American Airlines’ Fiasco
An inevitable result of its attitude toward quality
by
William A. Levinson
 On
December 29, 2006, passengers of American Airlines’ Flight 1348 were confined
in a parked aircraft for eight hours. By this time, “The toilets on the
American Airlines jet were overflowing. There was no water to be found and no
food except for a box of pretzel bags.” This fiasco was an easily foreseeable
result of the airline’s apparent attitude toward quality, as might be perceived
from CEO Gerard J. Arpey’s letter to Quality Digest magazine, written some time prior to this incident.
The letter took issue with Quality Digest columnist James Harrington’s
criticism “Of airline quality in general, and specifically that of American
Airlines.” It stated in part, “We carry about a quarter of a million
people every day, and, inevitably, there will be mistakes that impact our customers.”
The attitude that mistakes are “inevitable” is inconsistent with modern
quality science, and it fosters an organizational culture in which otherwise-avoidable
mistakes do indeed become inevitable.
There are no excuses for poor quality
The U.S. Military Academy allows cadets only four answers to a superior’s question
as to whether a task or duty was completed properly: “Yes, sir,” “No,
sir,” “No excuse, sir,” and “Sir, I do not understand.”
James Kimsey, a U.S. Military Academy graduate and the founding CEO of America
Online, elaborates, “If you have to take men up a hill and write letters
to their moms that night, there’s literally no excuse. If you have to lay off
thousands of people from your company, there’s no excuse. You should have seen
it coming and done something about it.” The quality sciences provide tools
such as the failure mode effects analysis (FMEA) for seeing it coming and doing
something about it, so planning failures by American Airlines and other passenger
airlines are indeed inexcusable.
The excuse that AA ticket agents gave stranded passengers who, after waiting
in line for three hours, were refused hotel vouchers to cover their overnight
costs was that “The problem was caused by weather and American wasn’t responsible.”
This wouldn’t cut it at West Point, the AA passengers involved shouldn’t
accept it for an instant, and it will probably and rightfully cost AA hundreds
of times as much money in lost business as the vouchers would have cost.
Although AA cannot be blamed for the weather conditions that initiated this
situation, it’s wholly responsible for any lack of foresight and planning
that aggravated it, along with the attitude that “Inevitably, there will
be mistakes that impact our customers.” The easily foreseeable results
of this organizational culture are that the affected customers now agree wholeheartedly
that mistakes are inevitable at American Airlines, and that the airline got
its name on page A1 of the Wall Street Journal in the worst possible
context. For good measure, the online WSJ article, written by Susan Carey, reminded its readers that
Northwest had had a similar incident in 1999:
“The five or six lawyers on board [Northwest Flight 1829] were fast
becoming the most popular passengers, as others quizzed them about the possibility
of a lawsuit. Mr. London, the passenger from Toronto, found one attorney who
figured there might be a case against the airline for “false imprisonment.”
Seizing the moment, Mr. London, 32, circulated a notebook through the cabin.
Gathering that it was from a lawyer enlisting clients, more than 50 passengers
signed up on behalf of themselves and their families.”
The highly-negative visibility for both airlines underscores a principle that
Henry Ford stated 85 years ago:
“If the machine does not give service, then it is better for the
manufacturer if he never had the introduction, for he will have the worst of
all advertisements—a dissatisfied customer.”
There was a time when a satisfied customer might have recommended a supplier
to seven or eight friends, and a dissatisfied one might have badmouthed the
supplier to roughly the same number. Today, the Internet allows a customer to
share his or her dissatisfaction with hundreds, thousands or even more. A negative
news article or letter to the editor in a local paper could cost an airline
thousands of fares from a single city.
The same news in a national paper like the Wall Street Journal, whose
subscribers include frequent business travelers, could cost an airline hundreds
of thousands of fares. Perhaps consequences of this nature are what it will
take to make management teams understand their basic responsibilities—or
else accelerate economic natural selection by weeding out those organizations
that are simply unfit to survive into the next decade.
Scott McCartney, writing in the January 12, 2007, Wall Street Journal, cites a possible reason that American didn’t move the airplane
to a gate and allow the passengers to get off: “Moving a plane to a gate
for a bathroom break could cost a flight its place in line among the hundreds
trying to leave. It could also mean the crew might run into federal time limits
that regulate the work day.” The first reason is no reason at all. Even
Mom-and-Pop stores are familiar with giving customers numbers so they don’t
have to wait in line, and factories employ numerous systems for just-in-timing
work through the production line. Even if the airport is responsible for this
deficiency, this doesn’t relieve the airlines of responsibility for demanding
a correction. Quality auditors won’t accept the excuse, “Our supplier gave
us defective materials or poor service,” because an organization is responsible
for addressing its suppliers’ quality problems.
It’s also difficult to understand why deplaning and perhaps even catching
some sleep in a comfortable employee lounge is more fatiguing to the flight
crew than sitting in the cockpit, but this is something that the Federal Aviation
Administration must address.
Flight 1348 from a FMEA perspective
Most quality practitioners are familiar with the failure mode effects analysis
(FMEA), which identifies what can go wrong, how likely it’s to go wrong,
and the severity of the consequences. Each possible failure mode receives 1-to-10
ratings for severity, likelihood of occurrence, and likelihood of detection
or mitigation. Multiplication of the three ratings yields a risk priority number
(RPN), which ranges from 1 to 1000. Anything with a high RPN demands the implementation
of proactive countermeasures.
Severity ratings of nine and 10 are generally reserved for threats to human
safety (such as brake or steering failure on an automobile) or noncompliance
with government regulations (such as a toxic chemical release). An incident
that results in permanent disqualification from ever serving a customer again
if that customer can possibly help it, negative word-of-mouth advertising, and
negative national publicity would easily qualify as an eight. In fact, if the
conditions in which the passengers were confined qualified as physically abusive
or legally tortuous—recall that passengers and attorneys on the Northwest
flight were talking about “illegal imprisonment,” and a Flight 1348
passenger used the phrase “held hostage” to describe her ordeal—a
nine rating for this failure mode might be appropriate, with only a fatal incident
meriting a ten.
FMEA also rates each failure mode on how likely it is to occur. While
severe weather conditions aren’t likely on any given day, their eventual
occurrence is a near-certainty. Northwest’s 1999 fiasco should have been an
additional warning that an incident of this nature is not only possible but
likely, and that contingency plans should be made for it. However, “In
the case of Flight 1348, according to interviews with four passengers plus officials
at American, the problems were compounded by a lack of staff, the result of
cost-cutting and holiday vacations, and some bad decisions.”
Cost-cutting and staff reductions are management failures, not excuses
American’s management was responsible for the inadequate staffing that, according
to McCartney, resulted in an inability to service the stranded airplane’s toilets
or deliver fresh drinking water to the passengers. Cost-cutting is not an excuse,
as Henry Ford spelled out eighty-five years ago:
“Cutting wages is the easiest and most slovenly way to handle the
situation… It is, in effect, throwing upon labour the incompetency of
the managers of the business.”
Not hiring enough people to do a job properly—whether they’re airline
staff or nurses in a hospital—is simply a variation on cutting wages or
using substandard materials, and customers owe their suppliers absolutely zero
tolerance for any of these practices.
Management is also responsible for letting too many workers take the day as
vacation. If passenger airplanes are flying during the holiday season, common
sense dictates that one should have enough people to service them even if one
must pay overtime. I recall, in fact, having a flight cancelled in 1994 or 1995
because an airline, which I recall was American, had no mechanic available to
correct a problem because it was a holiday.
Nowhere in two graduate-level reliability engineering courses, nor in the Quality
Council of Indiana’s review materials for ASQ’s Certified Reliability Engineer
exam, did I ever see anything about failure rates or hazard functions taking
holiday vacations. McCartney points out quite rightly, “Why not acknowledge
that airlines, like department stores, do a lot of business at the holidays
and staff accordingly, at all levels of the company, from airport station managers
to top executives? You think retailers let their sales people take vacation
on Christmas Eve?”
Can the military mindset save the passenger airline industry?
Many airline pilots are retired military officers who understand that there’s
absolutely no conceivable excuse for the management and command failures that
caused the Flight 1348 fiasco. “After more than eight hours on the ground,
and 12 hours after the plane had left San Francisco, the captain told passengers
he was going to an empty gate, even though he didn’t have permission,” McCartney writes.
The pilot deserves credit and praise for taking responsibility for the welfare
of the passengers and crew members under his care. This behavior is entirely
consistent with a military background, although it’s also practiced by
competent managers and leaders who have never been in the Armed Forces. Perhaps
the best way to turn around our struggling airlines is to place them under the
management of people who neither give nor accept flimsy excuses for appalling
performance.
About the author
William A. Levinson is the principal of Levinson Productivity Systems P.C.
and the author of Henry Ford’s Lean Vision: Enduring Principles from the
First Ford Motor Plants.
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