Onboard Spat Between Flight Attendants And American Airlines Senior VP Sparks Outrage
American Airlines flight attendants have a status conference with the National Mediation Board this upcoming Wednesday over whether the federal government will allow them to strike.
And flight attendant social media is lighting up over an incident on board a flight from Dallas to Denver this week where the airline’s Senior Vice President of Inflight and Premium Guest Services, Brady Byrnes, was traveling with his family and reportedly wrote up the crew for failing to deliver proper service.
Flight attendants say the allegations are false and petty, and their claim is stoking anger at the carrier at a crucial moment. In a nutshell, Byrnes lodged a complaint despite his family receiving their choice of beverages during turbulence when the captain had restricted service. As one of the crewmembers being called in to explain themselves tells it,
- The captain instructed flight attendants to delay the start of inflight service and once they were able to proceed protocol was not to provide hot beverages.
- All passengers, including Byrnes and his family, were served. (“Brady, who traveled with his family, asked for Coke Zero and cranberry for his children and he even asked the crew to pour cranberry for his daughters.”)
- Yet Byrnes reported them for not doing service. “We all got emails at 4am about it and the company needed an explanation to why.”
- And they noted Byrnes was friendly and solicitous to their faces, didn’t express any concerns with them, but once he was off the flight he triggered an investigation.
The union expressly voted ‘no confidence’ in Byrnes in particular in October 2023. And whether there is more to the story than being reported by the individual crewmembers or not, this is stoking anger at him, and therefore at the company, as a symbol of how they’re mistreated and disrespected.
Aviation watchdog JonNYC was first to report on the incident Friday, though it’s been sent to me along with greater detail by several employees as well.
drAAma: (Gucci guy, remember?) pic.twitter.com/DBMKXFSnad
— JonNYC (@xJonNYC) March 8, 2024
Byrnes has been the focus of a great deal of flight attendant ire recently. In the fall their union’s President others confronted Byrnes at corporate headquarters, and a security alert was sent out across the Skyview campus for which the airline later apologized.
Photos of the confrontation went viral, and his Gucci attire has come to symbolize among cabin crew how out of touch he is. He almost always talks about his roots working as a flight attendant, but he’s a Gucci-wearing Senior Vice President while Boston-based second year flight attendants are eligible for food stamps.
Indeed, Byrnes comes off as aloof and out of touch. Two years ago, when a flight attendant reached out to him with concern over a trainee being dismissed, he chided them and reported them to their supervisor suggesting it was out of line for doing so.
He should have thanked the employee for their concern, shared that he appreciates their looking out for a colleague – that’s a great instinct – but he hopes they can understand that they do not have all of the facts, and that he’s not at liberty to share more about a personnel matter.
Brady Byrnes is in charge of both inflight and premium services, and these are both areas where the airline lags competitors. Naturally he was promoted from Vice President to Senior Vice President.
