re: American Airlines is dog shite!!!!

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Yea they tried to screw us in Key West. Overbooked the flight by 19 seats and started plucking people to take the next flight out, which was in 2 days. When I say there were some pissed off people, I mean they were furious. Like security getting involved

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Sometimes it’s just a stupid decision made by a scheduler that has no idea what they’re doing. Take this instance for example.

Couple summers ago, we’re flying a round trip from IAH to Key West and back to IAH. We had flown into IAH from Charleston, SC earlier so we already had about 2.3 hours of flight time for the day already and we are limited to 9 hours of flight per day. Key West round trip is about 6 hours. So we taxi out to the runway, and before we can be cleared for takeoff, the controllers shut down the airport because there was a huge line of thunderstorms just south of the field headed north. So we park in the run up area and fire up the APU and shut down the engines and wait. And wait, and wait. When we leave the gate, our “flight time” starts, so after over an hour of waiting, I tell the captain that we’re not going to be able to return from Key West because we’ll be over 9 hours. He disagrees. I literally have to write down our times (3.5 hours already) and add the flight times to Key West and back. We’d be at over 9.5 hours when we arrived back at IAH. That’s not legal. So he finally agrees and calls crew scheduling and explains this to them. There’s a couple of captains and first officers sitting ready reserve in the crew room for this exact situation. We would have to taxi back to the gate and the new crew would come on board and complete the trip. No problem. But the stupid scheduler couldn’t get it. They said we’d be fine and to continue the trip. Idiots.

So we take off and about 3/4 of the way to Key West, we receive an ACARS message that we legally can’t make the trip back to IAH. Well no shite, we fricking told you that. So we get to Key West at about 5 pm and they had to cancel the flight back to Houston. We fortunately didn’t have to face the passengers since we went out the arrivals side of the airport but I can’t imagine the amount of pissed off people. It was late afternoon and they had already checked out of their hotel rooms, and had to find another place to stay for the night. And hotels in Key West probably average well over $300 a night, if you can find one available.

All of this because an idiot scheduler can’t do simple math.