Over the past few months, there has been an EXTREME lack of any sort of business class availability on American Airlines without flying either on their old style business class seats (usually to Manchester UK) or flying on British Airways (and their outrageous fuel surcharges).
Speculation was that this was due to the American Airlines AAdvantage devaluation which went into effect on March 22nd. Why would American let people book at 50,000 miles (for a business class flight to Europe) when they could wait a few months and charge 57,500 miles for those same flights!?!? (or so the thinking went)
American business class availability has returned!
In any case, it appears that there is now pretty good availability both trans-atlantic AND trans-pacific on American metal. My searching around showed that availability was worse with closer-in dates but better as you moved into 2017. Here is Philadelphia to Paris, non-stop only, for January and February 2017
You can see that it is on AA metal, and that on this particular day at least there is availability from ORD, PHL, JFK (and most of the east coast AA hubs)
Availability is good for most US hubs to many European cities.
Looking trans pacific, here is DFW-HKG. Availability that I saw was not as good, but still far better than the ZERO availability that we were seeing a few days ago!
I also saw LAX-HND, DFW-NRT, ORD-NRT (I flew ORD-NRT just the other day in Japan Airlines first class), though I doubt that is an exhaustive list
Good luck and happy award booking out there!
(Thanks to Jonathan on Travel Hacking 101)
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Dan Miller travels with his wife and 6 (SIX!) children. He loves to help families travel for free / cheap, especially larger families. If you are looking for help, drop him an email at 
Thanks for the heads up. Just scored my wife’s Business Class flight home from Europe in July. Now we are both set to fly home on the same date, but from different cities. We will be in Copenhagen and she will fly Air Berlin to Dusseldorf and AA to Chicago on a 763 true lie-flat seat for 57.5K + $61
I will go from Copenhagen to Stavanger, Norway for my revenue flight home in United economy class with return in September for my 3rd annual September Norway hiking vacation.
Glad I could help! Sounds like a fun trip!
So True…after 5+ years of redeeming 2 trips a year in Biz class on US Airways and Star Alliance, I cannot find a single mile saver seat from PHL or JFK to anywhere in Italy (other than with British Airways) in Sept and returning October. I hope you are right that availability is returning!
AA has terrible customer service. I have yet to have a good experience traveling on the airline. Most of the time I would prefer to pay more to fly another airline just to avoid AA.