Category Archives for Airlines.
Passengers need a pilot contract because unhappy pilots mean massive delays and cancellations. But a pilot contract is going to mean the airline can squeeze more seats into regional jets. Either way, passengers lose.
Since norms vary across airlines and have only recently changed it’s not a moral failing of passengers who don’t know or understand the position that any given airline takes here. On the contrary, it’s incumbent on the airline to explain in clear terms what their policy is and why rather than suggesting a passenger wanting to move is doing something untoward.
The retirement of the American Airlines MD80 has been written about extensively and covered across all sorts of media. I am didn’t find the event nearly as momentous and many did, but there were plenty of celebrations as the plane made its last commercial flight – AA80 – from Chicago O’Hare to Dallas Fort-Worth and then media took a trip on an MD80 to park the aircraft in the desert.
While I’ve read reports that American sent the last of its MD80s to Roswell, New Mexico in fact there’s still an MD80 sitting in Dallas and it’s going to stay there.
Airlines often claim an exemption to European delay compensation rules due to “extraordinary circumstances” that couldn’t have been avoided, and there’s much litigation over this most of which having been resolved in favor of the passenger. For instance while strikes and weather can be extraordinary, mechanical issues generally aren’t.
When airlines don’t pay some passengers who have been stiffed have gotten creative, sending bailiffs to airline offices.
Women were lining up for the lavatory for about ten minutes, and no one was coming out. That’s usually when you hope a flight attendant will put some coffee grounds in there between uses. A flight attendant notices the line, saying to one of the women “you’re still right here” as no one has moved.
When the lavatory door opens a man appears and then “[j]ust a few seconds later, a woman in a matching red jumper also walks out from the cramped room, apparently having just joined the Mile High Club.”
Maybe this isn’t the strangest part of the story, but it strikes me that the racist would demand that minorities serve him, not that they not be allowed to perform in servile roles.
According to the man’s attorney his family is the real victim here, the man’s wife “suffered from stress due to the allegation” and he lost his job. They’re not even welcome at their kids’ school anymore. The man and his wife are New Zealanders and even considered moving back there.
News that an American Airlines mechanic in Miami sabotaged an aircraft before it prepared to take off with passengers was truly shocking. The man admitted that he wanted to delay or cancel the flight out of frustration with union contract talks, and to force more overtime work to fix the problem he had caused.
American Airlines had to address the issue with employees as well. Here’s the memo that was sent internally:
Michele Ballarin is a West Virginia heiress who served as a go-between with Somali pirates and tried to get the CIA to hire her to kill Al Qaeda jihadists. She was “a trusted confidante of Somali pirates and warlords.”
Ballarin ran for Congress in the 1980s in Morgantown but the 31 year old lost badly, paying for her campaign “with money from her first husband, a man several decades older than her who had landed on the Normandy beaches on D-Day and amassed a small fortune as a real-estate developer.” She and her second husband, a bartender at Manhattan’s 21 Club, moved to Georgetown and then moved to an estate in Markham, Virginia named “Wolf’s Crag,” which had belonged to a famous Confederate commander known as “The Black Knight of the Confederacy.”
We haven’t reached the point of a strike, and the airline and its mechanics are headed back to the bargaining table with the National Mediation Board next week. However tensions have certainly been high. For instance a video of an American Airlines supervisor yelling at a mechanic went viral in June (though note there’s NSFW language):
Now we’ve learned that at least one mechanic took things way too far
An easyJet flight from Machester, England to Alicante, Spain was delayed without one of its pilots to fly the plane. The airline had called in a reserve pilot who was going to take 90 minutes just to get to the airport. Passengers would be taking off a couple of hours late, if they were lucky. With other delayed inbound flights last weekend, the pilot might wind up assigned to a different aircraft.
Fortunately there was a passenger on the plane with flying experience that easyJet could turn to.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
