Originally Posted by
LupineChemist
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.
I think we can all agree that holding a flight is a complex decision that shouldn't be left to individual employees without the full facts, but is there any evidence whatsoever that AA has a United-like algorithm running in the background that factors in missed connections/gate availability/crew time out/last flight of the day/etc. and decides whether to hold a plane for a few minutes? I have seen no indication of anything like that and "we shouldn't try to optimize this problem because we might just make it worse" sounds a lot like AA but not like a successful company. Even if AA wanted to be conservative in how it held flights, there are situations where a flight could be held with 100% certainty of no downstream impacts and a competent organization would be able to use the readily available data to identify those situations.
A few weeks back I missed a connection by about five minutes where my connecting flight was forecasted to arrive twenty minutes early and did. No other plane immediately took the gate once my plane left and there was not weather at either end that would have put the early arrival in question. The destination was a very small airport and it was a midday departure so gate availability or the destination airport closing for the night were not factors. Zero identifiable reasons they could not have held it for me and saved me five hours of sitting at the hub waiting on the next flight.