It looks like American’s week of hell has come to an end. After canceling more than 3,000 flights, the airline has seen its operations finally return to normal. Hopefully most travelers have now made it to their destinations. Now we’re left wondering . . . what the heck happened?
No, I’m not going to spend much time on what happened technically. We know by now that when American complied with the Airworthiness Directive to secure some wiring on their MD-80s, they did it just a little bit differently than they should have. Combine that with an overzealous FAA that needed to show Congress it was actually doing something in the wake of the Southwest scandal, and you had a perfect storm. If you want to read more about the details, I recommend taking a look at the Airline Biz blog which has had excellent coverage of this. Where I’d like to spend more time is on how badly American mismanaged the crisis.
It all started a couple weeks ago when the FAA first decided that American hadn’t done things quite right. American pulled many MD-80s out of service to reinspect them. Flights were canceled for a couple of days and that was that.
Then, last week, the FAA came back and did a spot check on several aircraft. Most of them failed, and this time there were far more cancellations lasting from Tuesday through Saturday. If you think about this from the customer perspective, it’s pretty scary. American said everything was fine a couple of weeks ago and then all of a sudden, it’s not. What exactly was wrong? What did the FAA find? Was it a safety issue? So many questions, so few answers.
American did put out a press release on Tuesday explaining, “The FAA raised additional concerns regarding the recent inspection of American’s aircraft and the manner in which American followed the engineering change order (ECO) that had been written for the airworthiness directive related to the wiring in the MD-80s wheel wells. Specifically, some areas of concern included the spacing of the ties on the wiring bundle and the direction in which the retention clips and lacing cords were facing.”
Uh, OK. Reading that, would you automatically assume that it’s not a safety issue? Sure, they said it elsewhere in the release, but it wasn’t much of an explanation. Still, they said that there could be up to 500 cancellations on Tuesday and possibly more on Wednesday.
Then Wednesday came and all hell broke loose. More than 1,000 flights were canceled without a peep from American about why it was so much more severe than predicted. It got even worse when a spokesperson for the airline actually walked off camera when a reporter started to question if it really was a safety issue. That was definitely the worst thing that he could have done.
Later that day, Dan Garton the EVP of Marketing came out with a hastily put together explanation. It answered a lot of questions, but it also put the blame on his mechanics, which did not go over very well at all. More importantly, why did a marketing guy giving the explanation? Why not the operations guys or better yet, CEO Gerard Arpey?
Meanwhile, American had a little alert on the website saying that there were problems but no list of all flights that had been canceled. By that night, the airline announced another 900 cancellations for the following day, and the media was in a frenzy. No wonder passengers were reporting issues about getting accurate flight information. A list on the website is basic.
On Thursday, Arpey was finally out in front of cameras with an explanation. Pictures of the affected area on the aircraft had been distributed, apologies were being prepared to send to top frequent fliers, and the press started to die down. The airline finally started to catch up, but the damage had been done.
Every media outlet and blog picked up on this story and ran with it several times this week, and most of the press was bad. In the end, it really wasn’t a safety issue. This blew up far beyond where it should have gone. Had the airline been more proactive in attacking this issue from a PR perspective, they could have avoided most of the pain.
I will admit, this wasn’t an easy problem to tackle. I have to imagine that the PR team was sitting around cursing the FAA for trying to flex its muscles in front of Congress, but of course they couldn’t come out and blame the FAA. That certainly wouldn’t have done them any favors in the long run. So, what they should have done was just be completely up front from the beginning. Put out a photo release with a picture of the affected area. Show some diagrams, and explain it in detail. Make sure the word gets out quickly, and directly contact as much of the media as you can.
In the end, they did a lot of things right, but they just did them too late.
