There are 15 cities without American Airlines service this morning. A total of 255 aircraft — all MD80s — are grounded. That translates into 991 flights canceled today, resulting in hundreds of thousands of passengers jamming the phone lines at the world’s largest air carrier.
At a time like this, it’s instructive to pay attention not to what the airline is saying to us. Or not saying.
Instead, why not review what it’s telling its own employees? Thanks to an inside source at American, I have series of memos that outline the airline’s attitude — or am I allowed to say it — aatitude, toward cancellation-gate.
Here’s how the situation unfolded yesterday, in the airline’s own words:
UPDATE 0939CT/9APR08/MTC/HDQ
As we are all painfully aware, there are 991 more S80 cancellations today, 9APR08. We apologize to all our customers for the inconvenience of the cancellations and those who must be re-booked again.
The REACCOM tool is not running at this time. We will advise when it is turned on.
Uh-oh. That doesn’t sound good. I’m not an American employee, but having the REACCOM tool not working doesn’t sound like it’s helping the situation.
The memo urges employees to keep their spirits up but not to get too chatty on the phone.
Please do not speculate to our customers and just use the guidelines in RESCON for your conversations. Keep a smile in your voice and thanks for all your hard work!
A few hours later, American is painfully aware that not everyone can reach the airline to have flights rebooked.
UPDATE 1315CT/09APR HDQTCA
As you know, American has canceled more than 1,000 flights today as part of the effort to complete inspections on our MD-80 aircraft, and we are doing whatever we can to assist our customers who have been affected by this event. Due to our extremely high call volume, many of our customers have been unable to speak to a Reservations Representative on their first attempt.
It’s clear that the airline is also pushed to the limit when it comes to resources.
Update 1445CT/09APR HDQHR8
During this critical time for American Airlines, we would like to ask all of our Reservations Representatives to work as many extra hours as they can through Friday in order to accommodate our inconvenienced passengers. Our goal is to fill every work station in all of our reservations offices. We are currently accepting overtime for all Representatives including those who were scheduled for a day off today, tomorrow, or Friday.
Please follow your local procedures for signing up for overtime. Please note that Representatives can work up to a total of 14 hours each day.
Our hope is to have enough volunteers to fill all of our workstations. However, due to the criticality of our current situation, it may be necessary to institute mandatory additional hours for Thursday and Friday.
The appeal doesn’t work. American can’t find enough volunteers. So it orders reservationists back to work.
Update 1705CT/09APR QSDRSK
Thank you to all Reservations Representatives who have worked so hard to assist our customers during this very difficult operational crisis. We are very appreciative for the extra hours that you have volunteered to work over the next three days.
We are expecting additional cancellations and a continuation of our extraordinarily high call volume. We have assessed the number of volunteered extra hours thus far, and we are still far short of the hours needed to cover our anticipated workload this Thursday and Friday.
In light of this shortfall, all full-time Reservations Representatives who are scheduled to work on Thursday, April 10, and Friday, April 11, will be required to work two additional hours each day. We recognize the short notice and we would like to accommodate your schedules to the extent that we can. Therefore, please choose the extra two hours that would be most convenient for you to work on Thursday and Friday.
What’s going on here? American is clearly overwhelmed by the cancellations. It’s trying to reaccommodate passengers as best it can, but it can only do so much.
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That’s a scary memo!
Obviously, they did not think this through. They only realized *after* they canceled all their flights that customers might want to rebook their flight.
That is simply *very* poor management.
I realize that even when they did have realized it at the time of cancellation, they might not have been able to do much, but at least the customer representatives would have had a little more notice.
I am also missing any incentive for their employees to work longer. They are not told that they will be paid more, not even base rate. A smart employer would wave some money around. Even an extra buck an hour might have helped. Compared to the losses the company is already enduring, I can’t imagine it’s that much.
Lastly, a couple of questions for the travel journalist:
* How come they didn’t see this coming?
* Are airlines really that lax enforcing safety inspections?
* Anybody wants to set up a little pool on the exact time they start blaming “government regulation”? I think we need to be quick.
* What is the first airline that does not have enough cash on hand to survive their grounded MD80s?
* How much money is the tax payer gonna fork out to get some tax breaks to “these poor over-regulated” airlines?
Dear employees – yep, we screwed this up. You will bear the brunt. Keep your mouth shut and speak only when spoken to. When we want you to say something, you have the talking points. ONLY the talking points.
Dear Passengers – you are screwed. We have turned off our reaccomodation system so our employees do not end up costing us too much money by booking everyone in first class on Delta, Continental and Northwest. You need to understand that we will not take care of you.
‘
Dear American Airlines: The lawyers are coming – the lawyers are coming.
‘
Here is what happened – right from the mouth of a mechanic. There is an Airworthiness Directive [AD] requiring that all landing gear bay electrical wires be covered with a certain type of teflon’d polyester plastic, and then the plastic wire wrapped using plastic tie-wraps every linear inch of run.
The American mechanics USED to measure the length of run, and then put on tie wraps more or less equidistant equal to the length of the run of wire, plus one – thus a nine inch section would have 10 tie-wraps, spaced ‘more or less’ an inch apart. Some were 7/8’s, some were 1-1/4 but there were always the correct number of tie wraps.
The FAA in is sole wisdom, decreed that an inch means an inch; therefore, the old way of doing things was no longer OK – the AD said an inch so it has to be an inch According to Boeing and the McDonnell Douglas engineers still at Boeing, the engineers already had 3 times as many wraps as needed, but used the every inch in the interest of being overly safe and to give the mechanics a rough rule of ‘thumb,’ which is about an inch long.
So, the FAA is insisting, as bureaucrats can do, that an inch is an inch and not more or less an inch, even though the safety rule requires on every three inches, but that is not specified in the AD anywhere – only in the engineering drawings.
The FAA is under pressure from Congress, and they had being under pressure, so they are passing the buck.
This little adventure is doing nothing for safety, is taking mechanics away from real safety issues and delaying the routine and regular maintenance and repairs on regular aircraft in for normal checks and repairs. It is an utter make work requirement and proves that the government can never be trusted with safety of anything, sooner or later it degrades into mindless paper shuffling.
Amazing memos, thanks for posting. I feel a bit selfish in saying that I’m glad I got home to Seattle (from ORD, on MD-80 service) two days before this hit. I have lots more AA and OneWorld flights coming up, but thankfully only one is domestic and not on MD-80 metal.
But as for the whole situation, wow.
Interestingly, I received my AA Platinum card in the mail today. It’s a strange contrast to all the bad news about canceled flights.
I know that American has seemed less than prepared for this fiasco, but they certainly don’t want to BE in this position – think of how much money the airline has lost.
Like Chris, I am feeling so very thankful that my travel last week (on an MD80) was completed without interruption….and that my flight home from a business trip today was a 737.
now, we are all blaming management….however, I would love to see what the Mechanic’s Union is saying about this…..
I am Executive Platinum with American….110 segments last year and 40 so far this year. I hope that American can recover from this.
@ Joe F: I knew it! Evil regulations!
This is not a case of silly rules. This is a case of AA being treated by the FAA like they treat their own personnel and customers.
Rules are rules. They are there to be followed, whether they are stupid or not. If they didn’t like the rules, they’ve had plenty of time to protest against them. They didn’t. By flying, AA accepted those rules, just as customers (are forced to silently) accept the CoC by getting on a plane. Customers are not allowed to deviate from the rules. Neither should AA techs.
This sounds like a trivial detail – and it probably is -, but it is the FAA’s job to make rules for the safety and to enforce those. When airlines start to interpret those rules to their own liking, you know total chaos will follow. You know that at some point some bean counter at some crappy airline is gonna silently tell its techs to put a piece of tape only every 1 1/4″, just to save on the expensive teflon tape. A plane will go down, and suddenly it’s not the airline that’s at fault, it’s the FAA.
The FAA is under scrutiny from Congress because air travel is a mess. Flights are delayed, prices go up, and customer satisfaction is down. And apparently, one of the things they are doing to get the airlines back in shape, is performing annoyingly exact checks of the rules.
When things go wrong, people often call for more rules. Often it would have been enough to just enforce the existing rules. The FAA is rightfully doing so.
BTW: I have a hard time believing your story is the whole story because I can’t imagine the rules for wiring other airplanes is very different. It must be something specific to these MD80s. It can’t be MD80s are the only planes that have wiring running through them.
I feel *very* bad for the customers, but I am (guiltily) chuckling at AA’s troubles. I hope this makes other airlines very nervous, and that this works as a precedent to get the airline industry back in shape.
I’d like to remind the airline industry that a reality of a free market with few regulations (something they always say they want) is that bad companies go out of business. And with bad companies, I also mean companies that ignore safety regulations.
______
I’ve had my share of frustrations with safety regulations in my work environment. Some of them are clearly totally insane and thought of by idiots that have never worked in the environment that they regulate. However, once they are there, there is no excuse to not following them. Or at least, you should make it look like you’re following them by having all the mandatory equipment in place, and then ignore it safely when the safety dudes are not looking.
Jasper: Obviously you have never dealt with the FAA . . .as a pilot and an aircraft owner [and darned happy about it right now - since I control every element of the maintenance of the airplane in which I fly ;-)] The FAA is a huge bureaucracy which has no conception of reality.
Recently, for an airplane flown by us little guys, they issued an airworthiness directive for an entire make and model of airplane requiring removal and inspection of the exhaust system since there failures from bad welds. Fair enough. It needed to be done. However, this particular airplane comes with two different engines from two different manufacturers using two completely different exhaust systems.
Did FAA know in advance, despite that information being in their records pertaining to this make and model? Sure. Did it matter? No. When it was pointed out, did they change it? No – the response to the owners group was ‘we’ll ground you all if you mouth off to us.’” Not in so many words but that was the response.
So, just because its’ CALLED a safety inspection or grounding, does not make it so in every instance.
@ Joe F:
I don’t doubt that the FAA is led by incompetent people, that make up insane rules. Every institution that makes rules does. I deal with OSHA rules and do you really think they make more sense?
We have also debated the “security” measures that the TSA enforces on the public and that made you buy your own plane. They make no sense whatsoever. However, since they are rules, they are enforced on everybody that flies. And if you protest, or even joke, you get in trouble. Every kid older than three knows that ignoring rules gets you in trouble.
AA (and the other airlines) *chose* to not comply completely with the rules, because they thought they knew better. Or because they didn’t care. Or because they were lazy. Whatever. They *could have* instructed their techs to be precise in the 1″ spacing. They *chose* not to. In fact, as they rules usually come in thick manual, they actually went out of their way to study it and ignore it. Well, then you can expect that some day, some inspector is gonna whine about it.
Safety regulations are there to keep people safe. Overall, the reduction of accidents hopefully ways up to the frustration of the rules and especially the nitty gritty ones. But that is besides the debate here.
Ignoring safety regulations is gonna bring you into trouble in the end. AA management should have know and jumped through the silly hoop. They *chose* not to do that, and now they get hammered.
It is incompetent management to let your company get to a stand still because you ignored the rules. AA should behave like the big boy they usually are when they enforce their own rules on customers and employees. They shouldn’t start crying like little babies when some rules are enforced on them.
I feel bad for the stranded customers and their employees, who are paying for this incompetent management. I have no mercy on the management. Especially since they probably will leave with a nice bonus. Most likely in cash, because AA stock will not be worth very much when this is over.
In the long run, I am not worried. Some other airline – hopefully one that does comply with the rules – will take over the routes, planes and personnel of AA.
People need to fly, few can afford their own plane, so there will be airlines.
BTW: Have you noticed that both of us have changed positions in this case as opposed to the Mr M vs SW case? Here, I side with the regulation enforcer (FAA), while I don’t care about the enforcee (AA), while in the other case I felt more sympathetic with the enforcee, being upset with the enforcer (SW) and their silly rules. You flipped the other way around.
I gotta think about that. Am I that anti-airline? And does that mean that you are pro-airline? Hmmm.
Could it be that the teflon tape “every exact inch” is just the excuse from AA? Perhaps the scrutiny has led to them realizing other things were left unchecked or halfway done and they better get a move on before those are exposed too. Otherwise, I would think a teflon tape spacing issue wouldn’t cost as much in fines to the airline as it has in lost revenue (and reputation) for them now.
@ Michelle M:
Of course it’s an excuse, but most likely one from the FAA. They just wanted to get someone, and they did. Now everybody is awake again, so that’s good.
Perhaps Joe F can share the source of the “every inch story”. Was it AA, of the FAA?
Why was it impossible all thru the AA mess, that no one talked about any passenger rights. Because AA canceled flight, not because of weather but nelect, was the airline required by any regulation or law to pay to put the passenger onto another carrier if the passenger is delayed 2 or 4 or 18 hours or two days. To offer a refund of a discounted fare 0f $180 so that the passenger can go over to another airline and book the cheapest walk up fare of $1200 is just another punch in the stomach. And to provide no real means to even communicate with American, since the phones were never answered and to stand in a line for several hours with 52 other strandees only to be told that one had to go another part of the airport and start over was never a viable option. Does federal law or regulation require AA to pay for available seating on a competing airline. Is AA required to provide meals or lodging over a two day delay. If there are such laws or regulations are there any penalties when they are flaunted? I never could find out.
Robert Hunt