May 02 2019

American Airlines rolled out new uniforms but was met with employee complaints about toxicity and physical effects. Testing couldn’t confirm this, but complaints mounted.

It’s something that’s happened at other airlines before, with large numbers of employees some have reactions to what they’re assigned to wear. However the number of complaints were large, and so American first offered alternatives for employees who believed they were having medical issues with their uniforms, and then began another redesign.

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May 02 2019

Last week American’s Vice President Planning Vasu Raja told an employee forum, “We chose our way out of Tel Aviv. Arguably we did it too prematurely. We’re not going to be out of Tel Aviv forever.”

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May 01 2019

American Airlines is planning to make three changes that involve listening to customers, revisiting past decisions, and fixing pain points. That’s great news.

The plan is to make changes to their new domestic first class seat to offer greater comfort and more underseat storage. They’re going to improve their international wifi, moving towards the quality improvements they’ve made domestically. And they’re going to install working dividers between center seats in business class to provide passenger privacy.

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May 01 2019

Airlines are going to new great lengths to avoid involuntarily denying boarding to passengers — selling more tickets than there are seats and then not having enough volunteers to take a later flight for compensation when more passengers than expected show up. Some airlines are overbooking less. Others are paying out more compensation to get more passengers to volunteer to give up their seats.

We’ve seen stories about Delta giving a passenger $4000 in travel vouchers for agreeing to take a later flight and United giving out $10,000. American’s Day of Departure Desk will also authorize substantially more compensation than before.

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Apr 28 2019

After the Ethiopian Airlines disaster and before the FAA grounded the Boeing 737 MAX American Airlines pilots came out declaring the aircraft safe.

Now they suggest it’s not safe to bring back as-proposed. Those are two positions which are difficult, but not impossible, to reconcile.

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Apr 27 2019

American Airlines CEO Doug Parker explained a year and a half ago that executive bonuses were determined by their ability to hit these profit figures, earning partial bonuses at $3 billion, and more at the $5 billion and $7 billion levels.

So what happened to executive bonuses when the airline failed to meet this goal for 2018? No one received bonuses, just as the CEO promised. Executives received bonuses.

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Apr 26 2019

In the fall I walked through American Airlines financials to show that the airline is losing money flying but earning an overall profit thanks to selling frequent flyer miles to banks.

That remained the case for the last quarter and full year of 2018.

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Apr 25 2019

In the American Airlines internal podcast Kurt Stache, American’s Senior Vice President of Sales, Marketing, and Loyalty talked about the airline’s new Airbus A321neo, on board entertainment, the airline’s new mission, and getting customers to want to recommend the airline.

He’s a legacy American Airlines executive who once ran the AAdvantage program, and AAdvantage reports up to him.

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