Commentary

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Flight Attendant Puts Coffee Grounds Above Passenger’s Head to Mask the Smell of Chick-fil-A

by Gary Leff

overhead bin with something coming out
Mar 08 2019

A reader brought a bag of Chick-fil-A on board with him (“12 grilled nuggets w/ buffalo sauce, 2 grilled chicken deluxe sandwiches no bun”). He admitted that it smelled quite a bit in the small first class cabin of an American Airlines Bombardier CRJ-700 regional jet operated by SkyWest.

He finished eating, a flight attendant picked up his trash, and “moments later without making eye contact crushed up a bag of coffee grounds, opened the overhead bin, and placed the bag directly over my head in seat 2C.”

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Airport Fight — This Time It’s Employees Throwing Down

by Gary Leff

Mar 07 2019

In this crazy video two employees are fighting. We don’t know when the video was taken, although it was posted to Facebook yesterday. It’s happening in the Caribbean — I think St. Croix, though I haven’t been since a US Airways mistake fare brought me in 2007 — and one of the employees is wearing an American Airlines vest.

We can only speculate what started the fight — but usually it’s passengers that are melting down. Right now though flight attendants (who are just entering contract negotiations) and mechanics (who haven’t yet gotten a new contract from the merged airline) seem to hate American. That apparently leaves other employees and contractors to hate each other.

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Financial Analyst Asks American’s CEO: Maybe Your Revenue Lags Because Your Product is Poor?

by Gary Leff

Mar 05 2019

At the JP Morgan Aviation, Transportation, & Industrials Conference today JP Morgan’s Jamie Baker asked American Airlines CEO Doug Parker about the airline’s poor revenue performance compared to United and Delta.

He noted that Parker had promised that the airline’s new aircraft would help the carrier’s bottom line. In general newer aircraft are more fuel efficient and have lower maintenance costs, that’s good on the cost side, but these new planes were supposed to be more attractive to customers as well.

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Airline Pilot Used Fake License for 25 Years, Exposed After Taking ‘Strange Turns’ Over Swiss Alps

by Gary Leff

south african airways
Mar 03 2019

Star Alliance member and United Airlines partner South African Airways is promising to check the licenses of all of its pilots — and obtain copies from a government regulator instead of pilots just bringing in copies themselves — after discovering that one of their veteran long haul pilots had been using a forged license for 25 years.

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