American understands the importance of protecting and funding pension benefits for its flight attendants and will continue to work to provide the best-funded and most rewarding flight attendant plans in the industry.

American's consistent approach to investing as well as its relentless focus on its pension commitment has allowed it to maintain defined benefit pension plans for more than 127,000 participants, when nearly all of its other competitors have frozen or eliminated this benefit. In fact, American and Continental are the only two major carriers that still have defined benefit plans for flight attendants. Today, American collectively has funded its defined benefit pension plans to approximately 96 percent, in contrast to Continental which has funded its plans to approximately 77 percent.

In 2007, American completed its required calendar year funding by contributing $380 million to its defined benefit pension plans during the nine-month period which ended Sept. 30, 2007. And in the first quarter of 2008, AMR contributed $25 million to employees’ defined benefit pension plans and made an additional contribution of $50 million on April 15 for a total of $75 million.

The company has contributed more than $2 billion to these plans since the start of 2002, underscoring AMR’s commitment to its employees and standing in stark contrast to U.S. network airline competitors that have terminated or frozen pensions in bankruptcy court, significantly reducing retirement income for many employees.