American Airlines completed its merger on October 1 when it achieved operational integration of its 27,000 flight attendants.
“It’s a huge milestone,” the company said in a memo to employees on Friday.
The integration effort, American said, required over 6.2 million hours to move the legacy US Airways crew members as well as legacy American Airlines flight attendants to the new flight crew operations system, called Flight Operating System or FOS, the platform that manages crew scheduling and operations.
Prior to the change, flight attendants were limited to their legacy airline’s aircraft. That changed on Monday.
“All flight attendants, regardless of heritage airline, will be able to fly together on the same flights,” the airline said in the memo.
Exactly one year ago, the airline moved its two pilot groups to a single Flight Operating System, without any reported glitches, and the airline hopes for a similar result this time as well.
American had originally planed to the systems that manage flight attendant operations in late 2016, a date which changed to the spring of 2017. The move turned out to be “more complex” that had been originally thought.
The Fort Worth-based carrier had successfully merged all US Airways customer-facing operations with those of American Airlines by October 17, 2015 and it had obtained a single operating certificate from the FAA in April 2016.
The merger between the world’s third largest and fifth largest airlines was first announced in February 2013 and closed on December 9, 2013. The final US Airways flight took place on October 17, 2015.
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