American Airlines (AA, Dallas/Fort Worth) parent, the American Airlines Group (AAG), secured a Single Operating Certificate (SOC) for both American Airlines and US Airways (Phoenix Sky Harbor) from the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Wednesday, April 8.

"The FAA’s approval for American and US Airways to operate under one certificate is the culmination of more than 18 months of work aligning the carriers’ operating policies and procedures," the AAG said in a statement. "A team of more than 700 employees reviewed 465 manuals along with policies, procedures and programs from both carriers and selected best practices to implement for the merged airline. More than 110,000 employees completed hundreds of thousands of hours of training in multiple phases and more than 115,000 pages on policies and procedures were published."

As it now stands, most of the AAG's flight operations, maintenance and dispatch procedures will be identical for all flights though US Airways' "Cactus" callsign, inherited from predecessor America West Airlines (Phoenix Sky Harbor), has now been retired in favour of that of AA - "American".

As part of the merger, American integrated US Airways' frequent flier members into its own AAdvantage programme with the two expected to consolidate into a single reservation system later this autumn. Until then, consumers and agencies will continue to see two separate airline codes (AA and US) with the usairways.com website remaining in place.