Another question that day: “I was on an Airbus yesterday that was extremely dirty. The headrests on the blue fabric seats were a grayish brown color. Several seats were ripped. The seat cushions had no cushion left. Are we the 99-cent store airline? How do I take pride in this product?”

Airline mergers may be profitable but, in the short term at least, they are rough on passengers. “The only success so far has been on the financial side,” John McCorkle, a US Airways flight attendant and union officer based in Philadelphia, said in an interview. “It was an absolute disaster for our employees and our customers.”

Mr. Parker said the merger saved two troubled airlines from potential financial ruin and that, over time, service would improve. In the meantime, blunt employee input “keeps management extremely honest,” he said.

Last March, when US Airways combined its two reservations systems into one, it was a mess. Kiosks that dispense about half of the boarding passes did not work properly. Neither did the Web site, where 16 percent of passengers check in. That left ticket counter agents, who normally handle the other third of check-ins, to process nearly 100 percent in some locations. And many of them had not received adequate training on the new system, so they were moving more slowly. It amounted to triple the work for a temporarily less efficient group.

The reservations mess, though in a sanitized way, had been explained to Scott Kirby, the airline’s president. “I certainly knew we had issues,” Mr. Kirby said. “But until I went out and met with employee groups, I didn’t appreciate the problems we were having.”

Spending a day at the hub in Charlotte, N.C., about one week into the mess “really was an epiphany,” Mr. Kirby said. “I wrote a diatribe on my BlackBerry on my way back to Phoenix.” Because of the reservations problems, just 55.5 percent of US Airways’ March domestic flights got to the gate within 15 minutes of scheduled arrival times, an industry low that month.

Distrust between the sides of the 2005 merger  old US Airways is known among the rank and file as East, America West as West  has in some ways grown worse, not an encouraging sign in an industry contemplating other mergers.