Originally Posted by ryan182

You're conflating two separate issues, the "we are going to have to gate check roller boards for anyone in group 5/6/7" is for AAs benefit to meet D0 (on-time departure) as they are speculating that those bags won't find OHB space and are trying to avoid gate-checks after boarding has started because that delays departure. The FAA gives pretty much exactly -0- Fs about AAs internal policies that prioritize D0 over everything, what they do care about is that AA stipulated in filings to the FAA what the maximum dimensions of carryons they will allow. I might be wrong here but as I understand it that filing and those dimensions are essentially a FAR which means that AA needs to abide by them and not doing so gets the attention of the FAA, which apparently has occurred and now AA will "self-audit" aka we got this Mr/Mrs regulator, sorry - will fix ASAP please leave us alone. For pax this probably means more scrutiny of bag sizes at least for the short term, like all else in this realm eventually it will fade away until next time....