American Airlines CEO Doug Parker took to Instagram yesterday to condemn the brutal attack against a flight attendant earlier this week onboard a flight to Southern California. While the threat of prosecution and flight bans are important, it seems to me something more fundamental needs to change.
De-Escalation: How American Airlines Can Reduce Bad Behavior Onboard
New details have emerged concerning Wednesday’s incident onboard AA976 from New York (JFK) to Orange County (SNA). Initial reports that the skirmish was over a mask appear to be false. Instead, a flight attendant bumped a passenger with a beverage cart, apologized, but the passenger still responded by walking back to the rear galley later in the flight and striking the flight attendant twice.
In a video posted to Instagram, Parker condemns the poor behavior and calls for robust prosecution:
View this post on Instagram
And Parker is correct: the passenger should be banned for life from American Airlines and face federal prosecution for what occurred onboard.
But that does not get to the heart of why so many incidents occur on American Airlines.
Sometimes, I’m not sure there is anything that can be done differently, like the issue on Wednesday. If the passenger just came back and decked the flight attendant, how can you really prepare for that? Throughout the pandemic, though, we’ve covered far more incidents on American Airlines than other carriers.
View From The Wing wonders whether poor behavior is due to lower fares and American’s Miami hub. It’s true that $29 fares attract a different clientele…but we’ve also seen poor behavior from passengers in business class and I’m not convinced that American Airlines is simply attracting bad people and United and Delta are not.
Maybe the lack of legroom, in-flight-entertainment, and alcohol sales come into play…it’s true that American Airlines squeezes customers in and does not give them viable options to pass the time onboard (streaming entertainment without power plugs is quite limiting).
But I’m increasingly convinced it is simply the way American Airlines flight attendants handle conflict onboard. From all that I’ve seen, confrontation seems to be prioritized over de-escalation.
Let me be clear: this is not blaming the flight attendants. They are simply following orders handed down from management. And management is also not fully to blame: in terms of masks, they are simply following a federal mandate.
But let’s juxtapose United and American. I’ve seen it myself and heard from many: if you refuse to wear a mask on United Airlines, you may be scolded a few times, but will be ultmialtey left alone. That’s by design. Protocol calls for a flight attendant to write up the incident and that passenger will face a flight ban on United, but you won’t see a United flight attendant screaming in the face of passengers to put their masks on.
There’s advantages and disadvantages to that approach. The bad news is that encourages passengers to flout the rules because there will be no immediate consequences and none at all if a flight attendant doesn’t write up a report.
But the advantages are clear: the people who tend to act up onboard are often unstable (sometimes drunk with alcohol, sometimes drunk with delusion). Seeking to de-escalate, even if it means they are temporarily left to continue breaking rules, seems to me like a far wiser approach to protect flight attendants.
CONCLUSION
It seems to me that American Airlines encounter so many bad actors onboard at least in part because flight attendants want to enforce the rules and do so more aggressively than on Delta or United. While flight attendants cannot be faulted for that, I think the wiser approach as the pandemic winds down is to simply note the poor behavior, ban the passenger, and avoid the sort of confrontation that has led to repeated physical and verbal attacks against flight attendants.
This is not a problem with the flight attendants at any airline; corporate hierarchies, misaligned incentives, and poor management communication are all to blame here. My partner is a flight attendant at AA and has shared the horror stories of how management and airport operations handle these incidents and customers in general. The entire airport operations experience is a blame game that often ends with the flight attendants as the last point of contact. The check-in desk tells passengers to ask for help at the gate, the gate agent says to ask for help onboard, then the flight attendants are left helpless in a sealed metal tube for hours on end. Recently,
I was made aware of a recent mask and verbal abuse incident that started at the gate and moved to onboard an AA flight before the plane even pushed back. When the flight attendants and pilots refused to leave with the unruly passengers, AA was more concerned with getting the plane out on time than the safety of the staff and employees. The passengers were allowed to stay onboard per the executive decision of airport operations management, even after the crew pleaded with them. The crew was then taken off the plane and sent home.
Horrifically, after this JFK-SNA incident the other day, the working crew was expected to continue flying on to their destination without any thought about the trauma they might be facing after watching their colleague get brutally attacked. You don’t necessarily see these problems at other airlines as the management and frontline of those airlines prioritize the entire flight experience more so than achieving D:00.
It really is a shame. Most flight attendants absolutely love their job – the service, the thrill, the travel. The skies are brutal these days and flight attendants are doing everything they can to maintain a safe environment. I would love to see any of us walk a mile in their shoes then come back and say that they prioritize conflict over de-escalation. Much easier to be an armchair critic than actually experience it.
Enough Already! Share the list among the carriers. Banned from UA, Banned on DL
+1.
After someone knowing flouts the rules on one airline, is there any reasonable expectation that the person will suddenly follow the rules on every other airline?
I believe the airlines should place two security personnel on each flight. One in the front and one in the back. They should be clearly identified through uniforms and equipment they carry. This is coming from a retired airline employee.
There has to be arrest and jail time on the spot when the flight lands. No slap on the wrist…. arrest them, let them sit in jail until they can see the judge (hopefully 30 days) and go from there…. with a hefty fine of course. People are sick of this – if management, police, and people in charge would do their job – press charges immediately – ENFORCE – for the love of God, none of this would keep happening. Do it everywhere, every airline, every time. Got a job to go to ?, kids at home ? — TOO BAD, ….. pay the price for your disgusting bad behavior.
Could Mr. Parker use any more worn out cliches ?….. yet nothing every changes,…. nobody pays the price except the planeload of people who have witness and be unwilling victims of one social misfit.
correction (typo) should read as — ….. except the planeload of people who have to witness the event and be the unwilling victims of one social misfit.
I have zero sympathy for flight attendants because they instigate many of the situations in the first place. They are responsible for turning something that isn’t a problem into something that is. Flight attendants operate the same way as cops. Cops enforce abusive, inhumane, and unnatural laws made by politicians. Politicians don’t use force to implement them: cops do. Flight attendants in the same way choose to enforce ridiculous mask rules because a person doesn’t wear a mask between sips of water or is wearing the mask 1 mm too low. Flight attendants choose to instigate these situation and we should not support them for doing so. It’s not just with recent Covid policies. This has been going on before that.
Just like cops, flight attendants are known to lie. They often abuse their power of flight and aircraft safety to shutdown people who make legitimate complaints about poor service; this has nothing to do with flight and aircraft safety and flight attendants are committing a crime by operating under the color of law in their positions when they lie. Just like with cops, many will automatically believe flight attendants despite there being two sides to every story. Cops are supposed to be no different than civilians and have no more rights. Unfortunately for us, they think they do and use it to abusive and terrorize citizens. Pilots mostly always side with flight attendants in the way cops stick together and aid and abet abuse.
De-escalation is certainly preferable. It’s ridiculous that flights will be diverted 1 hour from its destination because of snowflake flight attendants. Flight attendants need to recognize that rights of passengers don’t end in the air. If it’s not a matter of actual flight safety (structural integrity of the hull), passengers have a right to request service they paid for and discuss situations. Flight attendants also need to recognize that drunk people aren’t thinking rationally. Barking orders at a drunk person isn’t going to handle the situation with minimal fuss. A lot of people drink or take prescription medicine because they are afraid of flying or get sick in such cramped spaces. Using force should be the last resort and is uncalled for in many cases.
The U.S. is a cesspool because of the different demographics that are all in conflict. The lack of homogeneity racially, ethnically, religiously, culturally, ideologically, and politically makes things more difficult than they otherwise would be. A good example is Hasidic Jews who want to sit next to men on their flights. Wouldn’t it be easier if Hasidic Jews could have their own airline instead of being forced by the government not to be able to. I don’t see how slavery (forcing people to do things they don’t want to) makes things better. If we want to be apart, we should be apart.
I know that domestic travel in the US, keeps quite a lot of the flight cockpit crew an the flight attendants busy. It is an important job they do keeping America united.
Being banned on one Airline, will they make any difference ?
I live in Norway, and if I was banned on any carrier, the news would pick up, and I would have to drive either 2 hrs our 25 hrs,
Jackson….I agree with most of your points. Flight attendants ABSOLUTELY do often escalate things. Many are minimally educated people who barely passed a “training” course. Many of them have this grandiose and delusional image of themselves being some sort of heros while in reality they’re little more than waitresses….and for the past 18 months, jumpseat vinyl warmers. No, they will never do the fireman dummy drag with 100 passengers while the fuselage is ablaze to be met at the bottom of the slide by thousands giving applause, cheering and taking their picture. Most are either sassy gays or bitter old ladies…not that I have a problem with gay or old people. I don’t. Every once in a while one on a power trip gives a bunch of shit to someone who just doesn’t care and BOOM…..a complimentary and well-deserved attitude adjustment is served up!
I think you hit the nail on the head. Europe tends to have young flight attendants who are energetic and who take pride in doing their jobs well because they don’t want to embarrass themselves in front of their peers (friends). They leave to other careers more suited for raising a family 30 with a few who advance to the pursuer position in their 40s. It’s the same thing with Middle Eastern and Asian airlines.
Flight attendants in the U.S. stay on way too long and many try to be lifers. We have people who should be young grandmas in an office job serving drinks, walking down the aisles, and responding to call buttons. They are there because of the perks, income, and the ability to phone it in with unions protecting them. They don’t care about embarrassing themselves in front of their young friends. The white young gay males in my experience are the only ones on the big 3 who take pride in not embarrassing themselves with their performance. Any young women has the old ladies to look to as an example and they themselves get bossed around and spoken down to.
U.S. flight attendants were rated worst in the world before Covid. There is a reason for this. Some passengers do behave poorly but some flight attendants do as well.
It is really just a symptom of the deeper rot at the heart of our societies – infantilization of adults and a lack of self discipline and impulse control. Piecemeal punishment and small fines after the fact isn’t going to do anything because of the lack of permanent and overwhelmingly bad consequences for such behavior. Imho, the deterrence against this sort of behavior needs to be dramatically ramped up. Either have airlines form a cross industry agreement to permanently ban problem passengers from ever flying again across all airlines or have the federal government ban (after an investigation) these people from ever setting foot in an airport again. Announce this one strike policy loudly and on every flight pre takeoff. Imagine living your life without ever being able to fly anywhere again for any reason. That should be enough of a deterrent to terrify people into behaving themselves.
The cheap $29 fares will attract the kind of clientelle who barely afford paying for a ticket and who cannot afford manners. Granted the media gives heavier coverage to the big 4 airlines, Spirit and Frontier passengers clog up the headlines with greater frequency.
Like mama said, “if you cannot afford manners, you cannot afford flying”.
I couldn’t agree more with the balanced assessment of the author. As soon as I heard of this incident, my response was “how did the FA treat this passenger (paid guest). Lets’ be real, we have all been treated like cattle and less than human by FA’s. This is especially true for people of color. I have seen “guests” not served meals, yelled at and ordered around like inmates in a penitentiary all by white American/European FA’s. I am truly surprised this hasn’t happened more often. I believe that since most of these “FA Karens” are aging out of their positions and are being replaced by a younger more open minded group of recruits there will be a lot less ignominiousness being served. My sincere apologies to the senior beautiful open minded individuals who don’t follow these racist practices. When I encounter such a unicorn FA, I make sure to bend over backward to treat them with all respect and consideration. One has to wonder why a CEO would react so quickly and vociferously to an incident, was it a case of thou doth protest too much. Bravo to the author for thinking freely and considering the source.