David Seymour’s job over the next few weeks is making sure that American Airlines flights take off on time and fly safely during one of the busiest travel periods of the year.
Seymour is American’s chief operating officer, which means he oversees flight and airport operations for a carrier that figures to make about 6,500 flights a day between now and New Year’s Day.
A West Point graduate and former U.S. Army infantry officer, Seymour joined America West Airlines in 1999. America West became US Airways, then merged with American in 2013. Seymour has held a variety of operations-related jobs and was promoted to his current post in 2020.
Seymour spoke with The Associated Press recently about managing huge passenger numbers during the holidays and preventing people from getting on a plane before their boarding group is called. The answers have been edited for length and clarity.
Q. How are you going to make sure American flights run on time during the holidays?
A: There are many thousands of people running the airline every day. My job, honestly, over this period isn’t so much about managing the chaos, it’s managing really all the challenges, and we’ll call it the headwinds that come our way. And I would say the vast majority of those are the uncontrollable.
Q. Such as?
A: What’s going on the (air-traffic control) system around us. If there weren’t weather that we have to deal with and other complications that sometimes arise, running an airline would be pretty easy.
Q. How will you recover from disruptions?
A: Before the pandemic, we would have a big storm in the DFW (Dallas-Fort Worth) area or the Charlotte (North Carolina) area, and it would take us a couple of days (to recover). We set about coming through the pandemic and coming out that we are going to recover better than any carrier out there.
Q. And how will you do that?
A: By anticipating the weather. My team looks out constantly at what the weather is, looking at multiple weather forecasts to understand what’s coming, what could it do, and how are we prepared for that.
Q. How much do you learn from big cancellation events? And how much do you learn from meltdowns at other airlines?
A: The team here, they do an after-action review. We will look at it and say, ‘What could we have done better?’ And we archive that information. Now, to your other question about competitors. I’m not inside the other competitors’ operations centers and looking at how they do that. Their networks are set up differently than ours. We do ask ourselves, ‘OK, if something similar were to happen to us, what would we do?’
Q. With Christmas travel, what what are the big things you’re looking for? Is it weather? Air-traffic control problems?
A: Weather is always a tough thing to predict. That’s really going to be one of the largest things because it has the potential for having the most impact. Controller-wise, we stay in touch with (the Federal Aviation Administration). We have a team out here that is in constant communication with the FAA, looking at what’s happening in the system, and we’re building contingency plans if they think there are going to be some challenges.
Q. You need to deice planes.
A: The only difference between summer and now is we have to deal with winter weather in some locations. So, deicing. But we’re ready for that. The technology we have right now with the deicing vehicles … we’ve been able to reduce our throughput time on deicing by half and still meeting all the requirements that we need to in terms of adequately deicing the aircraft, but having one person do it.
Q. Are the delays in deliveries of new planes from Boeing affecting your holiday season planning?
A: No. Boeing needs to be successful, they need to be able to deliver quality aircraft, but we haven’t built our schedule for the holiday period that is dependent on getting any deliveries. We have enough buffer built in.
Q. American recently expanded the rollout of technology to catch people who try to board the plane before their boarding group is called. What went into that decision?
A: Our frequent and premium travelers look at (the technology to catch line-jumpers) as a benefit of being loyal to American Airlines. It’s a huge plus for our gate agents because they do like order.
Q. Were people boarding out of order slowing down the boarding process?
A: No. We just want a steady stream (of passengers) going in. The ability to get overhead bin space … has gotten a lot better with some of the upgrades that we’ve done with larger overhead bins on the vast majority of our aircraft. We’re going to finish up the rest of the fleet in the next couple years with the large overhead bins. So that won’t be the issue, but that used to be a bit of that driver there.
