I was on the fateful AA 292 on 2/18 that had to make an emergency medical landing in Saint Johns, Newfoundland Canada. We landed at 3am local time and didn’t depart again until 7:30am - back to JFK. The actual medical emergency took at most 15 minutes after landing in Canada and the pax was transported to a local hospital. However, for reasons unclear, we didn’t leave Canada for over 4 hours after EMT took the pax off the plane and naturally the crew was going to time out. The captain tried his best to keep us updated but it was clear he didn’t even know what the plan was. I think the reality was that there was no plan.

Communication at JFK has been abysmal. Based on the tone of the onboard announcements, I somewhat expected a new crew to be waiting for us at JFK, but after immigration we started hearing there would be a special flight scheduled tonight. However, we were told there was ann issue creating a new flight number. After an hour standing in the rebooking line by the baggage claim, a shouting employee said we should all go upstairs to the main check in area. A mad dash began to stake a claim in the new lines upstairs. From there, I spent 3 hours in line before an agent could assist me, and I was one of the lucky ones near the front of the line. At this point we start hearing rumors that the flight would now depart the next day. No major announcements, no ongoing comms, no staff talking one on one to concerned pax, just rumors, overhearing chatting gate agents, and various text updates from AA. At one point an angry mob formed yelling and shouting. I thought a fight was going to break out. It was a mess and nobody from AA was in control.

Look, medical emergencies happen and that’s not AA’s fault, but the lack of a speedy recovery from this event at a major OW hub coupled with no communication and an overly lackadaisical JFK ground staff meant this was even more of a disaster than it had to be. A flight like this has a lot of multigenerational families who probably don’t fly very much and the lack of communication or concern shown by most of the ground staff was really unfortunate.

Is this normal AA IRROPS?