Guys. 7576 is a great dude and a friend, and he's frustrated like all of us at the direction our once great airline has taken the last 10 years. As such, his posts sometimes reflect that frustration and he tends to vent.

I can assure you his incident was extremely isolated. AA's cockpit culture is up to par with all of the US major airlines, CRM included. I am willing to bet that each and every one of you on this board has flown with a CA at one time or another who was "CRM-challenged." They exist at every airline and it makes for a rough trip.

AA's Human Factors course has dramatically improved over the past few years. Believe it or not, AA was the airline all others looked up to back in the 80s/early 90s as the most standardized cockpits in the industry (hence the name, Sky Nazis.) Even Delta came to AA when they were revamping their cockpit culture after their unfortunate streak of accidents. That is still very much reflected today, and I walk out of Human Factors every 9 months having learned many new things.

Where AA tends to stumble (although it's slowly changing) is in believing they have the best system, and not being receptive to outside ideas/influence. This used to include rejecting Boeing's recommendations and using AA's own "expertise" with regards to aircraft manuals. Again, that has changed, our manuals are now almost 100% Boeing procedures. Other examples include ancestral worship tendencies such as Captains making PAs while taxiing. We are hopeful USAir's influence will change that as well.

Overall, we run a good cockpit and have a very experienced, laid back pilot group, I'm proud to say.

Coming back at 4am is commonplace with Deep South flights returning to Miami. We have quite a few flights that arrive at that time.