worldiswide

Mr worldiswide left ord yesterday to connect to the 930 pm flight dfw to scl. Cancelled at 9pm due to lack of crew AA scrambled to put about 200 people in hotels and the flight is scheduled to leave at 9am this am. How does this happen especially in dfw? Related or unrelated to merger this weekend. He said ground staff last night and this am were great but we're working with little information.

AAExpDFW

Very rare from what I've seen living the DFW for 15 years. At that time of night though there is only a couple long haul flights to SA and sometimes LHR left. It is possible that a key crew member called in sick and they couldn't backfill with reserve after a long day. The 12-hour delay sounds very much like ensuring a crew reset requirement for the replacement crew.

millionmiler

Its very unusual. That's why they have reserve flight crew. I've even seen reserve crew flown between hubs (RDU-JFK and DFW-MIA) to cover flights. In fact I've had a flight from MIA-SCL delayed by 2.5 hours in order to wait for reserve crew to arrive in MIA from DFW for our flight.

That said, if they are out of bodies then there is not much they can do. One problem that I can see is that it screws up the crew rest time. I've been on another MIA-SCL flight that had a second set of flight crew sitting in J class to cover the return of SCL-DFW when a flight was canceled.

worldiswide

Thanks for the responses. I thought it was pretty rare, and I guess wanted some confirmation. There were some mechanical delays this am, and then they needed to take on fuel for a longer flight that stayed closer to land. I think there is still more to this story, as I only got bits and pieces from Mr worldiswide. It's about to land at scl about 14 hours late so that might be additional details later.

grahampros

As said it's pretty rare out DFW. Less so out MIA but in this case if it's crew issue and they told you that it's probably true you had a crew member that just got sick. It does happen. They really don't have a lot of options at that time of night to swap it out on such a flight. It's not an MD 80 to ORD they could just change crews on short notice.

worldiswide

So apparently the co pilot was moved from the scl flight to the last lhr flight last night. same pilot from the night before apologized profusely to passengers the next day and said we were all here and ready, wasn't our call , and FA were great. Plane was in bad shape, with seats not working, and small things like the boSe headsets were broken. Lot of disgruntled regulars on the flight who don't have a high opinion of the new AA and their ability to run the international part of the airline especially to Latin America which is pretty much AA territory to lose.

N1120A

A pilot issue is really weird. AA has separate international/domestic bases for FAs, so I can see that as an issue, but a pilot being unavailable is pretty odd.

jaytcsd

Same thing happened to me on Friday at MCI. RJ from ORD came in early (which they never fail to mention in the text notifications) and just as we were about to board 4346 back to ORD they announced they did not have a 1st officer and changed our 2.15pm departure to 3.15.

Our estimated arrival was 4.50 which meant I would miss my IND flight. The plat desk said they could not get me to IND Friday night or Saturday until late afternoon, everything was booked. I told them I'd rent a car and drive the 3 hours back home.

About 10 min later the GA said a pilot from an inbound PHL flight would take us out after it landed at 3.50, then 10 min later they canceled the flight. Got a text right away saying we were on a 9am flight on Saturday, we rented a car and drove the 7.5 hours back home.

I'm going to see if AA will pick up my rental bill since they did not have to feed us and put us up for the night. I should have known this trip was trouble when my bag got left in ORD on the way out, at least it caught up with me before I left.

When I called the plat desk about midnight Friday to tell them I was not taking the return segments the girl could not figure it out, even called me back to confirm it, then told me my ticket was worthless because I canceled.

TWA884

Not as of May of this year when the domestic and international flight attendant bases were merged.

totti

Hi there!

I did a search but could not find the information I was looking for (maybe because of the search terms?).

I flew PHL to FRA (AA700) the other day. The flight was operated by an Airbus 330-200. Right after takeoff, one of the pilots left the cockpit, settled in 5A right behind me and had a nap. When I got up shortly before arrival in FRA, another pilot removed the crew rest curtains in 5A and went back to the cockpit. So I assume there were 3 pilots on duty this flight. Is this standard for AA on this route? At least on BA and LH I always only had two pilots on flights to the northern East Coast cities (e.g. BOS, NYC, PHL). Just curious how this works.

Cheers,
totti

HNL

Flights over 8 hours get 3 pilots. Longer flights get 4

JDiver

There would normally be one at least Captain and two First Officers on that route; it's not unusual to have a couple of Captains and a F.0. On my recent LAX-DOH-LAX flights (~16 hours) we had four cockpit crew.

On some aircraft like the newer 777s, there is a crew rest area in the crown (there's what looks like a secured closet door forward that opens to the stairs leading there) and there's an FA rest area as well (the CRC, or Crew Rest Area).

On others, A330, B757, B767 there are no rest areas so seats are set aside for the PNF (Pilot Not Flying) and the Flight Attendants (the NGBC 767 has the seats at row 17 set aside for crew rest, therefore the curtains, leg rest and extended recline - I'm not sure of the 767 CIP). Crew rest issues are usually negotiated between management and cabin crew / Union representatives and at minimum adhere to FAA regulations governing crew rest.

See the crew rest areas in several newer aircraft from representative airlines here, c/o Airline Reporter, and here c/o the Daily Mail.

phlwookie

At least out of PHL, if memory serves, the only flights that don't get relief pilots are flights to Ireland and the UK. Paris definitely does in my experience; today AA755 is estimated at 7 hours 57 min. I don't recall if AMS/BRU do, though AA799 from AMS is 8:10 today, so probably.

agjil

I had the same experience flying in the other direction: on my FRA-PHL flight, right after take-off, someone came out from the cockpit and settled in 5A, deployed a curtain around the seat, and stayed there pretty much during the entire flight.

totti

Thanks for the information. Very interesting indeed. There was a crew rest area right across the lav. behind the cockpit but both bunk beds stayed empty the entire flight. It did look very narrow though and I can fully understand that they rather want to stretch in 5A.