At American Airlines, SAFETY IS JOB #257

Posted on | April 10, 2008 |

by Robert Pasikoff

Amelia Earhart once noted, “Flying might not be all plain sailing, but the fun of it is worth the price.” Clearly Ms. Earhart had an unusual view of “fun” and had never booked a plane trip on American Airlines.

Passengers on American this week found travel not at all plain sailing as the carrier canceled more than 1,500 flights in its efforts to inspect wiring bundles in the wheel wells of its fleet of MD-80s. As of yesterday, only 30 of 300 planes were back in operation.

Moving to head off any additional loss of confidence in its safety procedures, American said, “it planned to hire an outside contractor to review its compliance with airworthiness directives from the FAA.”

Interesting concept. Because according to our 2008 Customer Loyalty Engagement Index ratings for Airlines, American is already one of the lowest-rated airlines as regards safety. Those are, of course, customer evaluations and not those of an outside contractor, but still. . .

Anyway, rankings - in terms of safety perceptions - look like this:

1. Jetblue
2. US Airways
3. Continental/Delta
4. Northwest
5. United
6. Southwest
7. American

Keep in mind that these are the airlines’ very own customers rating them. And, as loyalty metrics are leading-indicators of profitability, we were not at all surprised to see that shares of the AMR Corp., the parent of American, were down $1.12, to $9.20 as of close of trading yesterday.

American is trying to notify passengers via e-mails, web sites, text messages, and cell phones. But given that this is the 21st century, they are faced with the incontrovertible not-fun fact that nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news about a brand.

Robert Passikoff is founder of Brand Keys Inc. (New York), a brand and customer loyalty consultancy.