Tag Archives for pilot.
Delta passengers say they flagged a first officer who appeared intoxicated before their Charlottesville–Atlanta flight, and law enforcement ultimately removed her from the aircraft. Delta called it a “safety issue,” but the flight did not leave for nearly 10 hours — finally departing after midnight with a new crew.
Shortly after takeoff from Las Vegas, a Southwest captain was struck in the head by the cockpit heads-up display hard enough to leave him seeing stars and vomiting, forcing the flight to turn back.
American Airlines finally has pilot trading cards, but the airline did not create them — the pilot union did, filling a small but telling gap that even Spirit and Frontier had already managed to cover, underscoring how American spent years missing the little customer-facing details.
American Airlines delayed a flight because its pilot was stuck in line at Starbucks, which says less about the pilot than it does about the airline’s coffee. For years, cheap onboard coffee has had a hidden operational cost: when crews go hunting for something better in the terminal, passengers wait.
BA crew are notorious for pushing beyond the boundaries of cheekiness and into cheekiness.
Comedian Jim Breuer bought first class tickets from Honolulu to Florida—but American Airlines bumped him down to coach so a deadheading pilot could have his seat. Breuer’s furious rant about American Airlines taking thousands of dollars for first class, only to give him a $400 downgrade refund, has reached hundreds of thousands of viewers in days. American’s contract allows bumping paid passengers for pilots flying transoceanic routes, but Breuer wants what he paid for: a first class flight.
American Airlines pilots avoided directly confronting CEO Robert Isom, but internal turmoil over cancellations, lost profits, and operational chaos continues to intensify—leaving the airline facing trouble ahead.
A Canadian ex–Air Canada flight attendant allegedly spent four years posing as an airline pilot—using a forged employee ID to grab hundreds of free flights on American, United, and Hawaiian, and even asking for cockpit jumpseat access. Indicted in Hawaii after two 2024 Hawaiian flights, he was arrested in Panama, extradited to the U.S., and is now jailed in Honolulu awaiting trial on two wire-fraud counts.
A United 737 MAX ran off the runway after landing in Houston, and the newly released incident report includes cockpit voice recorder audio from the aftermath. In the recording, the captain calls ALPA while passengers are still evacuating and is told not to “say another word,” then coached on what to do next—raising uncomfortable questions about how quickly self-protection can take priority even while the situation is still unfolding.
Delta cancelled 689 flights in just three days, and the problem wasn’t lingering weather — it was a union-contract catch-22 that made last-minute pilot staffing break down. A chain of rules around automated trip offers and “auto-accept” windows created a timing trap: open trips piled up faster than schedulers could award them, and cancellations followed even as conditions normalized.
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 »
