American Airlines Limits Flight Attendant Power After Discrimination Claims: No More Removing Passengers For Odor, Attire, Or Attitude – View from the Wing

American Airlines flight attendants are no longer allowed to kick you off of a flight unless you’re a threat to safety or security.

That’s what cabin crew are being told with a revision to the airline’s Inflight Manual, and comes as a result of a review prompted by eight black men being removed from an aircraft over reported body odor issue (the men did not know each other and were not traveling together, and the NAACP threatened to reinstate its travel warning against flying American as a result).

• When there are concerns unrelated to safety or security, those need to be raised by a passenger before any action is taken.
• The goal is to avoid removing a customer, not to remove them.
• No flight attendant can act alone – two crewmembers need to work on resolution.
• While the captain retains authority on passenger removal for safety of the flight, if it’s not a safety/security issue the captain now must contact a Complaint Resolution Official at the airline. And crew must fill out a CERS report.

Here’s the relevant internal summary of the change, that went out to every American Airlines flight attendant:

The memo continues,

Overall this seems like a good change. I’ve been on flights on various airlines where I’ve seen a passenger get concerned as their bag gets moved in the overhead bin, and a flight attendant asks “Are we going to have a problem?” the implied threat being the passenger will be removed from the plane for questioning the crew. Of course what is – and is not – a safety and security issue is effectively still being left to the crew in the moment (and, ultimately, to the captain).

Delta recently found itself embroiled in controversy after removing a veteran from a flight over their ‘end veteran suicide’ shirt, forcing her to remove the clothes and then bumping her out of an extra legroom seat.

Removing passengers over their attire is something that would no longer be the purview of a single flight attendant at American – and since it’s not a safety or security issue in almost every case, it would be a decision removed to corporate. That should also lead to greater uniformity.

Leaving things like behavior and attire standards up to the airline’s customers, rather than asking a flight attendant to guess at what is offensive, and asking more than one employee to be involved in the decision seem like reasonable steps to address ambiguity. And when immediate safety isn’t a concern, bringing in the company’s perspective seems like the right move, too.

After the David Dao passenger dragging incident in 2017, United stopped calling law enforcement on customers outside of safety and security issues, and started doing de-escalation training with flight attendants. This training turned out to be useful during the pandemic – United was much less likely than American to divert flights over mask non-compliance. De-escalation rather than passenger removal is a good thing.

At the same time, changes like American is making may mean less enforcement of manners, which probably says more about societal decline than it does about American Airlines.