AA Meltdown That Started Over the Weekend
 

I'm surprised no one has posted about the AA (and, to a lesser extent, Sprit) meltdown that began over the weekend. Twitter has been burning up over it and there have been a number of stories in the MSM.

It appears that they have had far fewer than sufficient people than necessary to operate their schedule. It would not be shocking Friday-Saturday since it was the end of the month and flight crews might be out of hours. But, apparently, it was hundreds of airport employees as well and it lasted Sunday through at least today which crew hours should be refreshed. I read a story a few minutes ago that said AA has already cancelled 9% of their flights for tomorrow. Is there some sort of job action in progress?

DFW was a complete mess yesterday due to the number of cancelled flights. Extreme lines for agents, even in the AC's (I was in C, but heard others say it was just as bad in the other ones).
While most of the problems seemed to be crew issues (which were blamed on weather), it was obvious there were severe ground crew issues as well.

Weather: the airlines', particularly UA and AA, all-purpose excuse.

I have a trip on Sunday, but I decided not to take it because of heightened COVID risk. However, I'm waiting to cancel it until the last minute, because I'd rather get a refund than a flight credit. I bought the ticket in March so the flight credit would expire next March (unless extended). What a freaking mess. Both AA, and the virus. "Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water."

NK still seems to be having huge issues with 61% of flights cancelled yesterday. That's way worse than AA at 12%.

CLT wasn't too good either, IMO. Had CLT-HNL with a 11:59am departure Monday. Was delayed 6 1/2 hours waiting for 2 FAs to show up. When they did, we were about to board and they took the plane out of service and moved us from gate A4 to D11. Like an army of ants after a bowl of sugar we single filed across the terminal to D11. We had a new cockpit crew who thought they were going to LHR. We finally boarded the plane and then all the MX problems started. At about 10:15pm they "delayed" the flight to 9:30 the next morning (Tuesday). Overnight they pushed it to 10am for crew rest requirements. We finally pushed back with our third A/C just before noon, 24 hours, and 3 crews later. They did comp us 15K miles by the time we landed in HNL.

...but there actually has been really bad weather in DFW the last few days -- hours and hours of thunderstorms often accompanied by hail.
Considering 1/4 of AA's flights are to/from DFW, that will ripple throughout the system. They are not really lying this time,

Hoping they got it fixed by tomorrow. Beginning the first of 3 trips this month. Trying to avoid DFW if at all possible.

what reason do they have to lie about weather?

To hazard a guess, in general weather could be considered as act-of-god-type rationale.

If staffing-related, it may be more likely that the airline is seen as having higher liability/responsibility for delays which resulted.

Compensation could be seen as appropriate in such scenarios, while weather-related scenarios would not attract such.

Granted, in large scale events, that might not be relevant, but it will at least result in higher damage to the brand if within the airline’s control. (Though, would the airline care?)

I was in CLT on 31 Jul (but flying United) and saw the lines for the AA customer service desks were huge. I was wondering what was going on, as the weather seemed fine.

Ouch. We have this same flight in 3 weeks. Hope we have a better experience than you.

I was scheduled to fly through CLT on Sunday; flight was cancelled and helpful AA agent advised me to reroute through PHL instead. When I checked back later, turns out the next two CLT flights were also cancelled or delayed by hours.

When the delay is due to 'weather' it essentially allows the airline to be completely off the hook for any kind of hotel or compensation provided to the customer.

I would like to see the EU 261? applied to US based airlines.... I know its never going to happen, and yes since the
airlines always can blame the weather,,,, customers are stuck with no recourse...
We unfortunately has customers have a very few rights....