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.

I'll give you that one. With AA's deval and now jumping onboard with BA in screwing oneworld pax, Star is looking better and better. You can actually find Star alliance award tickets every now and then too. What a novel concept!

LUS was fundamentally an East Coast, shuttle-oriented shorthaul airline. That type of market dictates a product around getting out on time (because a 30-minute delay on a 1 hour flight means the train/driving/connecting to save $ is more competitive). LAA was not this at all, and when we say that Parker's management team "has no idea" its exactly this - they haven't figured out how to incorporate the shuttle product onto a full-service network carrier, and they haven't figured out how to integrate the full-service onto a shuttle carrier. What we are left with is, quite possibly, the worst of both.

I think I have said this before but this merger is literally bringing together the worst of both carriers. Plain and simple.

And what's sad is that even with that padding, they STILL have had a hard time with delays.

I've had more problems this year than I can remember in a long time. :td:

What's been sad is I usually find that service has been pretty good - once you actually get IN THE AIR. Anything on the ground has been very hit or miss - and much more often a miss this year.

As a side note - my last flight to CLT was delayed due to WX (as were most flights going in/out that evening). Of course, my onward flight left on time. :rolleyes:

The AC people at the B club were pretty pushy on either putting me on UA (UA thru ORD as a kettle with a tight connection? I don't think so!) or trying to find a flight that had the same revenue bucket available. Yeah, I get that getting booked into F would be a bit much, but there was very little left. Is it a requirement that they book you into the same revenue bucket for WX?

I can understand that may be preferred, but when things go pear-shaped - why the aversion to just throwing me into a Y ticket and calling it good? I've had other agents do that. Is that the exception?

Sad when Spirit and express airlines beat you.

If there is, they broke it for me a couple times this month. But in each instance I called the EXP line at the first sign of trouble, and they quickly accommodated me (albeit with downgrades).

I would have bought that had Doug not worked at AA back in the day and ran HP before taking over US. Your statement implies that he came straight out of the 80s/90s US and that's not the case.

I think Doug's issues come from the fact that he's had an LCC mentality for a very long time. While that may have worked being the junior US airline in *A, it doesn't work when you're trying to run a much larger airline with a more global reach.

Doug made the same mistakes Smisek made in that he didn't work hard enough to keep enough legacy AA management in place so that they could work together as a team to bring the best that both offered. Instead, he took a somewhat softer version of Jeff's approach and still replaced a bunch of AA management with US management - and kept is ol' buddy Scott with him. So we now have a smaller airline used to do things that worked well in a niche market trying to apply those concepts to a much larger entity and market and it just doesn't work. The market and the beast are just too different.

I think my mistake is I should have went to the main AC rather than the hole in the wall. I probably would have gotten better agents.

Compared to what one AAngel did at the MIA AC for me to save my trips impacted by IRROPS - this was a very far cry from that service.

Definitely not-- very odd that they would have been so insistent about doing that.

Except for the part where AA wasn't exactly doing well pre-merger.

Many of the issues I had post-merge and eventually jumped ship over were the logical consequences of continuing pmAA policies. IRROPS happen, but mass strandings at hubs don't have to happen every time there's a drop of rain. They did on pmAA, though, and continue to post-merger, because pmAA's Baghdad-Bob routine has been left fully in place. Which leads to "on time" boarding and closing of flights which only get you to a hotel room for the night (and that only if you're lucky).

I've said it over and over: pmUS would start proactively rerouting people well in advance, or just admit there was a problem, cancel a flight and leave people at origin instead of overloading its hub with stranded passengers. pmAA would do everything in its power to pretend the flight was fine, it's on time, the weather is clear and beautiful, there's nothing to worry about... until "uhhhh... from the flight deck... uhhh... looks like, uhhh... DFW is in uhhh... ground stop for the next three hours, so we'll be uh.... sitting here...."

Last month I decided to give it another go and burned some miles on an SFO-PHL run in F. The 5.5-hour return flight ended up being over 10 hours gate-to-gate because the mentality has infected the pmUS side of operations now, too. Never again; I'll find some other way to spend down my miles, and keep flying DL and AS (and KL/AF for my TATLs -- no Heathrow for me!). Even with DL's recent network outage they're still light-years ahead on reliability.

MIA/PHX this morning a quick minor 2 minute mechanical issue is now running over 30 minutes with no word of why so long. Stranger is paxs keep coming on the a/c.

The exact reason this is happening is because of the rebanking of hubs post-merger. When most transfers were in the 90-120 minute range, these mass misconnects would not happen nearly as frequently. The post-merger airline is far worse operationally because of failed rebanked schedules than AA or US ever were on their own.

Today at LAX it was a 90 minute venture from landing taxi to Eagles Nest,wait for agent, wait for bus toT4. Landing 40 minutes early meant nothing.

I have a co-worker that is based in Melbourne, and regularly flies into LAX and connects onward with AA. Every time he has a AA delay, and tweets about it. He's SO frustrated he's now investigating other airlines to use that are actually ontime most of the time.

Early-landing flights that become delayed flights due to no available gate has become routine for me. You can land 40 minutes early, but it will take them 60 minutes to locate a gate. Just glad I'm not flying this summer!

Seconded. The only requirement is for inventory in the same cabin. Even that is negotiable since airport agents (not phone agents) can oversell a lower cabin if there are seats available in a higher one.

Sadly this is the often the case with Eagle flights at LAX. Often you are landing on the North runway, so there is a long taxi involved to get around to the other side of the airport. If it's an AM arrival, you will be waiting in a long line for a bus to T4/T6. It's painful and there is really nothing that they can do to improve the taxi situation. They could schedule the busses a bit better knowing how many people are arriving/departing at certain times of the day.

^

I got double pwned between LAX-ORD - there is no ORD-LAX 787 anymore (at least not on the day I'm flying) and they cut away the LAX-ORD 6pm departure which means connecting from HKG-LAX is not feasible anymore (OTOH there are now 3 red-eyes for this route...)

:(

I wonder if being PMUS agents had something to do with it.

So am I better off calling in or heading to an AC?

My normal plan has been to go to an AC if the airport has one, and calling in if not.

I call the EXP desk as I am walking to the AC. In general I find the EXP desk somewhat better at doing rerouting.

I'm so tired of AA purposely lying about on-time departures. Am on 2386 today. Inbound from MEX is delayed with estimated arrival 35 minutes before 2386 departure. No way for 2386 to depart on-time with an inbound int'l arrival that requires a security sweep. The agents at the admirals club said this keeps happening and it's frustrating everyone. Why has AA ops become so terrible on very basic things? Fix it.

Trying to see potential silver lining here:

If it were me, I'd just keep taking this route, budgeting time accordingly for the delay, and purchase the flight on Citi Prestige due to their amazing $500 trip delay benefit after only 3 hours delay. Lots of stories out their show that the insurance adjusters via this benefit are very generous on reimbursing just about anything, and the claims process frequently taking 24 hours from claim to reimbursement. Taking that into account, great way to finance one's holiday gift shopping list. :D@:-)

Slight eye roll at my own post for that one... :rolleyes:

This happened to us yesterday. The previous/inbound flight was deplaning at the time of our boarding. GA's did not even make an announcement about "20min" delay until 5min after when boarding was supposed to start. My wife and I have become accustomed to, and almost expect, to play AA's "20min game" with every one of our flights now...

Happened to me last week flying LAX-PHX out of T-6.

First the inbound flight was changed from an A321 doing PHX-LAX, to one dong CLT-PHX.

That inbound wasn't due at the gate until ten minutes after boarding started. At boarding time, radio silence at the gate. Plane shows up at 2:15PM for a 2:30PM departure.

New crew waiting at the gate to board. Obviously not going to go out on time. Departure was not pushed back to show the delay until after we missed our scheduled departure time.

I'm assuming that the delay, on time performance data is coming from the main flight database. Not keeping this updated causes cascading problems you can't plan for. How can the next plane scheduled for that gate get in (or even, get sent to another gate) if no one updates the database with a new departure time? Operations people are making decisions based on bad data in their system because it's not being updated appropriately. What a mess.

I've been tracking AA215 (LAX-GRU) for a few weeks now as I'll be on this flight in a week. It's seemingly delayed more than it's on time.

What's interesting is when I track the travel of the specific aircraft, the delays seem to get worse. While there's no tolerance built into the scheduling as it seems the plane is operating continuous turns, they don't seem to be able to make up any time.

As an example, a 1:45 delay on arrival somehow turned into a 2:45 delay on departure. If they schedule the aircraft with no slack in the system, how can they expect to not have this snowball out of control?

AA 46 strikes again, we are over 2 hours late and counting. Worst of all, heading to EDI and we now have a 6 hour layover instead of the original 2. The other direction and I'd be due a check, thanks Doug and co.

Oh, BTW, no PDB!

Going from CLt-CRW today, incoming flight gets in at 10 AM, it was a "ferry" no passengers, we are supposed to board at 10:45. They do the boarding announcement etc then 20 mins later say that the security check is not done and they have to wait for that. We stood there over a hour waiting for this BS. Who is responsible for that ? I assume AA is supposed to let whoever does this screen know the plane is there and hustle them over to walk on the plane and perform this BS 5 minute procedure ?

Also of course the AA app/website never displays the correct info., at 11:30 the app said we were in the air, they finally change the timing to depart at 12:05 - at 12:07 we are still waiting to board, so you can't actually leave the gate and hit the AC up, just stand there waiting and waiting and waiting.

I experienced this comedy of errors in a big way. Things turned out ok.
In March, I was scheduled to fly on an Award ticket from Aus to LHR via DFW.

AA lost my seat assignment 2A on the LHR flight, but I eventually got 1A after too much drama that could have been avoided.

Anyway the flight from AUS arrived in DFW arrived on time. i had about 1hour 20 minutes. I got to the AC in terminal D. The gate area was already full of passengers. Boarding was supposed begin in about 35 minutes.

The AC offered me flagship dining. I said ok, but thought it would be rushed and I would be eating a mediocre meal on the plane. I went to the dining area and the meal was actually ok.

I realized that boarding was about to begin. I left the dining area and realized that there was no lane at the gate. I could see the gate/Tarmac area from the AC, but the waiting passengers downstairs could not.

The people in the AC were not aware of the plan. The boarding time and and went. The departure time came and went and the monitors still indicated on time. The plane was towed to the gate about 8:00 and then about 8:30-8:45 preparations for boarding stopped because the entire airport shut down for a thunderstorm.

The plane started boarding at 10:30 or so for what was supposed to be a 6:40 departure. I think the actual pushback was 11:30.

Anyway the monitors, The AC never had realistic times of departure. The thunderstorm was beyond AAs control. The planes maintence needs were not communicated.

Times posted kept coming and going. At about 10:20 the skies were starting to clear. AC had no info. I went for a walk in the main terminal, saw some FA head into the gate. A couple of minutes later, an announcement was made asking all passengers to report to the gate. I was basically in the area. As I walked up they started boarding.

whats going on at JFK? Wife was on AA #34 from LAX - JFK this past Thursday night. The flight landed on time yet she had to wait nearly 30ish minutes for a gate. Is gate space at a premium that late on a weeknight?

Doesn't seem especially noteworthy

so then 35 plus minutes waiting for a gate is the norm with AA at JFK when your flight lands on time? Interesting. Maybe AA should add an extra 30 minutes to the scheduled flight time and circle over the atlantic for those 30 minutes.

Good idea