Well said.......I have only recently begun posting, but long time lurker and I have many times agreed with your view, as its mine, funny how that works;)

Bottom line, if all you needed to do was cut costs to make money, running ANY company would be easy. This management team believes in the policy of "lets see what we can get away with, and when it really get bad / we get huge customer push back then we will add". Eventually, this will lead to even weaker financials when compared to Delta and changes will be made.

This summer is just a preview of the end for this team. That is my opinion, and I will stand by it. It will get worse before it gets better, because I believe the changes that JONNYC has referenced are merely a bandaid, and not a solution to the actual problem. Time will tell, and all I can do right now is book away from AA till things change, even though that can be more difficult being based at a AA hub.

~TG

Interesting report on NPR this afternoon about AA instructing pilots to use the "speed-up" flight plans in order to make schedule and avoid crew time-outs. The spokesperson from the pilots' union was interviewed briefly who said the pilots are in strong opposition to this as they consider it unsafe in many situations and assuring passengers that they're on "your side" when it comes to safety. AA declined interview requests and sent a statement saying that "safety and regulatory compliance" are their first priority.

The plot thickens....

Parker is a creature of Wall Street that demands numbers and never wants to spend a penny. IIRC some months back when DL gave big raises out to employees Wall Street shrills had a cow. The CEO of DL had no problem telling the pigs of Wall Street that these were the same people that endured pay and other cuts when times were tough and now was their due.

LUS focused much of their attention on on-time performance and ops under the premise that what most pax cared about was getting there on-time and not having their bags lost.

Since the merger on-time performance has slid, Envoy has devolved into a joke of a regional carrier and, Mr. SOBE ER DOC has personally had bags lost three times on non-stop flights in the last 12 months.

Meanwhile, DL has delivered the best on-time performance of the legacies, has refreshed their product, developed a superior int'l biz class product and cleaned AA's clock on nearly every metric.

I say this because, even if AA fixes its performance issues, it's being left in the dust in other areas and just arriving on-time may not be enough for folks not living in an AA fortress hub anymore.

I agree with some of the assertions on here that the current AA management team do not know what it takes to run a world-class airline.

I'm not the first person to say this, but I do wonder if what we're seeing play out is yet another difference between running a large but primarily domestic airline that offered value (US) vs. a massive, truly global airline that's also trying to woo premium customers (AA).

I actually liked the old US Airways...for me at least, it was cheap, generally on time, the planes were clean, and the employees friendly (much better than, say, the unhappy FA's on United). They didn't pretend that they were SQ or CX (or even AA), but they generally under-promised and over-delivered. There were exceptions, of course, like when they tried charging for soft drinks in coach, but overall I felt like I knew what I was getting. And, of course, they were profitable.

The American brand, however, always offered something different and more aspirational...more international routes, better service on board and on land, the whole "Flagship Service" experience, better treatment of frequent flyers, etc.

And now we see two corporate cultures (and approaches to management) colliding. On the one hand, it looks like this summer reflects a series of mistakes in scheduling and running such a large, complex airline -- corner-cutting that may have worked at US and HP. Since Parker's approach took him right up the ladder from HP to US to AA, it's not surprising he'd try the same things that have worked in the past.

As travelers, I think we're also feeling a collision between the relatively high expectations of AA's legacy customers (expectations which are entirely reasonable - the new AA has done nothing to temper those expectations, at least on the marketing side) and the US team's radically different approach to running an airline.

Agree wholeheartedly with these statements. A lot of people are acting like Parker was running this terrible operation which he has foisted upon poor old AA. US Airways was, in my experience, always great at doing what it did: getting me from A to B on time with little fanfare, offering quick and reliable connections at second-tier hub airports, and occasionally surprising even a low-level elite like me with an upgrade to a slightly bigger seat, a few more drinks, and a pass or two of the snack basket.

I'd take back those old days in a heartbeat over the current state of the "premium" airline AA - sitting on hot tarmac with no crew while supposed, I guess, to feel smug about the presence of a buttonhole in my napkin, their 3-class transcon product that doesn't fly to my city, or some new flight to Sydney that I'll never use.

I concur. Some people need to chill with their irrational hatred of Doug Parker. He is not perfect but he is no Smisek. The LUS side is still doing well operationally; almost all of the problem flights/aircraft/hubs are on the LAA side and it sounds as though DP and his staff are taking actions to deal with the problems, even if it means admitting mistakes and backtracking on some things if necessary. We will see how the next few weeks go...

Well that's big of them considering they created the problems in the first place.

They "created them" insomuch as they decided to merge two pretty big companies. I'm not defending everything they've done - the FFP is a mess and perhaps they should have targeted these ops issues more quickly - but in my book these scheduling/ops issues strike me more as a fairly expected outcome of a large merger than as gross managerial negligence. These things aren't exactly easy to do.

That doesn't mean I'm happy when I'm baking on the ground waiting for a crew!!!

I would mostly chalk it up to impulsivity and inattention to detail. They would have been best off just sticking to the banked schedules at US hubs and leaving the AA hubs alone, at least while they conducted the actual research to find out what a banked hub would actually look like in say, MIA, DFW, or ORD.

Well, I'd sorta figured that's what they did for the year or so when they were still operating as independent airlines. :o But I also figure that the actual doing is harder than the planning. Maybe I'm cutting them too much slack...

That's me speaking as a businessperson, where I guess I'm a bit sympathetic to the challenges of working within huge organizations. As a flyer I just want them to get their act together ASAP! :D

wouldn't hurt to start boarding a little earlier on a few flights - i've done a few LGA-CLT runs on the 321 lately and they just cant get everyone i their seats in 30 minutes with all the crap people bring on board.

Your last sentence so perfectly sums up why this merger has sucked for both sides; LAA folks wanted to keep our superior FFP and reasonably good onboard product - we were willing to live with rolling hubs and maybe subpar punctuality because we were used to a good (decent) product. We wanted AA to expand to HKG and SYD (among many others). LUS flyers obviously could care less about any of these things. Too bad it's LUS management that's in charge and now has no idea how to do either.

To be clear, I was both an LUS and LAA flyer, the two serving different needs out of my home base of DCA. I do not think that it is necessarily fair to say that LUS management "has no idea how to do either" - they ran US quite well, well enough, in fact, to be able to afford bankrupt AA.

The question in my mind is whether the continued push on the LAA priorities - fancy new shiny things and faraway destinations - did distract a significant amount of resources from the nuts and bolts of merger ops. I don't have the scoop, but I certainly do not think it could have helped.

Oh, and as to that comment about LAA having the better FFP, well, you are right in most regards, but that LUS combination of cheap mileage sales, Star Alliance, and nonexistent routing rules was pretty tough to beat! :D

Management doing well on a smaller airline does not mean they know what they are doing with a larger, more complicated airline.

Sorry, but it's obvious AA management can't maintain the previous upscale image, nor can they run the current airline effectively. LAST in on time performance in the last report.