Tag Archives for flight attendants.
American Airlines melted down at the end of October without enough cabin crew to work flight. This followed a meltdown in June caused by not having enough Boeing 737 pilots. United Airlines sent an email to all its customers throwing shade at them, and suggesting they book United for the holidays.
In order to prevent a repeat of the October flight attendant debacle, American Airlines is throwing money at the problem (err, at the flight attendants).
The American Airlines flight attendants union is telling employees that unlike United, American will offer a way for those who obtain a religious or medical exemption to vaccination to continue working.
When you fly an Asian or quality Middle Eastern airline, you expect that lavatories will stay relatively clean throughout the flight. I’ve seen ANA flight attendants cleaning restrooms between passengers, and Emirates has even had staff on its A380s dedicated to this cleaning.
After a long haul flight on a U.S. airline, though, it’s almost de rigueur to expect that by the end of the trip lavatories look like something out of a post-apocalyptic zombie film where we everyone must band together to rebuild humanity out of the ashes.
United Airlines, which claims its de-escalation procedures have led to a 50% reduction in passenger incidents, has sent a memo to flight attendants reminding them that they are never to duct tape passengers to their seats.
Two men ‘huffed’ at a flight attendant when asked to put on their shoes for the plane’s takeoff as the aircraft taxied out. The crewmember appears to have escalated the encounter, and asked the pilot to head back to the gate – where police were called and armed officers entered the aircraft to remove the men who were described as “disobedient.”
Video of the incident shows other passengers objecting to what was going down. You can hear “don’t get off” and “sit down.” The men were allowed to stay, and the flight attendants were taken off.
The American Airlines flight attendants union has filed a grievance against the airline because, it says, cabin crew are being forced to “in airports and outside of baggage claim” because they can’t get rooms on their layovers. And they report that pilots “are dealing with the same issues.”
Occasionally things have gotten out of hand, and passengers have become violent. There’s a much greater proportion of leisure passengers now, and first-time passengers, than ever before (“every airline’s passengers are Spirit Airlines passengers now”) and we’ve seen video of shocking confrontations that became violent against cabin crew. Those are so shocking, in part, because they are also still so unusual.
However the American Airlines flight attendants union is telling its members that if things escalate to create an unsafe situation, getting law enforcement involved may not be enough. They should get the FBI involved.
When David Dao was dragged off of a United Express aircraft and bloodied, the carrier outsourced the dirty work to Chicago Aviation Police.
The TSA, though, has a program to teach flight attendants how to do this themselves. It’s been suspended during the pandemic. But the TSA announced today that they are bringing it back because of the rise of onboard incidents, mostly centered around masks.
JetBlue was born at New York JFK, with slots gifted like so much manna from heaven by Senator Chuck Schumer. But JetBlue no longer drinks from the New York Kool-Aid, they’ve talked about moving down to Florida and they’ve built up flights at Newark.
Schedule data from Cirium Diio Mi shows that JetBlue is operating 1685 flights to 29 destinations from Newark this month. However they don’t have the infrastructure at Newark to support their current ambitions.
While the TSA began requiring passengers to select a gender as part of their security identification system, passengers can now choose ‘unspecified’ or ‘undisclosed’ just as many states now offer an “X” for gender on their drivers licenses. But flight attendants can’t choose X when selecting a uniform to wear.
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 »
