L1011ret,
Sorry to say that Captains authority went out the window with the buyout. Don't know if you were there during the "Two great airlines one great future" lie but hopefully you were not. AA omitted all the "SCD" (Subject to Captains Discretion" verbiage out of our policy manual. You almost have to ask permission just to go to the lav. at AA. Remember at TWA when if say the galley wasn't stocked and some suit wanted you to take a 4 hour flight with no ice. Well most guys (Captains) just said "nope" I'll wait for the ice, and guess what, the ice showed up and the pax were happy and the F/A's didn't get abused by a bunch of unhappy pax., Plus we all were very proactive on making up the time once airborne by using a multitude of tools to trim off some flight time, without asking mommy, I mean dispatch, if we were allowed to, or (and this is a biggie), if you wanted to add a couple thousand pounds of gas because you could see that they didn't add enough due to circumstances only a pilot with decades of experience could see coming, you just told the fueler or the load controller and it was done. No questions asked. Not at AA, you have to ask permission from the dispatcher and give him your reason, as if his butt was sitting in the cockpit and not yours. I flew under the new rules for 2 years before they put me on the street, and I'll tell you what, my brain went numb because they took all the thinking out of the job. Getting laid off was a godsend, because I no longer had to work in the most god awful environment I had ever worked in, (like when one of the AA pilots took a swing at one of our guys in an elevator, missed and hit one of our female F/A's in the face, what a man), plus I was furloughed into a raise with my new co. after the gutting of their latest contract.
Just before I was layed off though, I did see that some of the less arrogant union reps. started listening to some of our guys, and specifically started addressing the Captains authority issue. Hopefully if and when I go back, they will have adopted some of the tried and true policy's that earned us several JDPower awards in a row before they took over.
