Read Gary Shteyngart’s painfully comic post-mortem following a surreal transatlantic flight on American Airlines:
At Heathrow, fire trucks met us because we landed “heavy,” i.e., still full of fuel we never got to spend over the Atlantic. At the terminal, a woman in a spiffy red American Airlines blazer was sent to greet us. But the language she spoke — Martian — was not easily understood, versed as we were in Spanish, English, Russian and Urdu.
Using her Martian language skills, the American Airlines woman proposed to take us “through the border” at Heathrow, for a night of rest before we resumed our journey the next morning. An apocalyptic scenario: an employee of the world’s worst airline assigned to the world’s worst border crossing at the world’s worst airport.
The Martian took us to one immigration lane, which promptly closed. Then another, with the same result. A third, ditto. Despite her blazer, the Martian was obviously not the ally we had made her out to be. So, ducking under security ropes, knocking some down entirely, we rushed the border with our passports held aloft, proclaiming ourselves the citizens of a fading superpower.
There seems to be something going on at American Airlines. As a part of bankruptcy proceedings they are trying to get concessions from the pilot’s union. The pilots appear to have found a clever way to fight back: obey the letter of the contract and in so doing violate its spirit with extreme prejudice:
Long story short, American is totally screwed. What management is discovering right now is that formal contracts can’t fully specify what it is that “doing your job properly” constitutes for an airline pilot. The smooth operation of an airline requires the active cooperation of skilled pilots who are capable of judging when it does and doesn’t make sense to request new parts and who conduct themselves in the spirit of wanting the airline to succeed. By having the judge throw out the pilots’ contract, the airline has totally lost faith with its pilots and has no ability to run the airline properly. It’s still perfectly safe, but if your goal is to get to your destination on time, you simply can’t fly American. The airline is writing checks it can’t cash when it tells you when your flights will be taking off and landing.
Taqiyah tap: Mallesh Pai
Cheap Talk 
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October 5, 2012 at 5:39 am
Greg Taylor
A similar phenomenon has cropped up in UK academia, where members of a major trade union “worked to contract” in order to protest changes to the universities pension scheme. See here: http://www.ucu.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=5772
November 30, 2012 at 5:32 am
Eduardo
Airlines (or hotels for that mteatr) will not accept low bids on air routes / peak travel times that are likely to get sold out at higher prices. They will accept bids on competitive routes and off peak travel times that are not likely to sell out. Like a flight from New York to Orlando during spring break for the kids is a route that you are unlikely to get a bargain. But that same trip in mid October should yield you some bargains. Also, keep in mind that with airlines, priceline makes you accept flights at any time of the day, so you could conceivably lose 1 or two days of vacation if they make you take the outbound late flight and the early flight on your return.For that reason, I only use priceline for hotel stays and car rentals (not flights)