Originally Posted by bruhaha

The nice thing about AA/Envoy is that you (if you decided to keep your access up to date) have access to passenger reservation system so you can see what the gate agents are doing working the flight.

You have access to how many seats are unassigned and which passengers are potential misconnects (so those seats are available for reassignment to people on the standby list.) As the gate agents work their way down the standby list, you can see if your family is going to get on the flight or not.