The American Airlines terminal 8 at New York JFK was evacuated around 7 a.m. this morning after an escalator caught fire in concourse C causing smoke to fill the terminal. Nearly 1,000 people were moved and departing flights were halted, though about 75 minutes later normal operations resumed. Four people were hospitalized out of nine with minor injuries, with none apparently life-threatening.
The most dangerous place in Atlanta is usually between Delta CEO Ed Bastian and any tv camera. But he wasn’t giving interviews. He wasn’t out talking to employees or customers. He wasn’t even taking responsibility for the mess – days after all the other airlines recovered from the CrowdStrike outage, he was blaming CrowdStrike and not his own carrier’s IT mess that followed, that their own staff couldn’t recover from.
Instead he left the country while passengers were still stranded and employees struggled to get things moving again.
The airline is out with another statement from the CEO and it’s appalling. All other airlines were up and running quickly after the CrowdStrike outage. He still accepts zero responsibility. That shouldn’t be surprising.
A roundup of the most important stories of the day. I keep you up to date on the most interesting writings I find on other sites – the latest news and tips.
Vietnam’s VietJet has placed an order for 20 Airbus A330neo aircraft, valued at $7.4 billion at list prices.
Major airline caterer Gate Gourmet is scheduled to face a worker strike starting July 30th. I told you we wouldn’t see an American Airlines strike. We aren’t. But unless there’s a last-minute breakthrough in negotiations, this will happen.
The FAA has launched a safety audit of Southwest Airlines. This comes after the airline came within feet of the water while still miles from Tampa less than a month after another of the airline’s 737s descended to just over 500 feet while still 9 miles out from the Oklahoma City airport.
In March CEO Badr Mohammed Al Meer said that the new first class seat was ‘70%-80% done.’ Now he reports that he’ll be shown a prototype of the new first class seat this Thursday.
Employees are furious about this new policy. While the union says it’s filing a grievance, individual flight attendants have been bombarding both federal and state agencies with complaints on their own.
According to a voicemail recording received by a United flight attendant in response to a complaint regarding the new weekend sick policy requiring an absence certificate, the Department of Labor has assigned an investigator and is launching an investigation.
Delta Air Lines may be starting to turn a corner with their internal operations finally, after melting down on Friday, cancelling thousands of flights (nearly 3 times as many as in all of 2019 and more cancellations than in all of 2018 and 2019 combined), and displacing hundreds of thousands of passengers.
Passengers won’t notice it today but the pieces are beginning to come into place to get to a better place.
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 »
