As bird strikes go, this one had to be a doozy. Late Tuesday night, American Airlines flight 1855 from Chicago to Kansas City flew through birds on approach, about 7 and a half miles from the runway. The pilots declared an emergency and Kansas City airport fire and rescue trucks hurried into position. The pilots landed safely and there were no injuries to passengers or crew. Looking at the damage though, which extends across the front of the aircraft, it appears the engine cowling took the brunt of the impact on the right along with the radome while birds created craters on the leading edge… Read More…

For people in the northern hemisphere, summertime brings excitement, nostalgia, and sometimes both. It is the season young people join the world of work and those already steeped in that world may recall their anticipation as the journey started. For American Airlines mechanic Azriel (Al) Blackman, who this summer will have spent 80 years at the airline where he started his career, July 18 is not a work anniversary but a celebration of doing the thing he loves for so long. “If you like what you do, it’s not work,” he told a reporter a decade ago. That was the year American brought a DC-3… Read More…

  To much fanfare and a curiously ironic twist, United Airlines became the latest American carrier to open its own pilot training program. On January 27th it officially welcomed the 30 cadets who arrived ready to learn to fly at Arizona’s Goodyear Airport two months ago. The fanfare is justified. United now occupies and runs Aviate Academy, formerly the flight school of Lufthansa, and it is proud that 80 percent of its first students will provide a demographic diversity previously not seen in airline cockpits that remain overwhelmingly white and male in the United States. What’s ironic is the timing. United is several years behind… Read More…

(photo courtesy www.merdeka.com) From the time the pilots retracted the flaps of the new Lion Air jetliner that flew as Flight 610, they were presented with anomalous readings, chaotic warnings and an airplane that was not flying as it should. This is what can be learned reading between the lines of the service bulletin Boeing sent to airlines operating the planemaker’s newest 737, the MAX. The airplane crashed into the sea 13 minutes after taking off from Jakarta on October 29th killing 189 people. In the bulletin, Boeing says during the Lion Air crash investigation, it was determined that a faulty reading of the flight… Read More…

When American Airlines chief executive Robert Isom sat down with the president of the Allied Pilots Association, Daniel F. Carey last week, it took mere minutes to come to an agreement, according to APA spokesman Dennis Tajer. “They had this,” Tajer said of the close-call American had with cancelling ten thousand or more flights during the busy holiday travel season. American agreed to pay pilots double time if they would return to the cockpit, filling flight decks left vacant after a software problem allowed too many pilots to opt out of holiday flying. But as I reported for Forbes, not all pilots are taking the… Read More…

Last week I wondered how much will it cost to fix the American Airlines pilot scheduling snafu? This week I can tell you the answer: Double time pay for all American Airlines pilots who fly over the Christmas holidays. In a communication to members this weekend, the Allied Pilots Association said that the union and American management had agreed that those would-be Santas would be paid double their hourly rate for flying for the carrier between December 17 and the end of 2017. The terms came a day after a joyfully playful announcement by the union and the airline that read, “If Santa is flying,… Read More…

Getting paid time and a half for flying over Christmas is an adequate incentive if you are an American Airlines executive. But if you are the pilots’ union,  you might consider it coal in the stocking. Like the homeowner who doesn’t know there’s a leaking pipe until the kitchen floor is underwater, the Dallas-based carrier was unaware that a software glitch on its pilot scheduling portal was allowing flight crews to drop or trade December assignments without those flights being picked up by others. Had the program been working correctly, that would have been impossible. Faced with the horrifying prospect of cancelling flights during the… Read More…

For an update on this event from the NTSB click here. Uncontained engine failures are relatively rare. Rarer still is the failure that leads to a hull loss. But American Airlines Flight 383, a Boeing 767 routed from Chicago to Miami was on its takeoff roll on Friday afternoon when passengers reported a loud explosion quickly followed by black smoke and fire just outside the right side of the aircraft. “People are yelling, ‘Open the door! Open the door!’ Everyone’s screaming and jumping on top of each other to open the door,” Sarah Ahmed told Chicago’s ABC television station, WLS. Ahmed said she could smell smoke… Read More…

Warning to readers:  Photos of toilets appear in this post. Travelers at the airport hail from many countries and speak many languages but women arriving on oneworld flights into New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport have one word for the condition of the bathrooms in Terminal 8, “Ewwww.” Kisha Burgos stopped at the bathroom in the baggage claim area and was shocked to see paper-strewn floors, filthy toilets and empty and broken paper dispensers in the stalls. “It’s bad,” she told me comparing it to the airports she visited in Bangkok, Vietnam and Laos on her recent five-week trip. “Everything was really clean,” she said of the bathrooms in… Read More…