QF-AA connection

[ms1]

I was able to snag award seats for SYD-LAX-SYD (return via BNE) over Xmas and returning in the new year in F on the way over and J on the return (booked via QF). The plan is to book separate internal flights on AA in J to NYC and back and the JFK-LAX flight I have my eye on arrives at 12:41pm which leaves approximately 8.5 hours before the LAX-BNE flight. Theoretically plenty of time and presumably we’ll be covered by travel insurance if there are any mishaps. However I was reading this article about Oneworld flights on separate tickets (How American Airlines Ruined My Trip To Croatia | One Mile at a Time) and was wondering, if American was to delay us getting into LAX and missing the connection would they be obliged to make new arrangements?
Is there anything else I can do to protect myself? Will QF allow me to add the AA flights to my QF PNR?

 

[Danger]

That article was very informative. There's a link in there to an article on View From the Wing about AA's misconnect policy and there's an even more recent one here: American Will Still Protect You If You're Flying on Separate Tickets and Things Go Wrong - View from the Wing. The first box in grey (with an excerpt of AA policy) looks like it would apply to your situation and suggests AA would protect you.

 

[Himeno]

AA has a policy to protect pax who miss flights due to a oneworld flight being late, even when the flights are on different tickets (which means they don't have to). AA needs to be the carrier for at least 1 of the flights and you still need to have at least the min connect time between the original scheduled times. They aren't going to cover someone because their flight was 20 minutes late and they only allowed 15 minutes for the connection.

If you had booked AA3 JFK-LAX and then QF16 LAX-BNE on different tickets, and somehow AA3 was so late that you missed QF16, AA has chosen to protect such connections and will rebook you. Normally, they would not have to unless the flights had actually been booked as connections under the same ticket. (however, they won't check baggage etc though)