“All we can do now is go out there and try to put on a brave face…” -Robert Isom whispering to himself in the mirror before walking outside to what can only be described as a corporate Salem witch trial.

If you’re a halfway-decent attorney in Texas, congrats… you’re probably already on retainer for a furious American Airlines flight attendant who would like to “sue their boss’s a** for being a freaking moron.”

Because yesterday was like something from a movie.

Flight attendants represented by the Association of Professional Flight Attendants picketed outside corporate headquarters and made it absolutely clear they want CEO Bobby Isom out. The union, representing 28,000 cabin crew members, issued a vote of no confidence in Robert Isom. This marks the first in the airline’s 100-year history… which just so happens to be more people than allegedly tuned into the WNBA all last season.

And it’s not coming out of nowhere.

Delta and United are out here printing money like Walter White with a fresh batch, while American can’t seem to keep up on profits… or on-time departures.

For instance, in 2025, American posted net income of just $111 million. Delta? $5 billion. United? North of $3.3 billion. Talk about embarrassing. Forget firing the guy, with numbers like that he should probably be thrown in jail.

And when profits lag, so does the profit-sharing pool. Which means employees who just locked in new contracts with higher wages looked at their bonus checks and said… “That’s it?”

(Source: Inquirer)

Operationally, the airline hasn’t exactly been crushing it either. For the first 11 months of the year, American ranked eighth in on-time performance at 73.7%. Winter storms exposed recovery issues that left some crew members without hotel rooms. Signs at the protest read: “Everything froze, AA melted down” and “Failed Ops = Failed CEO.” Yikes.

To his credit, Isom is trying to steady the ship (I mean, plane). He’s promising revamped cabins, bigger lounges, schedule adjustments at Dallas-Fort Worth, and stronger earnings ahead… forecasting adjusted EPS up to $2.70 in 2026 versus 36 cents last year.

He even gathered 6,000 managers at Globe Life Field for what was essentially a corporate pep rally about the next 100 years of greatness.

Which is cute. But last time I checked, you can’t motivational-speech your way out of a morale crisis.

This protest wasn’t about squeezing out another 50 cents per flight hour. It was about direction. About reliability. About whether American can compete with the big dogs instead of watching them disappear into the clouds. And right now, the people working the aisles are making it clear: They want a pilot who can actually land the plane.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in United Airlines as mentioned in the article.