American Airlines Mechanics Intentionally Delayed My Flight

A worker intentionally delaying something vs a worker stopping being a "hero" can be hard for an outsider to discern and they should withhold judgement unless they know the full story.

Here is a software analogy. Suppose you have a team of developers with crappy management. They are constantly changing requirements, not giving enough resources etc. Yet your team has made this work by working extra, maybe coming in on weekends when you don't have to, being available to work on vacation even though you don't have to, etc.

Eventually, you get tired of being treated like crap, and you decide that you are going to work according to what your company states is your contract. Instead of working on nights and weekends, you put in a normal days work through the week. Your team stops working on vacations and takes true vacations. While working, you work hard and smart, but you do not bring your work home.

Now the company can accuse you of deliberately slowing down the pace of software development. However, what you are doing is entirely reasonable.

In the same way, maybe the mechanics were resorting to heroics beyond what their contract actually required so that the flights were not delayed. Maybe after being crapped on by management, they decided that they would stop doing heroics and just do what was required by their contracts. If that was the case, I personally can find no fault in their behavior. It is stupid and wrong to expect employees to go above and beyond for a company when that level of dedication is not reciprocated by the company.

I am not saying that the above is the case, but due to my knowledge of how corporate management works, I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the workers.

I really hate stuff like this. Bad things happen some percentage of the time when you're doing any thing complicated. And the sort of paradox is that in a large enough sample, rare events happen all the time.

Air travel is pretty close to commodotized now. Yes, Spirit is "worse" than the rest (although I admire their fee structure and their transparency around it, honestly) and Southwest is probably the best (information that does me no good on most of the routes I fly, unfortunately). But past that, differences between airlines are incredibly marginal. And yet, people find patterns in the noise, and if they've had a bad experience with an airline, they tend to dislike them, no matter that most airlines have roughly the same level of delays and cancellations, and all of them have the same awful customer service.

Plus, if you're not flying between two hub cities, you're likely flying on a regional carrier that has American Airline livery on the planes but is a separate company:

https://www.aa.com/i18n/customer-service/about-us/american-a...

I only flew American once in my adult life. Just rude/grumpy people at the gate. I fly almost on a weekly basis and they made me check the carry-on that always fits fine on United/Alaska/Southwest claiming it was too big. And they were not polite about it.

Out of the Bay Area it seems like Alaska is the best domestic option, then United. AA is probably the last airline I'd fly after that experience.

So american management(amd shareholders) chose to continue with the delays instead of paying their mechanics better?