sluggoaafa

Sorry to resurrect this old thread, however I haven't seen anything new posted about this, and the title seemed appropriate. However, just saw that golfingboy stated changes were being made Sep 1st in THIS thread.

FEBO will be ending at the end of the month.

FAs will be obtaining meal preferences by direction of travel.

I'm sure this will be just as confusing as the old movie/CBS days as movies were suppose to be shown based on the same criteria:

If there is a change in time zones, take meal preferences:
- Eastbound: FWD-AFT
- Westbound: AFT-FWD

If there is no change in time zones, take meal preferences:
- Southbound: FWD-AFT
- Northbound: Aft-FWD

dmsdfw

That makes quite a bit of sense, because isn't that roughly how the flight numbers (even vs. odd) were assigned before they messed everything up and started using the same flight number for both directions on some flights. If so, it would return the ordering order to about what it was a year ago.

FWAAA

I agree completely. In the old days, odd flights were almost certainly westbound and even flights were almost always eastbound. And today, there are lots of flights using the same number for both directions.

KBMIFlyer

agree, it makes sense. Although since you can pre-order meals it doesn't really even seem relevant anymore.

FWAAA

What? What if my upgrade clears at the gate? Mine and yours, and we're sitting at opposite ends of the premium cabin? And we both want the one remaining steak or chicken or omelette or cold cereal?

sdsearch

So now we need a new acronym. FES? (Front Eastbound Southbound, with Back of course being in the leftover directions.)

And that's exactly where I've seen increased FEBO-not-followed issues lately, when the same flight number was being used in both directions.

At first glance, it seems a bit confusing, what if a flight is basically "horizontal" (close to due east or close to due west) while staying within a time zone? But then I realized, those flights are probably all too short to have meal service anyway.

Of coruse, there are alternate ways they could have done it, but no one way would be simple (without permanently biasing against one end of the cabin or the other). For example, they could have said that if the airport code for the departure airport is alphabetically higher than the airport code for the arrival airport, it's forward to aft, and vice versa. (For example, LAX-DFW would be forward to aft, while LAX-ORD would be aft to forward.) That wouldn't require looking at a map, it would only require knowing where you're flying from and where you're flying to (plus how to alphabetize!). And it would also (like the method they chose) automatically mean cabin direction reversal when a flight flew the same route in the opposite direction.

JDiver

I wonder if one decision point going in was the change of flight numbers occurring, some of which included using the same flight numbers on both outbound and inbound sectors?

In any case, it's good to be informed of these changes. Thank you, sluggoaafa!

It's easier to pre-order than change seats sometimes.

United747

I was on the second part of 1633 yesterday (DFW-MSP-DFW) and FEBO was used in the correct manner. But, for some reason, the FA had either the wrong manifest or it printed incorrect. It seemed she was addressing every second person by the wrong name. I was in 6E, so choice was not a problem (I pre-ordered, too).

Stripe

Is this a joke? FAs will never remember this. It will be worse than DL, where for at least a while the official policy was FEBO but many FAs ignored it. But not enough ignored it that you could be sure.

What problem is AA trying to solve with a change like this? Don't they have better things to worry about?

AANYC1981

What's my US FA going to do now? Rather than serve row 1 first then row 2 she decided (after no PDB) to do the entire Port side first then the Starboard side like a U. Never seen this before and adds to the weirdness of US travels I have encountered.

nrr

Here is a better scheme: toss a coin, heads they start in front, tails they start at the back...so its 50-50 that you may get your preferred selection. At least it is an easier scheme to remember, vs. what is being proposed.

Eastbay1K

That is a recipe for unpredictable quilombo on certain N/S routes, which are in the same time zone for certain times of the year, and not, for other times.

MIA/SCL? Sometimes the time is the same, sometimes SCL is +1, sometimes SCL is +2.

SCL is on the Pacific and is east of MIA, on the Atlantic.

The flights are mostly N/S.

The customer would not ever quite know what to expect with this policy if one flew the route during various seasons.

Unimatrix One

Isn't PHX one of those cities that doesn't do daylight saving time? So does that mean the order-taking policy on all those PHX hub flights will be different depending on whether it's DST season or not?

controller1

The rules state "time zones". A time zone is Eastern, Central, Mountain, Pacific (not Eastern Standard, Eastern Daylight, etc). Whether a city or state observes daylight savings time or not does not change the fact that one may fly from one time zone to another.

For example, flying from the Pacific time zone to Phoenix (Mountain time zone) is a change in time zones even though one may not have to change their watches during the normally observed period of daylight savings time.

VickiSoCal

Right now California and Arizona are both 10:02 pm. But California is on PDT and Arizona is on MST.