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Can American Airlines apologize effectively enough?
By Lauren | April 10, 2008
The Wall Street Journal reports that American Airlines has cancelled more than 2,400 flights since Tuesday in a response to warnings from the Federal Aviation Administration that almost half of the airline’s planes could be in violation of a regulation to prevent on-board fires. The cancellations occurred after an FAA audit revealed that American Airlines’ MD-80s, the most common plane in the airline’s fleet, were in potential violation of federal safety rules.
American Airlines has said that the planes were never truly dangerous, and the FAA acknowledges that violations of the regulation in question have not yet led to any serious incidents. Still, the grounding of almost half of American Airlines’ planes has wreaked havoc with U.S. air travel, especially because other carriers have also cancelled flights to check their own planes for similar violations.
American Airlines’ executives have done several things right as they’ve sought to satisfy angry customers. They’ve apologized sincerely, accepted responsibility for the airline’s failure to comply with federal regulations, compensated stranded travelers with $500 travel vouchers and hotel rooms, and put their mechanics on overtime to fix the problem. The airline has also promised to do better going forward – not a bad idea, all things considered.
Still, one has to wonder how one of the nation’s largest and most successful airlines got into this mess in the first place. It’s been common knowledge that the FAA has been more aggressively auditing airlines ever since it was accused last year of being too lenient with Southwest Airlines, and it’s not as though this particular regulation was a secret to anyone. Surely, American Airlines and its fellow carriers could have seen this coming before the American traveling public got grounded for days on end.
It won’t be surprising if, sometime in the not-too-distant future, we learn that the airlines viewed this particular regulation as something of a nuisance, and didn’t worry too much about compliance because they had decided that no serious safety risks were involved. They might even have been right, but that determination wasn’t theirs to make. If it turns out that the U.S. airline industry has been playing fast and loose with public safety, American Airlines won’t be the only carrier scrambling to apologize.
Topics: Apologies, Business Ethics, Risk Management, customer relations |