Still No Lie-Flat Seats on American’s Cross-Country Flights

Customers have been asking American Airline’s employees for lie-flat seats for a long time, and instead of getting them, American skirted the responsibility in an employee town hall and launched use of the supremely uncomfortable and small 737 MAX aircraft.

At a recent town hall event in Los Angeles, an employee brought up that her customers are always asking for lie-flat seats on cross-country flights. With that question, the airline’s president Robert Isom was again reminded that not only have customers been requesting it, the airline has consistently avoided doing it, even though they say they will.

Instead, the airline is launching cross-country flights on the small and uncomfortable 737 MAX planes. The 737 MAX aircraft are notorious for garnering complaints about a lack of legroom in every class, shortened reclines, tiny bathrooms, and no in-flight video systems.

At the town hall, Isom explained the reasoning, reported by View from the Wing:

“The 321Ts … have a fantastic lie flat first class product and also a really nice business class product and really just a very small coach section … And it does well to San Francisco and to Los Angeles … The marketplace is demanding more lie flat seats. And so one of the things you have seen recently, or you will see, we’ve brought the 330 out here from Philadelphia and that provides a lie flat product. We haven’t quite yet figured it out for [cross-country]. And it’s not because we don’t want to. It’s because in terms of having that lie flat product you’ve got it on the aircraft that can actually service [cross-country]. You’ve got 757s which is, those 757 lie flat seats are really dedicated to the European marketplace. And that is something we haven’t made the move on. You can’t fit widebodies in. In terms of 321Ts those are fully occupied San Francisco and Los Angeles now.”