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The SHOW: Airlines still a "good gig"??
- Thread starter A4sForever
- Start date
American Airlines pilots, citing fatigue, plan protests
American Airlines pilots are planning to protest work conditions, citing fatigue they say has been caused by their company’s mismanagement. The Allied Pilots Association (APA) says there will…
thehill.com
Too bad, they are my primary ride when I go meat-sack in the back.AA seems to be dropping in terms of reliability and customer experience. Thoughts?American Airlines pilots, citing fatigue, plan protests
American Airlines pilots are planning to protest work conditions, citing fatigue they say has been caused by their company’s mismanagement. The Allied Pilots Association (APA) says there will…
Almost all of the major brands (and many of the regionals that feed them) have had problems ramping back up to meet the summer demand. Now that it's back to school season and domestic leisure travel has eased back, it might give them a chance to catch up. It's a big puzzle and in this particular story the important is pilots qualified in specific combinations of airplane-crew position. Some of them hit the bottom of their bullpens because of extra busy holidays, major weather shutting down a hub for half a day and all the fallout from that, or cumulative effects of delays making crews timing out (which means an airplane gets stuck somewhere for a few hours or overnight).
Training is a bottleneck for a lot of airlines these last few months- mostly simulator capacity. Sims can run almost 24/7 (usually minus a maintenance period for a couple hours each day), sometimes that's what limits production. The sim instructor cadre can limit it too, those guys have a qualification matrix that involves steps in "growing" a new instructor, let alone one who can sign off checkrides. If you pull an experienced pilot off the line to be an instructor and your airline is short qualified captains in the airplane he or she is qualified in then that makes more short term pain. The instructor cadre can surge but they can also get burned out, have sick days, and otherwise be part of a complicated picture of plugging in the right qualified people to the right sim slots (so that the students aren't taking too long to finish training). Then another bottleneck can be qualified check airman availability, which has some similarities to optimizing a sim schedule.
Hindsight would have been either not give out so many buyouts and early retirements OR to restart the training departments a few months earlier. Either or both would have stocked up the bullpens much more robustly.
During covid and "quarantine," the airlines were trying to shore up market share by keeping routes open and utilizing gate slots (gate slots at some major airports are a pretty big deal with some weird rules). Sometimes that meant putting a small regional airliner on a route that would normally be flown by a narrow body airplane with twice as many seats, or larger.
This past summer the airlines shifted into building market share and they were quite ambitious about their scheduling and ticket sales volume (volume first, dollars later). Obviously this part hasn't all gone smoothly.
Hope that makes sense. Bottom-line-on-bottom: running a complicated business is complicated.
Training is a bottleneck for a lot of airlines these last few months- mostly simulator capacity. Sims can run almost 24/7 (usually minus a maintenance period for a couple hours each day), sometimes that's what limits production. The sim instructor cadre can limit it too, those guys have a qualification matrix that involves steps in "growing" a new instructor, let alone one who can sign off checkrides. If you pull an experienced pilot off the line to be an instructor and your airline is short qualified captains in the airplane he or she is qualified in then that makes more short term pain. The instructor cadre can surge but they can also get burned out, have sick days, and otherwise be part of a complicated picture of plugging in the right qualified people to the right sim slots (so that the students aren't taking too long to finish training). Then another bottleneck can be qualified check airman availability, which has some similarities to optimizing a sim schedule.
Hindsight would have been either not give out so many buyouts and early retirements OR to restart the training departments a few months earlier. Either or both would have stocked up the bullpens much more robustly.
During covid and "quarantine," the airlines were trying to shore up market share by keeping routes open and utilizing gate slots (gate slots at some major airports are a pretty big deal with some weird rules). Sometimes that meant putting a small regional airliner on a route that would normally be flown by a narrow body airplane with twice as many seats, or larger.
This past summer the airlines shifted into building market share and they were quite ambitious about their scheduling and ticket sales volume (volume first, dollars later). Obviously this part hasn't all gone smoothly.
Hope that makes sense. Bottom-line-on-bottom: running a complicated business is complicated.
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Bad option! Bad! Not approved by Wink (ret).
It looks like we’ll be flying on poo and seaweed before too long!
The smartest option would have been to suck up the sims required to keep all of us out on semi-paid leaves current and qualified. Letting currency lapse made it waaaaaay harder to plus back up to meet demand.
AA offered a number of leave options. As I recall only the one year UNPAID leave and the early out for I think 62 and over, went unqualed. Seemed like the majority of guys were on shorter leaves that required doing recurrent home study and training along with landing sim as necessary. Those guys should have gone right back to work. @webmaster would know real numbers. He was one of the union dudes who essentially administered the leaves.
AA seems to be dropping in terms of reliability and customer experience. Thoughts?American Airlines pilots, citing fatigue, plan protests
American Airlines pilots are planning to protest work conditions, citing fatigue they say has been caused by their company’s mismanagement. The Allied Pilots Association (APA) says there will…
Speaking of American Airlines, news of a possible change to their Contract of Carriage.
American Airlines just made a sneaky decision that may appall customers
This is one that, some might say, comes straight from the modus operandi of so many tech companies. Yet, especially if you're traveling on business, you could face a very unpleasant surprise.
www.zdnet.com
If anyone has plans to travel to Europe, these are the compensation rules which EU airlines have to meet - which might provide an interesting comparison.
Air passenger rights - Your Europe
Travellers' rights - flight delays, cancellations and overbooking (passengers unable to fly on flight they booked)
I only read the article regarding the contract of carriage. Much ado about nothing . Near as I can tell there is no change in what he highlights.Speaking of American Airlines, news of a possible change to their Contract of Carriage.
American Airlines just made a sneaky decision that may appall customers
This is one that, some might say, comes straight from the modus operandi of so many tech companies. Yet, especially if you're traveling on business, you could face a very unpleasant surprise.
If anyone has plans to travel to Europe, these are the compensation rules which EU airlines have to meet - which might provide an interesting comparison.
Air passenger rights - Your Europe
Travellers' rights - flight delays, cancellations and overbooking (passengers unable to fly on flight they booked)europa.eu
Airlines have never been liable for being late. You have never been able to get a hotel on your own and expense the airline. Who would allow that? You would have everyone running to the Ritz vs the airport Marriot or Double Tree the airline has a contract with. And I am quite sure every other airline has the same policies he is singling out AA for. These things are largely driven by International Treaties and Conventions and Airline Transport Assoc member agreements.
Speaking of American Airlines, news of a possible change to their Contract of Carriage.
American Airlines just made a sneaky decision that may appall customers
This is one that, some might say, comes straight from the modus operandi of so many tech companies. Yet, especially if you're traveling on business, you could face a very unpleasant surprise.
If anyone has plans to travel to Europe, these are the compensation rules which EU airlines have to meet - which might provide an interesting comparison.
Air passenger rights - Your Europe
Travellers' rights - flight delays, cancellations and overbooking (passengers unable to fly on flight they booked)
The EU passenger travel rights have been pretty beneficial. We’ve gotten several flight refunds with no questions asked when they changed our flights around. It would be nice if the US carriers had something similar.
Not sure how accurate this is but the story is pretty damning…
viewfromthewing.com
American Airlines: Penny Wise, Pound Foolish, And Saddled With $40 Billion In Debt - View from the Wing
American Airlines, and in particular current Tempe management, is known in the industry for being 'penny wise and pound foolish.' They spend lavishly on aircraft, investing in foreign airlines, and a new corporate headquarters (now supported with $10 billion in taxpayer cash over the last 18...
I am pretty agnostic about removing screens at seats. It looks like people have no problem watching a full length movie on a tiny phone screen. On board entertainment is still available through a wireless web link, you just watch on your device. Even when we had screens in seatbacks, people would use their own device to watch what they downloaded. The problem with using your device instead of an installed screen is you may have charging cords interfering with your tray table drinks/snacks and making getting up to go the the lav a bit more difficult. Problem with screens is limited entertainment options. Not many on AA lately have appealed to me.
Whatever the expense and hassle with the first class seat installations, the photo in the article is misleading. No seat in first class has limited under seat carry on space. That photo is showing the area that would have been the foot well for the middle coach seat. no one sitting there in a FC cabin due to wider seats.
The conflict between USAirways and Native American passenger service and other processes is real. Very frequently USAirways thinking prevailed and proved to be disaster. I could never understand why management would give deference to the type of thinking and processes that came from an airline that had been in bankruptcy multiple times, had a consistent reputation for poor service and whos labor relations were best known for playing the pilot groups against each other for years.
Whatever the expense and hassle with the first class seat installations, the photo in the article is misleading. No seat in first class has limited under seat carry on space. That photo is showing the area that would have been the foot well for the middle coach seat. no one sitting there in a FC cabin due to wider seats.
The conflict between USAirways and Native American passenger service and other processes is real. Very frequently USAirways thinking prevailed and proved to be disaster. I could never understand why management would give deference to the type of thinking and processes that came from an airline that had been in bankruptcy multiple times, had a consistent reputation for poor service and whos labor relations were best known for playing the pilot groups against each other for years.
Seatback entertainment is annoying. It's a waste of weight and money. Make convenient seatback tablet holders and put the power plug near the holder. Voila.
Lemme tell you about all the other ways to make airlines better.
Lemme tell you about all the other ways to make airlines better.