Mechanics at American Airlines have been negotiating their contract (and have been out of contract) for years. Work slowdowns for maintenance concerns, however, make the carrier safer, even if inconvenient.
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Work Slowdowns Hampering Operations
Reports have come in from frequent flyers and videos flood the web; American Airlines summer of pain has certainly begun. The mechanics have stated that the busy summer season will not be pleasant and have delivered on that promise. While we will have to wait for June’s on-time arrivals, anecdotally it seems to be taking effect, just check a departure board near you.
More Maintenance Increases Safety
While American Airlines mechanics displeasure may cause concern about safety, it shouldn’t. Mechanics from the two unions representing American workers are still performing work on aircraft, in fact, they are performing more of it. Tires that could have made a few more landings are switched earlier, more repairs generally are being made – that makes American Airlines safer. Other work that might have waited until aircraft sit idle overnight are instead repaired during operations hours, but nonetheless are repaired and in this case, sooner rather than later.
It just takes longer.
Mechanics don’t have to work overtime to get the tasks accomplished if they don’t want to, that prolongs delays and exacerbates the problem. While it may seem counterintuitive for a group of workers upset with their pay to turn down additional income, it makes their position stronger.
Passengers Don’t Like It
The real test comes from passengers that are less attuned than our audience to the ongoing struggles within American Airlines. A former colleague of mine, oblivious to the mechanic contract struggle, mentioned that he recently took a trip from Midland, TX to Pittsburgh via Dallas and instead of arriving at 10 PM, landed at 5 AM the next day. He was not amused and American handled it poorly.
Others have taken to the internet to display their discontent. Their stories are anecdotal, yes, but June’s on-time performance will tell the story. It’s a shame we don’t have real-time reports to demonstrate just how efficient (or in this case, inefficient) mechanics have been.
Nor Do Some Employees
Videos have surfaced with mechanics and managers in strong exchanges. Commenters have added that while they understand the struggle of their fellow employees, the consequences of those actions fall on the shoulders of gate agents, flight attendants, and call center employees who deal with upset customers.
Management certainly doesn’t like it either. In fact, last week American won a court order against the mechanics for slowing work that was “devastating” the airline – and that was filed in May, not June where the cracks are really beginning to show. Bloomberg published the following:
The slowdown has forced American to cancel 722 flights in the 23 days since it filed the original lawsuit last month, the airline said. The number of affected passengers has escalated to 11,000 daily, or more than 175,000 since the original May 20 filing, it said.
… the union’s “illegal conduct has dramatically escalated and has become devastating to the airline’s operations, customers and employees,”
Conclusion
The very thought of upset mechanics may frighten some passengers, but in this instance, they are using safety as a defense and doing more maintenance than may be absolutely required at that time. They are punishing management with both delays (to do the work), maintenance costs that would be incurred eventually in an expedited fashion, and the costs of delays like overnight accommodation for passengers and meal vouchers. While it’s not fun for passengers, working outside of their contract for the last few years probably hasn’t been fun for the mechanics either.
What do you think? Is American Airlines safer to fly because of the work slowdowns? Do safety slowdowns make you feel more or less comfortable flying American?
Sensible.
We are booking away from AA when we actually need to get somewhere.
Once again, previous pilot slow down, the gate agents and flight attendants are left to deal with passengers being(deservedly) irate.
While I do enjoy most of your articles, this is one where you should not comment on this topic unless you have first hand knowledge of exactly what is going. Reading this article seems to illustrate that you do not have an inside view of what is actually going on. I welcome your feedback in case I am totally off base.
As an Aircraft Mechanic it is my opinion more maintenance would increase the safety of aircraft. Aircraft are safe even with deferred maintenance. It definitely shouldn’t concern passengers if there are more delays, in terms of the safety of the aircraft.
And that is the point of the article. It might be inconvenient, and maintenance is in an acknowledged slowdown, but it makes them safer not less safe.
Mechanics deserve to get P Paid
@Dan – Respectfully, I have received a ton of emails from mechanics and employees across the business but as an observer, I should be able to comment or write a post without being either management or a mechanic, right? With all fairness to the labor groups and management, I wouldn’t really trust observations from either side right now, if you read both their statements there is no way to know what is really going on so I am not sure the logic follows.
Yes mechanics definitely need to be making more they currently are. Safety is of the utmost importance when it comes to the aircraft. Safety first ladies and gentlemen.
Good luck to mechanics, they deserve better pay and good benefits…this number one airline in the world needs to provide better benefits to all employees and not pay the upper management so much money…they don’t account for as much as the actual work force! Too many chiefs drawing big salaries!
People working on,flying and taking care of people in the aircraft and terminals should be making a decent wage. CEO,s and their upper management make a ungodly amount of money and perks for what they do. Most of it should go to the people that works on the front lines. If a company is having problems it’s because of bad upper management.
Not always.
I always struggle with the C-suite salary comparison to the frontline worker. I clearly respect the frontline worker (see posts every week for the last month at least) but at the same time, there will always be more nurses, maintenance workers, and admins in a hospital than CEOs and chief surgeons. It’s not that the hospital could run without either, but their training, requirements, and experience justify higher pay for those positions. A gate agent can go through some basic training to do their job and it’s absolutely true that flights don’t get pushed out without them, it would be chaos in the terminal. However, a CEO with 20-30 years of experience, well-qualified high-level education and much more scrutiny on their job from a public perspective (one bad quarter can be the end of their tenure) are some of the reasons why c-suite pay is justified (if performance is good.)
Also people demanding that CEO’s bring down their wage should remember that, Without a good CEO you wouldnt have had that job in the first place.
Check Jet airways story, no good CEO so it went bankrupt and now defunctional.
You can be a good mechanic by not having any education but couple of years of work experience is all you need. You think you can become a CEO by just couple of years of training?
I am completely horrified about this story and how little the author knows about the airline industry. In fact the author should not be writing anything if he knows nothing.
Deferred maintenance is not something that is unsafe. If an aviation tire lasts 4 months for example and you want to change it every two days because it’s .. safer.. then that is complete fraud and not safety. in reality it would be safer but you’re not going to change it every other day. you can probably change the oil in your car once a week and it would run better and have less chance of breaking down on the freeway but you wouldn’t do that. Especially when you have a 140 people waiting to get on that car or plane.
The mechanics are pulling the wool over your eyes. First of all I truly do believe the mechanics need to get paid more money. I am all for that. But writing up a plane that does not need to be written up which ends up canceling it and ruining the vacation of 130 people who will no longer get to their cruises and will miss their Cruise is absolutely horrible.
An aircraft goes through different kinds of checks like A B C and D check and if you want to do a D check which takes a long time once a week feel free if you think that’s going to make it safer but it’s not. This author really needs to wake up. I truly believe that maintenance should be done but there are times when you should not cancel a flight.
There are systems that are in triplicate. Let’s say you have a seat belt indicator that is out which will not defer or cause an issue for the flight until it gets to the next hub where they can fix it. The mechanics can write this up and cancel the flight if they choose to even though it’s not a safety issue.
In the cockpit there could be three bulbs as backups that cover the same system and if one of the bulbs burns out they can get it replaced at the next hub where they have the bulb or more time. It would be completely irresponsible what’s the mechanics are doing to cancel that flight rather than send it to the place where it could be fixed or when they have time to fix it.
This author truly has no understanding of what’s going on. And I am in full support of safety and for paying the mechanics more.
@Plane Guy – Always great to meet a fan.
You say I “know(s) nothing” about the airline industry, “no understanding of what’s going on”? Perhaps you haven’t seen my previous posts on the topic and should look back through those. I have been a proponent for the mechanics having a new contract and have called it “absurd” but I am sure you read that in the article and clicked to my sources.
You would have also found that I wrote that they may be changing tires that could have made it “a few more landings” and then cite that some of those changes could be made during the night but to make a point, maintenance is moving those forward to make their presence known. But you have twisted that into “If an aviation tire lasts 4 months for example and you want to change it every two days because it’s .. safer.. then that is complete fraud and not safety.” That’s the complete inverse of what I wrote.
You also state several times that mechanics need to be paid more but that this is an unnecessary step. I’m not a supporter of union action, but this workgroup with an incredibly important job has been out of a contract for years. That’s insanity. Should they continue to sit idly by while nothing gets done on their deal? How much longer should they wait?
Kyle, what you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone who read this is now dumber for having read to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
@Carl – Always happy to meet a fan… of Billy Madison. What is it, exactly, for which you object?
Sorry Kyle. Looks like some of AA’s management team “Plane Guy”, “IAHPHX”, and “Pruitt”, have felt the need to criticize from an obvious management perspective. It’s evident they know very little about what it actually takes to keep these birds in the air.
I guess being a travel blogger these days doesn’t require you to actually pay attention to airline news? On Friday, a federal judge ordered the AA mechanics to stop their slowdown. They are almost 100% certain to do so, or they will face millions of dollars of court-ordered penalties. So there will be no mechanics slowdown at AA this summer. The problems are now over for the foreseeable future. Perhaps you’d like to now blog about that?
I appreciate your continued reading of the blog and comments. However, I cited the same report and quoted from it in the post, I am sure you read that. Where we differ is that you believe the judge’s actions are enforceable while I do not. How can any judge determine whether or not legitimate work is taking place, why it takes longer, and how can he enforce the directive that they must work overtime. He can’t so it’s a “paper tiger.”
That being said, since all of the problems have been resolved, I would be happy to blog about the amazing on-time performance of the airline immediately following the order once those details are available. I suspect, that will not be the case, however, and critically thinking readers (or perhaps just cynical ones) will agree that it is unlikely.
Stop digging. Once the court order is issued, the slowdown stops. Always. Go do some more research. You’ll see that, in the past, unions and their leaders have been fined MILLIONS of dollars for defying a court order to end a slowdown. Nobody wants a multi-million dollar legal judgment against them. There will be no mechanics slowdown at AA this summer. A better blog post is whether the thousands of customers who were impacted by the slowdown have any ability to collect damages against the company or union. That’s complicated — and real. I’d first start looking at the EU regs.
I agree with you completely Kyle. I can tell you from personal experience today in fact. I sat on an AA 777 in Miami and we waited an hour at the gate for them to get mechanics out of the gate to push our plane back from the gate! Oh yes ignorant readers, that enforcement action is really working; not!
So are you implying that normally they are making unsafe decisions, and not addressing valid safety issues? Union thugs don’t make anything safer. This is pure nonsense.
Unions are legalized extortion, nothing more.
And management are greedy exploiters of Labor and customers!
I’ll take UNIONS!
That’s a ridiculous statement. Nobody is forced to work at a company. Like the vast majority of people, you, and they, are free to leave the company and find another job if you don’t like it. Similarly, nobody is forcing you to fly an airline. There are many choices. The only exploitation is by unions and their bullying and extortionist tactics.
When you say “i’ll take”, that’s pretty accurate, that’s all unions do. They take. They demand above market wages, and hold companies and customers hostage.
Unions bargain collectively. Executives are in a position to do so individually. Both demand more when negotiating but it doesn’t mean they get above market wages. They get what they can get. The gigantic widening of the gap between average employee pay and executive pay at essentially every company in America over the last 20 years should tip you off that if anyone is holding companies hostage it isn’t rank and file employees.
PRESS RELEASE: AIRCRAFT MAINTENANCE TECHNICIANS UNION CITING SAFETY CONCERNS ASKS MEMBERS NOT TO FLY ON AMERICAN AIRLINES
Updated On: Jun 15, 2019
Reacting to a temporary restraining order issued by Federal District Judge on June 14, 2019, at the request of American Airlines, the National Director of the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association (AMFA), Bret Oestreich, called on the Association’s members to avoid American Airlines operations.
Oestreich warned AMFA’s nearly 3,500 members at Southwest Airlines and Alaska Airlines: “If you care about your families’ safety, do not put them on an American Airlines flight until this injunction is vacated”
http://www.amfanatl.org/index.cfm?zone=/unionactive/view_article.cfm&HomeID=763901
Matthew was working on a post about this yet to come.
So refreshing to see a nuanced take on this whole issue, unlike Luckys tantrums on this subject over at OMAAT, all because he had a delayed flight
Thank you. Comments like this make all of the time, effort, and research worthwhile.
It makes it more concerning if I have to be someplace at a particular time, as I often do for business, if I’m at an increased risk of my flight being canceled. This only adds to the existing concerns of AA making things increasingly difficult for some employees of our company to retain status (EP 15k is just unnecessary) which has us recently reevaluating our continued loyalty as a company. I would like it to not come to that, but AA needs to step up their game and show everyone the same loyalty they’ve received, whether we’re a business traveler or mechanic.
You know it’s funny to read all this BS about a organized mechanics slowdown at AA. As a 34 year AMT at AA, we never heard about a slowdown till we read about it. Sure morale is at an all time low, and understandably maintenance employees feel like they have sacrificed since 2003 to help the company with half the benefits of their industry peers.
Since AA management has decided to change the maintenance program – make it less expensive by spreading out checks, and flying longer with deferred items etc. – the quality of the airworthiness of the A/C is going to be affected. Add to that, the availability of replacement parts has been a real problem.
These issues have nothing to do with AMTs participating in concerted slowdown. In fact, most AMTs point out the stupidity of the new system put in place – only to fall on deaf ears. The AMTs continue to do their jobs, maybe not as exuberantly as they could – if they felt they were being treated fairly. Even our supervisors are scared to speak up for fear of losing their job.
As far as unions go, I would be remiss not to point out most AMTs do not like their current representation as we were not even given a chance to vote on it. For the most part AA’s AMTs would like at least parity with our industry peers with benefits and pay. The recent company offer for some of these items wasn’t too bad, but had a lot of bad stuff: that of course, was not advertised – mostly future outsourcing related.
This is just a symptom of a company that has lost touch with both its employees and its customers. AA management has been prominent in the news for the past couple of years–for all the wrong reasons. I personally, have written them off as a choice in my travels. I have used up all my accumulated AA miles and will not continue in the program. In general, I don’t worry about the safety issue but I do believe that the horrible morale across the company creates an ever-more unpleasant experience for consumers. I choose to avoid that when possible. Get your act together Parker–or move on.
AA’s new style maintenance program is a recipe for disaster. Time between maintenance checks have been extended to the absolute maximum.
They wait until deferred items are down to zero hours or flight cycles before scheduling items to be repaired or checked. That means having repairs or checks accomplished on turns with minimum ground time. A check the requires approximately 2 hours with only 45 minutes ground time on an aircraft is a guaranteed delay. This is where all the delays are coming from.
Minimal maintenance program is counterproductive to reliability.
AA used to be the role model for airline maintenance programs. Not anymore.
The new management team has created a bargain basement airline. Now you just have a bargain basement airline with the mentality of as long as the seats are cheap, people will still fly regardless of whether they get there on-time or not.
AA’s Board of Directors must be OK with this….
Not a union guy but………………Money is the real reason for the dispute. My understanding is American wants to outsource deicing, ground equipment maintenance, facility maintenance and do more aircraft maintenance overseas. Southwest had the same dispute and it was resolved within 2 weeks after the “slowdown”!
Bottom line- AA managements fault. Mechanics having been working without a contract for years. They are fed up, who can blame them?
Management continues to enjoy million dollar bonuses and are completely out of touch with the flying public. (Charging the passengers for every little thing, cramming more seats/ making the seats smaller, smaller lavatories, making everything bare bones, etc…)
Also outsourcing is a real threat. I for one would want my plane serviced in the USA by USA mechanics, not sent to South America or elsewhere and worked on by some guy who doesn’t know English or know how to read a schematic.
Unfortunately, the sad truth is- (when management refuses to negotiate in good faith) the only way to get managements attention is to affect/ inconvenience the flying public. I saw this first hand during the flight attendant strike of 1993. AA in one day lost more than the flight attendants were asking for over the entire contract.
The BOD should replace Doug Parker with someone who has vision, not just caring about profit, profit, profit.
It won’t be pretty, I hope the mechanics get the contract they deserve.
Margaret you hit the nail on the head. From what I have read the biggest hold up in the contract is their scope of work, outsourcing their aircraft maintenance, line stations around the country and heavy maintenance to other countries, China, Mexico, El Salvador and others. The FAA requires US mechanics to be random drug and alcohol tested, but it is not regulated in other countries, a person can be picking vegetables one day to working on an aircraft the next.
The flying public needs to know you is working on the airplane they are flying on.
So this article is extremely one sided, perhaps to make a more informative story you might have put on here things like here is what a mechanic makes at American to start out, what they make with 5 yrs, 10yrs, 15yrs seniority as opposed to just reporting they are forcing maintenance early on planes, writing up defects, forcing the plane to be grounded, and then leaving for the day, thus impounding the plane till the next morning…
You can Google what AMTs make at all the airlines. The biggest differences are in the benefits. At AA; for example, AMTs get 5 paid holidays per year at 1.5 X pay while our peers at other airlines get 10 holidays at 2.5 X pay. AA’s AMTs receive less vacation then our peers as well. BTW nobody forces maintenance on a plane, if it’s a legit write up, it gets fixed or documented, and deferred if possible.
This should not be about a Contact or no contact .
NOT THATS ITS BAD ENOUGH with documented cases of degradation of safety culture at AA by the FAA inpectors WITH AA MANAGEMENT, BUT NOW more scrutiny having the Federal Courts dictating the MECHANIC ability to use their professional discretion for airline safety. Link
https://youtu.be/_gg1BmcRQi0
AA mechanics safety sensative evaluation, knowledge, expertise, and responsibilities are now under optics and are scrutinized, while being the vigilants of safety and being the last line of defense for the flying public.