American Airlines Flight Attendants Up In Arms After Snitch Rats Out Trainee For Dozing Inflight

An American Airlines flight attendant was caught sleeping on a training flight while seated in a passenger seat. A crewmember took a picture of the person and sent it to management. As with the two United flight attendants union officials caught maskless, virtually everything that happens in public gets recorded.

A foreign-language speaker was fired just a few days before graduation. American Airlines flight attendants say brief naps happen all the time.

• They don’t like snitching on colleagues. The story I’ve heard is that the ‘snitch’ used to work for Emirates which is regarded to have a ‘snitching culture’. And there are threats of retaliation, with other flight attendants claiming to have photos of this flight attendant breaking rules in uniform.
• There’s general sympathy for the new hire (which surprised me). Training days are long and there’s reportedly a medical condition that may have contributed to the brief snooze. Since the trainee wasn’t a working crewmember on the flight no safety rules were broken, though certainly company rules were (even if I see working flight attendants ‘resting their eyes’ quite frequently).

A flight attendant wrote a letter to the Vice President of Inflight at American Airlines and his response is going viral. She was told to give him a talking-to for her email.

I have three things to learn.

1. The fired almost-flight attendant was a trainee, any violation can lead to being bounced.
2. Crewmembers should not assume any solidarity as union members. They snitch on each other, and retaliate against snitchers.
3. Byrnes offered exactly the wrong response. He should have thanked the employee for their concern, shared that he appreciates their looking out for a colleague – that’s a great instinct – but he hopes they can understand that they do not have all of the facts, and that he’s not at liberty to share more about a personnel matter. And end by emphasizing what a testament is that they’re so caring at work, please continue to be and continue to take equally good care of customers.

Airline unions become like Ponzi schemes because they benefit the first in at the expense of those who join later. Senior flight attendants were paid to stay home when American Airlines took payroll support money from the government.

In airlines.

American Airlines is about to switch to a single flight attendant scheduling system. They will no longer have to keep former US Airways crews separate from legacy American crews. This will allow the airline to schedule their planes more efficiently.

In airlines.

Six years after United and Continental merged, they are still not complete. United flight attendants work on United planes while Continental flight attendants work on Continental planes.

In general.