Agreed, but AA and the other legacies are not powerless to remedy the situation. Nothing in the flight attendant contract would prevent AA from hiring management employees and assigning them to fly as inflight supervisors. They could sit on jumpseats as long as they completed the door training and would move about the airplane, ensuring that AA's service standards were upheld. They could also focus on meeting and greeting elites and high-dollar customers.

Problem is cost. Each one would run at least $50k in salary plus benefits plus hotel/per diem, etc, so figure on at least $100k each. Even if they were assigned to just the widebody international flights and the 32B transcons, AA would need at least 400 of them (give or take), which would run $40 million. And all that assumes that AA could find competent supervisors who'd be willing to work at least twice as many hours as the FAs they're supervising for about the same money as the FAs. That may be an unrealistic assumption.

Would the positives be worth that kind of outlay? Dunno. We'd see the end of the "just phoning it in" type of service that occasionally results from today's regime where there isn't any onboard supervision. And we'd probably see a lot of resentment from a lot of flight attendants, both the lazy (who really need the supervision) and the conscientious (who almost always put forth plenty of effort despite the lack of supervision). That pushback might be very expensive.