Airport Fight — This Time It’s Employees Throwing Down

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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Starting April 1 United Flight Attendants Will Be Allowed to Show Personality During Announcements

Mar 07 2019

Southwest Airlines is known for the personality of its flight attendants, and the way they lyricize their safety briefing often goes viral in social media. It really shows their corporate culture of fun.

United’s flight attendants will be permitted to show their personality when making in-flight announcements starting April 1.

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Arlington, Virginia Will Tax Visitors and Give the Money to Amazon

Mar 06 2019

Amazon decided to split up its proposed “HQ2” facility between New York and Northern Virginia, promising about 25,000 jobs for each. New York politicians chased Amazon out of their New York plan.

The payments that Amazon will get for their Northern Virginia headquarters (in addition to tax reductions) are many and varied, coming from all levels of government. Arlington, Virginia will direct a portion of its hotel tax to Amazon.

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What American Tells Its Employees About Losing Money Flying Planes, Only Profit From Sale of Miles

american airlines plane
Mar 06 2019

American Airlines seemingly spends an awful lot of time talking to employees about my blog posts whether it’s Vasu Raja responding to what I write about New York JFK or Doug Parker getting defensive about the 737 MAX.

The airline is clear in its financials though that they lose money flying planes and all their profit is accounted for by the sale of frequent flyer miles. American is telling their employees not to worry though despite the way “some online commenters have tried to oversimplify” the airline’s financial results.

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

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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