Crumbling First Class Cabin: The American Airlines Broken Seats That Just Keep Flying Anyway
I’ve written for years about the ragged cabins of American Airlines Airbus A320s. One of the more shocking things – beyond dirty seats – has been missing seat backs in first class, with seats taken out of service. The response from the airline (and some readers) has been that it’s better to fly planes in this condition than delay flights to address the problem. But I’ve always wondered, what are they doing when the planes aren’t flying to maintain the interiors so that this doesn’t happen so frequently?
When there are first class seats out of service, passengers also miss upgrades. On sold out flights, American has to deny passengers boarding. It’s not just the bad aesthetic experience, they become an airline that can’t provide the transportation they’ve sold.
So it was striking to see this problem spread beyond the fleet of old A320s to an eight year old Airbus A321, and to see the plane keep flying without cabin maintenance for weeks on end.
This was American Airlines flight 563 from Orlando to Philadelphia on April 26th. Other passengers report flying this aircraft, registration N148AN, over the past several weeks in the same condition. The airline hasn’t taken it out of service or even fixed during an overnight.
April 26, 2024
Here’s the passenger who shared the photo:
[T]he flight attendant complained over the loud speaker about American, stating that they don’t care about their passengers at all. The plane had no catering at all. There was exactly two bottles of Juice and 6 bottles of water for the whole flight. They left the plane completely dirty the night before with even dirty dishes in the plane.
It occurs to me that with delays in the Airbus A321XLR program – the new plane American plans to use for short transatlantics – perhaps they’re just trialing a new lie-flat seat up front?
I’m sure there are ‘supply chain issues’ but we’ve seen domestic first class cabins in disrepair like this for several years, and we’re well past the stage of the pandemic where this was a reasonable excuse.