Canceled Flights, Wrecked Vacations and Leaky Planes: Passenger Frustrations Rise as American Airlines Struggles

Lora Paine's summer beach trip to Florida to celebrate a new job now brings back only frustrating memories.Her American Airlines flight from California to Fort Walton Beach turned into a nightmarish weekend of flight delays, cancellations and intermittent sleep in airport terminals.She spent an extra night at DFW International Airport because of a delayed flight, then an extra day at Las Vegas' McCarran International Airport on her return trip. When she got a ticket back home, her plane dripped water from an overhead leak until a fellow passenger stopped the leak with feminine pads."The flight attendants didn't care that water was dripping on me and I wasn't getting off the plane because I had to start a new job the next day," said Paine, a 28-year-old project developer recently hired at a commercial solar company.Experiences such as Paine's are plentiful in 2019, with passengers of Fort Worth-based American complaining of mangled flight plans, upended vacations, snarky employees and hours-long waits on tarmacs.Delays, cancellations and angry passengers peaked this summer as American Airlines saw its fleet squeezed by the grounding of Boeing 737 Max jets and a dispute with union mechanics that a federal judge said was responsible for taking more planes out of service. Passenger horror stories spread through angry Twitter rants and distressing posts on Facebook.And as summer winds down, another stress test awaits American and other U.S. carriers. Trade group Airlines for America expects a record 17.5 million U.S. passengers to fly over the upcoming Labor Day weekend — a 4% increase over last year. Friday (Aug. 30) is expected to be the busiest day leading into the three-day holiday.Southwest Airlines, the other major carrier based in North Texas, also has struggled this year with on-time arrivals and cancellations. It endured springtime strife with its mechanics union and lost a large portion of its fleet to the Max grounding.But American is the airline industry's summer lightning rod. Statistics and industry experts testify to the same thing: American is falling behind on getting its customers where they want to go on time, if they get there at all."American has not been a great airline for most of the 2000s," said Henry Harteveldt, a travel and airline industry analyst. "Even before the recent problems, it's been unable to operate at a high level of punctuality and reliability."  Continue reading...