| | | Here's an example of what flying American Airlines is like nowadays.
I purchased a round trip ticket from Rochester, NY to Greensboro, NC, with a connection in Charlotte. On arriving at the Rochester airport, the ticket agent required an additional payment of $84 because of a computer error. The departure of the aircraft, a late model Bombardier CRJ900, was delayed a half hour because of a mechanical problem in filling the fuel tanks requiring manual, instead of pressure refueling. Arrival in Charlotte, already some 20 minutes late, was delayed another 15 minutes while an inexperienced ground crew tried unsuccessfully to position a stairway ramp to the exit door. The total delay caused my wife and I to miss our connection to Greensboro, forcing us to request standby on a later flight, which if full, would have forced us to remain overnight in Charlotte.
The delays leading to a missed connection were due entirely to poor maintenance and insufficient training of ground crews – a symptom of bad management.
Unlike many other airlines, American does not limit the number of available seats on its flights. All the flights we took were filled to capacity, with no vacant seats, creating additional dangers for transmitting Covid-19. The airports, meanwhile, were almost vacant. Rochester had only about six passengers in the entire departure area on a Friday afternoon. Greensboro had barely more than that for a Sunday morning flight. The airports have so few people around that the greatest danger in Covid-19 exposure is within the aircraft itself.
American isn't the only badly managed airline. Warren Buffett himself admitted that airline management was questionable when, years ago, he bought U.S. Airways, and then sold it prematurely. I'm sure he learned a lesson more recently, when he disposed of four major airline stocks that his Berkshire Hathaway had bought, simply (and wrongly) on the basis that the ratio of price to book value made them attractive. But more to the point, management quality matters.
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