American Airlines’ Roadmap to ‘Long-Term Success’
 

American Airlines presented employees with a three-pronged plan that I found rather interesting (and therefore assigned one of our reporters at FBT to write about as well).

Perhaps looking at the dismal results of the November 2018 survey, the plan calls for making the airline’s culture “a competitive advantage” as well as creating a “world-class customer experience.” It also calls for building the airline “to thrive forever.”

It also mentions a new employee recognition program.

There are no details on much of what it presents but it is interesting food for thought. Please look at the chart attached - it is a tall order so it will be interesting to see how the airline succeeds in the end.

The analysis is here:

Analyzing American Airlines’ Roadmap to ‘Long-Term Success’

https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...021b55af84.png

This link is to an online source to which I contribute and/or have a financial interest.

What stands out to me is to install power on 88% of their aircraft. In 2019. Nice. This will definitely reduce a lot of moaning about pmUS aircraft.

'Run the safest and most reliable operation in our history.'

They need to compare performance to the industry's best, not themselves. 99.6% 'controllable' completion factor isn't going to get it done.

No mention of Oasis huh???

5 out of six legs on LUS planes without power so far this year.

Also, no one gives a crap about D-0. D-0 is actively harmful to customers. What we care about is A-0 (although I'd say A-15 is totally fine, so the DOT is probably on to something there). But even that would be most usefully measured as "fraction of passengers that arrive on time" not "fraction of flights that arrive on time", because then they'd actually be incented to pay attention to connecting passengers instead of treating it as a big win that you pushed back from the gate 10 minutes early but left 15 connecting passengers behind in the process.

Interesting that under "World-class customer experience" they do not even pretend to want to provide better customer service by ground staff or on-board staff (cf. Delta). And I guess they can't, since the culture is so ingrained, and staff have no reason to do more than gossip in the galley after making announcements about how they are there primarily for our safety.

In-flight product improvements are limited to more seat plugs, bigger bins and wifi. No mention that the latter means removing seat-back IFE, which many prefer, and no mention of decreased pitch, tiny bathrooms, and horrible new F seats, which IMO all net to a significant in-flight downgrade. Do they really think this presentation is going to convince FAs who have to deal with all this every day that the in-flight product is "improved"?

There's a severe lack of vision in that document and a pretty average bar being set for themselves

I don't think the F seats are bad. OT, but whats bad about them? The current ones on the 738 and LAA airbii feel like park benches.

SFO lounge construction under "Create a World-Class Customer Experience" -- hopefully in the new T1 and not the current T2 location! No club closures, please.

American wants to increase EPS by 40% but then as another goal, they want to install TV's and wifi on a large number of aircraft, increase customer service quality, conduct construction work at their lounges, deliver 30 new gates between two airports, increase employee training, and whatever else that will cost them a significant amount of money. Investors should having meetings now as to when the CEO will be fired when they don't reach their goal(s).

Start by adding transfer partners from the large banks instead of forcing someone to either fly or get an AA card to earn AA miles.

Then you can move to the outdated flight atmosphere American provides (lack of wi-fi, seat-back entertainment, and an attitude adjustment for the few miserable flight attendants).

How about making the wifi free for first class domestic fliers?

In addition to that... How about fixing the wifi issues on planes where it doesn't work? In March I flew from JFK to RSW and the wifi didn't work for even one second on that flight. I felt like I was flying back in the 90's. Some people might think IFE is stupid, but what's stupid is having a lack of technology when all of the other mainstream carriers have it.

There isn't anything material here. So AA is going to fly a safe airline, hopefully get flights to their destination on time and fix up a few ACs (by the way the SFO AC is relatively new and one of the nicest lounges in the system). How about showers at PHL, CLT and PHX? Other than getting power to LUS A/C pretty much a big yawn.

Agreed. I didn't see anything resembling a stretch goal anywhere. Get to 32% of planes with more overhead space? Honestly?

And there remain hordes of planes with no MCE other than bulkhead and exit rows.

Looks like company confidential info to me.