Throughout the week, our team shares articles they’ve stumbled upon that may interest our readers, even if they might not otherwise merit a full post. Here are some of the posts we found interesting this week: American Airlines will grade flight attendants, Frontier sues American for collision, and United’s CEO is in talks about asset acquisition.
American Airlines Will Grade Flight Attendants And They’re Not Happy
I read an article once long ago (which I can no longer find) about how performance incentives or penalties have backfired across different industries. The example I remember was from Thailand, where bus drivers were assessed based on how quickly they finished their routes. This was, of course, a terribly inept system, which resulted in bus drivers simply skipping stops to improve their route speed. (That’s at least how I remember the anecdote.) Reading about American Airlines’ intention to begin grading flight attendants on a series of somewhat ill-defined metrics made me think of this article. While American Airlines has created a rubric that’s more complicated than the Thai bus example, including things like “customer experience” and “delays attributed to flight attendants”, it could still be problematic. For example, the “customer service” metric is going to be based at least in part on post-flight surveys. Can passengers be trusted to rate their experience fairly, without letting unrelated factors impact their results? (Like faulty seat issues or in-flight entertainment, delays, etc.) And will delays related to baggage loading issues be attributed to flight attendants even if oversized bags are at fault? It should be noted that there’s nothing yet to say how American Airlines chooses to use these scores.
Frontier Airlines Sues American After Planes Collided At The Gate — Again
Back in 2024, an American Airlines Boeing 777 clipped the wingtip of a parked Frontier Airbus A321 full of passengers waiting to depart. The wing-on-wing collision resulted in the cancellation of the Frontier flight and a 6-day grounding of the plane for repair, which cost $670,387 according to Frontier. In 2025, American Airlines agreed to cover half of those costs, but now Frontier is pursuing the rest of that cost, plus additional costs incurred from lost profits, consequential damages, etc. They hope to make a case that American Airlines has been negligent. Believe it or not, this was actually the second such incident in 2024, the first being a collision with a parked Frontier A321neo’s vertical stabilizer from another American Airlines plane, which Frontier also sued over. It certainly feels like that could help Frontier’s case.
United CEO Says He’s In Talks To Buy Assets From Another Airline
Scott Kirby, CEO of United Airlines, says there are talks of acquiring another airline’s assets, adding fuel to the speculation of what might happen to struggling JetBlue and Spirit. As we talked about in last week’s Saturday Selection, JetBlue is potentially facing bankruptcy, and Spirit is potentially facing liquidation. Gary at VFTW outlines what the potential benefits might be from either of these, pointing out that an acquisition of Spirit assets could mean presence at Fort Lauderdale or New York LaGuardia. But if Kirby is referring to JetBlue on the other hand, it could mean added presence at New York JFK (which should be happening from an already-planned partnership with JetBlue anyway). Which do you think (or is there some third option we’re not thinking of?)
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