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.