost carriers just as consumer preferences were pivoting away from that model to something more premium – they even took out business class seats to add coach seats, and took out seat back screens.
At the same time, management abdicated its responsibility to lead, offer a vision to employees and demand accountability. I’m told there are ghostriders on Delta over the next 3 weeks auditing flight attendant service standards, and that cabin crew are expected to deliver predeparture beverages from trays rather than hand carrying them from the galley. American Airlines flight attendants aren’t expected to offer predeparture beverages in first class at all. I’ve had jackets proactively hung in Delta first class, and haven’t had that on American in years.
There’s a role that flight attendants play in the service standards at the airline, but management hasn’t insisted on it. An airline that delivered a premium experience, and delivered a product customer want to pay for – driving the profits that would pay flight attendants more – would mean higher service standards for APFA union members. They should be honest about this, including with themselves.
One minor item about the union’s letter. They conclude the airline has ‘no answers’ because Robert Isom didn’t take questions at the quarterly employee meeting that follows the airline’s earnings call, and that senior executives no longer do regular monthly ‘crew news’ employee sessions, recordings of which used to be leaked to me and I’d report on regularly. These were artifacts of former Executive Vice President Elise Eberwein, under CEO Doug Parker. After Eberwein’s departure the line relayed to me was that ‘Gary gets more value of these than employees do.’
Isom would spend a lot of time preparing and practicing his answers. He’s not off the cuff or unrehearsed. As the airline pivots to a premium strategy, we haven’t had senior executives on the front line explaining a new vision to employees and building momentum for everyone to push in the same direction for a vision bigger than themselves – a vision that would make the airline more profitable, and lead to better pay for employees.
It is very sad to see how poorly AA has recovered from this winter weather event even though AA had more hubs in the path of the storm than other airlines.
AA has already cxld 15% of its mainline flights today with PSA at 20% cxls. They are leaking revenue to other airlines esp. DL which overlaps the most with AA’s southern and eastern US network.
It is also hard to believe that AA has recovered so poorly and performed so badly in operational metrics given that Isom is supposedly an operations person.
The FAs need to be joined by other labor groups in calling for a regime change but it is most notable that AA, with far more assets and potential if it worked than WN and yet Elliott chose WN which is seeing a substantial turnaround.
with UA willing to beat AA senseless at the cost of UA’s own earnings, you have to seriously ask what the endgame is for AA. years more of just flailing above the surface doesn’t seem a viable strategy
Gary, as usual, getting in an anti-union jab on an otherwise unrelated story. Give it a rest, dude. We know your feelings on unions. We don’t need to hear it in everything you write.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the average CEO today is a total moron. They hear AI and think that they can rid themselves of the pesky non revenue creating employees in favor of AI. With AA it means in the event of irregular operations there isn’t sufficient staff to recover the airline.
AA has made strategic blunders that will take years not to mention lots of dollars to fix. Management assumed passengers only cared about a price and maybe the schedule. But even AA struggles with the basics. What good is fancy champagne in business if you miss your connection while waiting 45 minutes for a gate?
@mutiny32 – it’s pro-worker to point out when employees are being poorly served by their current union, and there’s nothing ‘anti-union’ about pointing out deficiencies in an argument made by a union – i certainly do it with the *company* and here i place the blame squarely with management even when it manifests to customers are poor service by employees.
@ Gary — Isom seriously needs to go. I do not understand why it hasn’t happened long ago.
Isn’t the elephant in the room the huge amount of debt that they have that appears to be handicapping them? They’re trying to accelerate paying down more debt – that seems to be the focus for management and the board, no? Pay down more debt and cut costs. Put a “friendly” new face towards customers (Heather), show some pictures of new airplanes (that may not deliver an amazing experience for economy customers anyway as compared to competitors) and try to spin as much as you can.
The problem as this blog coined is that operational reliability is table stakes. If you cut costs / underinvested in IT so much that you can’t recover from storm impacts, folks will look elsewhere. It’s not like the weather in Dallas is going to get better in the next 5-10 years.
@Gene
Absolutely agree with this. I never liked the pick when it was announced by Parker. Has no leadership skills. No longer has meetings with front line workers like Parker did. With regards to the F/A’s, I’m not sure what they expect in this situation. It was a disaster for everyone from employees to the traveling public. Stuff like this happens from time to time.
@Coffee Please. I don’t know, maybe the employees expect that if they get stranded in the course of doing their jobs their employer will take care of them.
There is a lot AA could do in this situation. The simplest solution is to empower the stranded crews to find their own hotel with the promise of reimbursement.
IT “enhancements” at AA and DL have made recovery more difficult. Last major storm in NYC is was DL that tools days to recover while UA had EWR back up quickly.
American Airlines flight attendants, frustrated by repeatedly waking up on cold airport floors after being stranded by cancelled flights and the mysterious disappearance of their overnight hotel accommodations, are eager to say “Buh bye” to their Chief Executive Officer, Robert Isom, and some of his other C-suite executives.
This is usually the time of year where Robert Isom directs someone on his Comms team to create a couple of slides for the Investor Deck that defend his ridiculous pay package (relative to the competition). He somehow made $0.1M more than Ed at Delta; probably included in his non-performance based contract by a clueless compensation committee on AA’s BOD.
He is a crook and he should be fired!!!! These greedy CEO’s only care about themselves and there bounuses. They treat the flight attendants like crap. They are the backbone to the airlines.
Clearly the “strategy” articulated by Doug Parker and all of his acolytes has failed. Isom is “Parker-Light”, without the presence. There appears to be no vision and no plan to execute. More importantly, there’s no leadership. I agree with their so-called “pivot” to premium, but they clearly have no clue how to do it. AA, in my opinion, needs a complete regime change in all areas customer-facing. And it starts at the top. Moreover, the company needs a board with vision and the balls to hold management accountable, who are not afraid to make decisions and take some risks. Want an example? Look at Air France. They put Ben Smith, a Canadian, in charge of a French airline, and turned AF around in less than 2 years. They’re apparently working on KL next. My suggestion: go get this guy, or someone like him.
@Tim Dunn — Eh, I’d say AA is still doing better than DL following Crowdstrike, so why’s Ed still CEO? Share price! Profits! Amex! Got it.
@Parker
There is a lot AA could do in this situation. The simplest solution is to empower the stranded crews to find their own hotel with the promise of reimbursement.
They do but there are those people out there that say “it’s not my job” types. They sit there with arms folded and the rooms disappear. Not very bright.
Here’s the issue there are likely hotel rooms away from the airport but that would require 1. Someone in AA to find a van service for transportation 2. Book hotels in which AA would not be given a crew rate 3. Since the system depends on AI slop which can’t handle this unusual situation it would be down to people 4. AA doesn’t have the people to do so and doesn’t have the system to get these services lined up and paid for. So crews sit in the airport.