American Airlines cancelled 342 flights on Friday, more than any other airline in the world. That came on the heels of a major day of cancellations on Thursday. The primary cause of this was weather in Dallas – and the skies were clear.
That was followed by even more cancellations on Saturday, as the airline ran out of available crew, with more to come on Sunday with planes and people out of position.
Five years ago a United Airlines pilot announced that everyone had to keep politics off the plane. Passengers cheered. No matter your feelings about silly memes or the President of the United States, there are some places where we should be left alone. Stuck in a metal tube, you can’t escape a pilot’s politics.
One of the people challenging the legality of the federal mask mandate is Michael Faris, and he’s filed a motion with the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals seeking to be removed from a government terrorism watchlist he was placed on after seeking to litigate the mask requirement.
Another passenger who filed suit against the mask mandate claims to have been placed on a watchlist as well, which they discovered after trying to check in for a Delta flight on October 26.
Before the pandemic American Airlines served 8 routes from Austin, flying to its hubs. They’ve quadrupled their destinations since then and passengers are using the airport for connections in a major way as well.
In any employee meeting American’s Vice President of Network Planning dropped two other cities they’re thinking about as having similar characteristics to Austin.
Before the pandemic American Airlines was prepared to announce free inflight wifi. They didn’t want to do it, but Delta was testing it and if Delta went forward they were going to match whatever Delta did. (Delta ultimately found that their Gogo systems weren’t robust enough for all the usage free wifi entails.)
American doesn’t offer free wifi, but it’s something they still think about.
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It isn’t often that a union tries to get people not to join. Usually the incentive is to grow its ranks. However the American Airlines pilots union is warning pilots if they go to work at American Airlines they’ll be stuck at American for their whole career thanks to the senior system which makes jumping carriers not a viable option (since you lose schedule flexibility and pay).
It’s one thing to say that American Airlines doesn’t want a $15,000 a year flyer, who doesn’t also engage in the program in other ways, to have top status – since those other activities are often more profitable to American.
It’s another, I think, to say that whole classes of members are shut off from much of the new program based on their geography, or that new millennial flyers they supposedly want to attract have a higher hurdle to clear for status than older business travelers who last had to meet standard criteria for status in 2019.
Video of a line for customer service was shared to twitter. It wraps around the customer service area and into the corridor of the terminal – and it just keeps going. Naturally this was American Airlines, and naturally it was in Miami.
Here’s what to do when facing this worst-case scenario.
Passengers bring their own life experiences and (emotional) baggage with them to the airport. So do flight attendants. We also have different cultural expectations and behaviors. And then we’re trapped inside a metal tube together for several hours. Sometimes that goes very badly, and we all need a bit more patience and understanding.
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 »
