Friday, October 19, 2012

American Airlines will be hiring

After 11 years, looks like one of the legacy carriers is finally going to be hiring for Flight Attendants.

After another type of scare tactic of up to 2,500 possible layoffs during contract negotiations, the airline was able to get over 2,200 Flight Attendants to take an early out to retirement.

With that, American just announced that come November 5th, they will be opening up their aacareers.com website and will be looking for 1,500-2,000 new hires in the next year.

Interviews would start sometime in December, with the first class starting in January, then approximately 45 new hires per class, a new class would be starting every Monday there after.

This is great news, however many are concerned that both the Union and airline mislead their members, similar to the possibility of an earlier bankruptcy in 2003, if they didn't take this early out and retire.

Whether it was a scare tactic, or a way to get the most Senior flight attendants to retire, those still flying are finally able to slightly move up the seniority ranks after a 11 year stall.

Saturday, October 6, 2012

Where does the time go?

It's really hard to imagine that it's been over a month since I've last posted. At the same time, it's not hard to imagine since I've been flying a lot, and my time off has been short. Sad thing is, it's probably not going to get any better.

A lot of bad publicity has hit my once great airline recently. From the filing of Bankruptcy, Labor talks/issues, and more recently the lack of safety concern over failing seats. The only good thing about this, the public now sees how us employees deal with the lack of good management.

Don't take me the wrong way here, we have many great managers within the airline, it's just sad to see an airline that use to be #1 in everything, be the laughing stock scrapping the bottom of the barrel. Now, the failed maintenance that has plagued the airline is being blamed on passengers being sloppy.

It's hard to keep your head held high when management continues to put more demand on us, with less pay. Penny pinching the consumer and outsourcing the maintenance to a different company when it use to be done in-house. Yet, the employees can't talk about the possibility of bonuses if/when the company comes out of the bankruptcy as a stand alone carrier.

One of the reasons I continue what I do is because 1) I love my job, 2) I enjoy the majority of the people I work with (other FAs), and 3) I enjoy helping our passengers have the experience of a lifetime. My last trip, I had a crew that I wish I could keep for the rest of my career. Sure, I can see we would get on each others nerves after a while, but my last trip, we had a blast.

We had a long layover in Quito, Ecuador where we got together, ran around the city, and had dinner together. The next night, we again got together for some poolside massages that the hotel provided (along with some cocktails) and dinner, and the last day of our trip we were sad that we may never see each other again....or for a long while.

When you work with others who can overcome the difficulties that has been dealt to us, it really makes for a awesome trip. We worked well with each other. We made the customers feel like there wasn't anything wrong on the outside(or inside), and made them feel comforted when and where it counted.

I do hope that our once great airline will again be on top of the list, and equaled to that of most International carriers. It seems that the upper management forgets that it is the work-groups that help keep this airline afloat, and most importantly, keep the customers coming back because we truly do care.