American Airlines flight attendants were forced to use emergency flashlights to serve meals on a transatlantic flight from London to Los Angeles after the airline dispatched the aircraft without functioning galley lights. Crew faced challenging conditions preparing food and drinks in near darkness. As the person sharing video of this put it, “They just sent the plane anyway.”
On Saturday, February 14th, American Airlines flight 137 from London Heathrow to Los Angeles was dispatching without working galley lights. So flight attendants had to jerry-rig jumpseat flashlights as substitutes.
Flight attendants without proper light to work in will mean improperly plated meals, and fewer passes through the cabin offering service. Galley carts may need to be staged differently, and it can be dangerous to prepare hot beverages there for passengers because spills and burns become more likely in the dimly-lit workspace.
American would have sent out the plane under Minimum Equipment List procedures, deciding that it was more costly to take a delay at Heathrow than to defer maintenance.
- It’s unclear how long it would have taken to fix. Electrical troubleshooting might be 5 minuts or 5 hours, and parts would have to be available.
- While crew are almost certainly all originating at Heathrow, there can be a concern about available duty time (as well as downstream effects of delaying the aircraft). Plus, losing takeoff position can extend the delay even further.
Every crewmember has to have a working flashlight available. So the flashlights are there anyway. My understanding is that a cabin lighting issue like this can be deferred for up to 10 days, provided sufficient light is otherwise available. My concerns here aren’t so much safety of the aircraft, but service implicatons and safety of preparing meals in this environment. I reached out to American Airlines for comment and they did not respond.
And if the flight was held up, the passengers would have been far more inconvenienced than a messed-up meal. No one was going to starve.
AA is always running planes into the ground, maintenance-wise, until they’re no longer legal. So running a plane without galley lights is no surprise. It’s what any premium airline would do.
“Electrical troubleshooting might be 5 minuts or 5 hours,”
Well they could have at least tried to troubleshoot for 5 minuts [sic] right
Inept
Scheduled
Operations
Management
What does it spell?
AA under Robert
They also had the flashlight function in their cell phones. Congratulations on getting the job done.
Well it wasn’t a night flight so I don’t see the big deal here.
LHR-LAX would be a daylight operation for at least 95% of the flight. After explaining to the pax – Window shades up would generate plenty of light at 38k. Details are missing such as MX likely would have tried to run down the problem before departure. Maybe the part they needed was in LAX?
Sounds like a reasonable call by the Capt and their OpsCenter…
Picard
The MEL or CDL might have allowed dispatch without the galley lights. However, it would stand to reason to get them working before departure.
I looked at the route and the takeoff time plus the landing time. The flight would have been in daylight it’s entire route. The sun would have been the lowest in the sky maybe over Greenland or maybe over Canada but it still would not have been night.
Next time American Airlines launches a transatlantic flight from London to Los Angeles without any working galley lights, the flight attendants should just prop open the lavatory door and bask in the radiant, golden glow of restroom glamour. Not only will their sandwiches be assembled by using the light of a thousand flushes, but these flight attendants will have the cleanest hands this side of the Atlantic. Who knew in-flight gourmet cuisine at 35,000 feet required such toilet-inspired innovation and bathroom brilliance?
Which galley Gary? They’re not all tied together. Any galley but the aft galley have plenty of daylight from the doors, shade up, e voila.
@Ken A — Never stop. Glorious!
Gary,
You appear to be making a mountain out of a molehill. It is not as if they are doing surgery in the galley. I say American made the right call.
Sorry I disagree ..as a crew member you’re as to do your job. It’s unacceptable not to be given the correct tools to do it. Just like ” they’ll figure it out”. ” They are used to sleep on floors that’s part of their job” yeah I don’t think so..
“Flight attendants without proper light to work in will mean improperly plated meals,”
the absolute horror… except that none of the US3 plate any of their international J meals to begin with, right? The meals are already plated and just heated.
I can tell you troubleshooting did occur and fixing in LHR wasn’t possible.
@DB — Thanks for being one of the few people willing to side with workers. Gary really should rename his site, view from the right wing, based on how often others shitpost anti-worker sentiment on here, day-in day-out. Ironically, it’s as if their jobs are to hate on those that literally serve them.
To the haters, I wish y’all’d tell those crew members how you really feel, ideally, before meal and beverage services… then, eat up! Yum!
DB writes, about American Airlines flight attendants, “They are used to sleep[ing] on floors that’s part of their job.” It has been previously reported at VFTW that flight attendants still do. Their struggle is real.
Kudos to those flight attendants for making the extra effort going the extra mile and getting that flight out. I didn’t read anything in your article about pushback from any of the flight attendants. Why are you being a downer Gary, oh yeah I forgot it’s American!
That’s American’s norm. Broken planes. Never fixed. Deferred. Poorly run airline and maintenance. Poor representation of a airline