American, Crews At Odds Over Cleaning Crew Security
FORT WORTH (CBSDFW.COM) - One of American Airlines' new cost-cutting measures is causing security concerns at DFW International Airport.
American recently outsourced the cleaning of their airplanes to a contract company at DFW, and that created security concerns for current American employees.
CBS 11 has learned both flight and ground crews have raised concerns and placed phone calls to DFW Police over the crews because some of the crews didn't have proper security badges to be inside the aircraft they were cleaning.
Aviation analyst Denny Kelly says cleaning crews should be going through greater scrutiny than they currently are. "They have total total access to the airplane and nobody supervises them. If you go out the the airport lets say you are a cleaner and you go and clean an airplane 3 in the morning and the plane is going out on 4 o'clock 5 o'clock , 6 o'clock 7 o' clock flight that day you could put something on that airplane and probably nobody would ever find it."
Sources say the concerns have been so great that members of American management have ended up getting involved cleaning planes to help ease the frustration over the situation.
American wouldn't confirm those reports, but did say it isn't unusual for management to get involved at that level if help is needed.
The company doing the work is AirServe, which does work for other airlines at airports all over the United States.
When asked about the issue, American spokeswoman Andrea Huguely said "As is typical when starting a new relationship with a vendor, we had a few hiccups during the first days; however, things with AirServe have greatly improved since then. We hold our contractors to the same high standards as our in-house employees."
American also says that all AirServe crews go through the same background and TSA checks that any employee would go through.
