Mr. BoH

https://viewfromthewing.com/american...ing-october-1/

Interesting. Perhaps more evidence that many of the covid-driven service reductions aren't coming back? I'm a little surprised their union contracts allow for this. I am sure the flight attendants are thrilled.

AANYC1981

Anyone know which cabin is losing the FA on the A321T? That’s my most frequent plane/route....my guess is FC goes down to 1 FA from 2 and BC keeps 2 and YC keeps 2.

MGW2000

321T is also my most frequent plane / route (usually in J, occasionally in F). Hard to see how they make that work with 5 FAs given the workload is already huge in J and pretty substantial in F.

I guess F and Y might share a floater ?

Often1

I suspect that the mid-term for service will be pre-wrapped meals and that the long-term will still mean that everything is pre-wrapped and served to the passenger on a tray which the passenger then unwraps and serves. Much of the time consumed for F and J is in plating the food and in Y from removing covers.

I have no doubt that many service reductions are close to permanent because the economics of commercial aviation are not going to recover for 3-4 years.

sethMCOflyer

Oct 1st is also the date they can start layoffs.

LittleBird

Bare minimum crew is all they need for safety. Nothing more is done anyway with f&b being taken away.

Bear96

I would have thought AA/DL/UA all would have moved to FAA minimum staffing already.

roadtriper

Recent Article stated that they are overstaffed by 20,000 employees, as many as 8000 of them being Flight Attendants, and after Oct 1 they may be thinning the herd. Wouldn't it be Nice if the first 100 were let go based on performance reviews provided by the Pax? let the Union fight for the other7900+/- maybe that would get some of the Slackers off their LAAZY AASSES. you could also give the top 100 Rockstar reviews some sort of Immunity… Ok, back to Reality RT

JDiver

Iirc FARs require 1:50 FA to passenger staffing. A few years ago, AA blocked several exit row seats in 737-800s to limit seating to 150. Then they went Oasis, adding an FA. So essentially four FAs to a 737 (172) or A320 family (A321 190 pax).

radonc1

Sadly...

I believe that AA is expecting much fewer business flyers over the next 6 months. The residual casual passengers who are flying probably never expected to have a high level of service to begin with, so passing out a bottle of water and a cracker prior to boarding does not require extra staff in the rear of the plane during the flight.

For those in the front, most flights will be minimal on-board service to begin with, and even those with meals will have abbreviated service thanks to Covid.

If one thinks about it, this is a chance for AA to clean house of superfluous staff. I am certain that they would like to eliminate the 30 year vets of the sky in order to reduce salery and benefits and to lower their insurance costs (insuring a 25 yo is much less expensive than covering a 65 yo )

What better excuse than a pandemic

cova

I thought the requirement was 1 flight attendant for each increment of 50 passengers.
150 seats = 3 FA, but 151 seats -= 4 FAs.
Hence RJ-145 have 50 seats.

I guess they can reduce F - FA's but usually only 1 for the 16 seats anyway.

I guess FA are "primarily for your safety" isn't really true if they drop below 1 for 50 people.

milesandmoremiles

But they arent dropping below 1 FA for 50 pax.

Duck1981

When I see how 'motivated' my AA FA's were on my pre-CovID flights I think service will defo not get better; especially as they know that big redundancies will come.

[but fair to say that many FAs have currently other problems than happy Platinum members - the situation we are in is such a shame. I believe for many of them it's still a dream job and to see this gone without any chance of finding any other airline job, it must be horrible]

JDiver

Crew bases have just been closed at RDU and STL. RDU based FAs will report to CLT, STL to DFW. LAX will be affected by flight reductions. One International FA I know of might have to commute LAX-SEA if not laid off.

CARES funding basically extended a number of positions that can be legally terminated 1 October. AA is currently positioning for those reductions. Some employees, they hope, will retire, accept “early out” compensation or just resign by that date.

luckypierre

Tried to pay attention to the airline industry during these tumultuous times. Keep seeing 1/4 to 1/3 tossed around both domestically and internationally. headcount and planes. For some reason, thought the payroll protection aspects of CARES ended in August. Is that Oct 1 date uniform throughout the industry or something AA negotiated with the Treasury Department?