Originally Posted by
jordyn
I agree with all of the above; the real question is why AA is apparently uninterested in making the type of investment that United did.
I feel pretty strongly that instead of measuring on-time performance of flights, the DOT should make the airlines measure the on-time performance of passengers (i.e., what fraction of passengers complete their end-to-end trip according to the published itinerary, and by how much are they delayed?). This would incentivize them to care both about standing people who miss connections while also considering those who might be delayed on the flight being held. As it is, AA doesn't seem to care at all about the effect on connecting passengers, even if a bunch of people are going to be stuck overnight versus a 15 minute delay for the rest of the folks on the flight.
Honestly they made an even more impressive investment into software to handle weather disruptions. I wouldn't be surprised if they're running something in the background, too. But the fact is in an industry like airlines, a good heuristic is stick to the schedule as much as possible and figure out the mess later because otherwise you might just be making things worse. So I know it sounds weird, but I've found things work much better when employees are worried about doing their job according to their criteria than worrying about the organization as a whole. It sounds wrong, but it can be better than a thousand people all trying to make uncoordinated decisions that make everything worse.