If you're somebody who plans to return home for the holidays, and you have tickets to do just that with American Airlines, sounds like you better get your ass walking now.
We say that because, due to a scheduling glitch, the airline company gave an enormous amount of pilots time off during the period of December 17-31, meaning that there could be a crew shortage for as many as 15,000 flights during the typically packed holiday rush. While this sounds like a scenario to point and laugh at the airline company's incompetence, it's actually an embarrassing situation with the potential to mess with tons of people, and thus AA has offered overtime pay to pilots willing to give up their holiday to come back and captain some flights:
A spokesperson for American Airlines refused to put a number on the amount of flights that are potentially screwed, but did add that they expect to fix the problem in a timely fashion. "We are working diligently to address the issue and expect to avoid cancellations this holiday season," the spokesperson said, according to Bloomberg. The company also added that the amount of flights affected would decrease every day as they're reassigned.
The glitch that led to this fiasco apparently showed that the airline had an abundance of staff to work through the holiday season when, in fact, that was not true. Because of this, pilots were allowed to drop some of their December trip assignments. Since then, the carrier has made tweaks and they expect their schedule to run smoothly now (which seems like it should be a given, but with American you never know).
Bloomberg adds, according to a company memo they read, airports with flights that could be impacted by not having a captain, first officer (or both) originate in Dallas-Fort Worth, Boston, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City and Charlotte, North Carolina.
