"That is just really poor management; this is the last for me for American," said Cerber, 42. "If they had a customer-first mind-set they should've been looking at the planes already. That should be the first priority."
But airline and industry sources said American Airlines had little time to anticipate or prepare for the kind of disruption that erupted as a result of an obscure wiring requirement.
Executives of American said that on Monday, FAA inspectors initially found that nine MD-80s were not in compliance with an airworthiness directive. Subsequently, the airline agreed to have all of its 300 MD-80s inspected to make sure that wiring running through the plane's wheel well was bundled properly and posed no fire hazard.
But to avoid a massive disruption to its network, the airline said it requested that it be allowed to inspect the planes on a "rolling" basis, perhaps temporarily grounding 15 to 20 planes at a time rather than all at once.
Arpey said he left Dallas on Tuesday morning for a gathering of airline chief executives in Marina del Rey thinking the airline and the FAA had settled on a less disruptive plan.
But shortly after landing at LAX, Arpey said, he got a telephone call saying that the plan had been rejected and that the airline's entire MD-80 fleet had to be grounded for inspection. The airline, which initially planned to cancel two dozen flights per day, was suddenly facing the prospects of canceling thousands of flights.
"I left for Los Angeles with a brief heads-up that we had another issue with the MD-80s, and when I arrived in L.A. I learned that we were in fact going to have to re-inspect all of the airplanes," Arpey said. "Dynamically trying to figure out how to manage through that has certainly not been perfect."
An industry source said that the airline also initially believed the inspections would take 20 minutes or so, but they have been taking up to eight hours as FAA inspectors have had to sign off on any changes made to the wiring bundle.
FAA officials said that the agency had not gotten tougher and denied that American grounded the planes at its prompting.
The FAA has been under attack in Congress, where some lawmakers in recent weeks have accused the agency of being too lax with inspections and too cozy with the industry.
