American Airlines gets mentioned in Leno’s Tuesday night monologue

American has been in the headlines this week as a results of passenger seats coming loose on at least two, possibly three, different Boeing 757 flights. They’ve managed to track down the cause: improperly installed clamps.

They’ve been able to inspect and fix the problem on 36 of their 47 757s, and now they’re busy working to complete the process on the remaining 11 planes.

Of course, this comes at a pretty bad time: American has been suffering from a rash of mechanical issues between the yoke and the seat on many of their flights. It’s been two very tough weeks for American’s employees and their passengers.

Hopefully, this will all soon come to an end. AA and the pilots’ union have agree to sit down again at the negotiating table.  This is from a letter that Tom Horton, American’s CEO, sent out AA employees yesterday afternoon:

So I’m pleased today that APA has agreed to immediately resuming negotiations and the negotiating teams are scheduled to meet in intensive bargaining sessions beginning this week. I remain optimistic that we can work collaboratively toward reaching our goal of a consensual and constructive agreement. It is time to put this chapter behind us and move American forward. We need to get back on track quickly and return to the reliability and first rate service our customers expect from us.

Let’s hope that they do get things worked out.  Soon.

At least Jay Leno has been able to find some humor in the situation. This is from his monologue last night:

What happend to the Dallas Cowboys? What was that? Tony Romo – five interceptions. He collapesed faster than a row of seats on American Airlines.

American Airlines has a new slogan. Your seat is free to move about the cabin.

For the second time this week on American Airlines, a row of seats were not bolted down and went sliding around the cabin. This is deliberate. That’s the airline’s way of trying to shake all the loose change out of your pockets.

Ouch!  AA shouldn’t feel too badly about being mentioned, at least they’re in good company. Apple also took one on the chin last night:

More problems for the Mars Rover. It tried to navigate using the new Apple Maps and ended up on Neptune.

You can watch Leno’s monologue here.  The mention of AA happens at 2:17.

Photo: Ticket for the Tonight Show with Jay Leno
Credit: Sherry Ezhuthachan on Flickr