You may have read last week about AA’s almighty meltdown during Winter Storm Fern: 10,000+ canceled flights, a five-day stretch of mass delays, customer service nightmares, and crews sleeping on the airport floor.
COO David Seymour appeared on Airlines Confidential to address the collapse, and was bullish on the airline’s recovery:
SEYMOUR: What I’ll tell you is our technology that we used did not fail. It worked.
I would tell you throughout the whole event, we did not lose track of our crew members in our system, which I think you alluded to, others might have.
…I mean, it’s the largest amount of cancels this airline has ever done in that short of a period of time.
But that’s what we also, the same technology we used to repair.
He doubled down in his next answer:
QUESTION: “Do you feel like you recovered as quickly as possible?”
SEYMOUR: “Yeah, we did. No, we didn’t. I mean, again, I will always tell you, there’s always an opportunity to do better, you know, but it’s weather and understanding and how you factor in the, what I tell you in a lot of cases was infrastructure issues that added to the complexity that we had.”
Pushed again for some thoughts on improvements, Seymour closed with:
SEYMOUR: We’re going to invest in better tools to communicate with our crew members.
We’re working certainly on better technology for our customers in terms of looking for opportunity to rebooking. I like what we did in advance of putting the travel waiver out. We had over 100,000 customers that took advantage of that.
Did something unique by creating flights, extra flying to create opportunity for those that could leave before the storm to get them out. Also, opportunities for people to route themselves around the hubs that were impacted. And then we’re going to look at better tools so we can manage even more volume and how we integrate that with hotels.
Some parts of storm recovery are beyond an airline’s control. You can’t force a plane to take off in a storm, and while you can make your hubs more resilient to weather, you can’t change the conditions they operate in. American’s hubs were hit the hardest this time, especially Dallas and Charlotte.
But an airline gets to control how it communicates, and here, American didn’t do enough. Customers hung around in terminals for hours, even days, waiting for news about their flights. Lines spilled out into the concourse in at least two terminals at DFW. Pilots, according to their union, experienced “multi-hour hold times” and “six-hour delays between requesting a hotel and having someone even assigned to review the request.”
The question is whether American views this as once-in-a-decade bad luck, or they think this exposes underlying issues in their operations technology.