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American Airlines Accidentally Let Too Many Pilots Take Off The Holidays (npr.org)
A glitch in American Airlines' pilot scheduling system means that thousands of flights during the holiday season currently do not have pilots assigned to fly them. From a report: The shortage was caused by an error in the system pilots use to bid for time off, the Allied Pilots Association told NPR. The union represents the airline's 15,000 pilots. "The airline is a 24/7 op," union spokesman Dennis Tajer told CNBC. "The system went from responsibly scheduling everybody to becoming Santa Claus to everyone." "The computer said, 'Hey ya'll. You want the days off? You got it.'"
Do they use the same holiday scheduling software as Ryanair?
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
I'm gonna need you to go ahead and come in on Christmas. That'd be great.
American drags pilots on. What a lovely industry!!!
Software must have been written by Clem and Bubba Software, Inc.
Would rewriting this scheduling software in a modern programming language like Rust or Go or Node.js, which make logic and programming errors much harder to introduce, help prevent future incidents?
Low guys (or gals) on the seniority totem pole have their vacations cancelled........... that is usually how most places fix stuff like that.
I thought so after Trump's tweet but now it's official. The Yanks are as dumb as the Paddies.
American Airlines Accidentally Let Too Many Pilots Take Off The Holidays (npr.org)
Merry Xmas Delta.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
I work in the airline industry. This is a huge mess for American...it's not like they can just get some temporary holiday help off the street, and airlines have very few pilots sitting around on reserve. Even with the reserve pilots, who are usually the newbies, they have to match up who's qualified to fly certain equipment, keep track of duty hours, maximum flying hours per month. Having a few key flights cancelled due to crew shortages cascades through the whole system...crew and equipment expected to be in certain places doesn't get there in time, so the onward flights in the schedule can't run either. This is where you see things on CNN showing airport terminals with thousands of people milling around with nowhere to go.
In a seniority-based system. the least senior pilots are probably going to end up getting their vacation cancelled and paid extra to entice them to not say they're unfit to fly. They're also going to have to pick whose turn it is in IT to be the official scapegoat. Airline scheduling is not an easy thing, but the computers doing the schedule rely on human inputs as well.
Immediately rescind all holiday vacation to start then correct the software.
Not rocket science, geezus.
Yo Miss Mash, you should write less awkward titles.
American Airlines Accidentally Let Too Many Pilots Take Off The Holidays
Putting take off next to pilots makes the reader expect that you are talking about flying the plane. This title is a slang statement to begin with. Once the reader has grasped what you are trying to convey, he scratches his head at how awkwardly you wrote it. Talk about vacation or leave instead of saying "take off."
Also,
computer said, 'Hey ya'll. You
this makes NPR look like a bunch of retards, which they essentially are. Starbucks latte sipping snobs who get a new Prius and Macbook Air every year. They can't even spell, but that doesn't matter because they are ABOVE that, far too important to bother with things like spell check and proofreading.
The computer only "says" what a developer coded in for it to "say", which is based on specification defined by project managers, which comes from corporate management.
Notice how every headline seems to be a conspiracy to wean Americans off of air travel by making airlines full of shock and horror stories? Who is pulling the strings here and why? Who is threatened by air travel? Who controls the hedge funds that own these corporations?
And these are the people you trust to take you up to 30,000 feet in an aluminum tube and get back down again safely. Good Luck with that.
Funny though, isn't it, how the pilots' union leaders are turning it into an opportunity to criticize the airline management and milk more $ from them for this mistake.
They could try to take the cooperative approach and say, "ok, no harm done yet, let's redo the schedule and not have to pay people 150% normal rates for time they would've worked anyway during these mistake days", but no, they're saying that the contract doesn't cover working if not scheduled -- and it's "management's" mess to clean this up. Even if the airline were to reimburse everyone for costs incurred due to this mess, it's amazing that the sides are not cooperating at all. So you suddenly see that you got 2x the vacation you expected, and you're going to say, "hey, that's what the computer says and what my contract says to follow, fuck everyone else".
IT quickly learns that technology doesn't solve everything.
Immediately rescind all holiday vacation to start then correct the software.
Not rocket science, geezus.
Holiday vacations were most likely already awarded months ago. The glitch didn't give people off, it just didn't assign them any work. And, since pilots are unionized with strong contracts, you can't just say "oops, we screwed up, you're working now".
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
"We have reserve pilots to help cover flying in December, and we are paying pilots who pick up certain open trips 150 percent of their hourly rate â" as much as we are allowed to pay them per the contract," he told the network
Hold on a second, the union contract specifies a maximum bonus to the hourly rate that the company can offer? How in the world could that clause benefit either the workers or the company?
It clearly sucks for the company, because now they've fucked up and should be responsible for paying out however much bonus they need to pay the pilots to entice them to pick up the extra flights.
It clearly sucks for the workers, because they forego the higher bonus that the company might have paid them. Many of them might have been perfectly willing to reschedule what the computer gave them at 200% or 250% pay.
Maximum suck would be if the rigidity of the contract prevented them from offering enough, forcing them to cancel flights. That would cost the airlines far more than offering mea-culpa bonus to the pilots and would completely ruin the travel plans of customers.
Interestingly enough, only 20% of the cost of your flight is salaries. Of that, pilots are probably 5-7% or so (there are many more ground and gate crew per flight than pilots). So even if they had to pay 300% bonuses to get enough pilots to voluntarily do those shifts, that would only be a 10% increase in net costs, bringing their margins for those particular flights from 2.5% to -7.5% (or, making $6 a passenger to losing $10 apiece or so). No matter how you slice it, it's much cheaper for the airline to offer pilot bonuses to compensate for their mistake.
In a post to its website, the union warned its members that because "management unilaterally created their solution in violation of the contract, neither APA nor the contract can guarantee the promised payment of the premium being offered."
First off, management asked pilots to volunteer to do those flights in exchange for money. That seems reasonable enough (except of course for the cap on the percentage). Second, I can't imagine that management would promise a premium and then not pay it. That would be an open-and-shut violation of labor law.
If they really wanted to help, the APA would be organizing the pilots to see how much they would have to be paid to give up the vacation they were promised and then present that to the airline in a package-deal format. Something like "I have 1500 pilots willing to take shifts fro 150% bonus, 2500 for 250% bonus, ..."
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Suddenly we will see new fees to fix this.
Yeah, it's important for you to go to work and put up the homepage that says the government is closed.
This user is a Pedobear Troll! Hide your chikdren and goats!
And Chris answers with a typo. Looks like his parents didn't paint him green enough!
You obviously have never worked a union job.
Without creimer, the entire United States (and its possessions such as the Virgin Islands) would grind to a halt!
Immediately rescind all holiday vacation to start then correct the software.
Not rocket science, geezus.
You're right, it's not rocket science. It's pilot union science, where vacation time, once approved, cannot be cancelled. All the airline can do is offer financial incentives (limited by regulations to 150% of normal pay) to entice the pilots to cancel their vacations themselves.
Listen, I'm going to need you to go ahead and come in tomorrow? So if you could get here around nine, that'd be great, m'kay? Oh, oh, and I almost forgot. I'm also going to need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday, too.. yeah.. we, uh, lost some people this week and are sorta having to play catchup. M'kay? Thaaaanks
It sounds like the pilots in question will *not* be taking off.
Pretty sure this problem, like most airline problems, is easily solved by throwing money at it. Offer pilots enough money, they will change their plans and fly the plane for you. Might make a dent in American's quarterly profits, however.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I'll do it. I've got like 1000 hours in Falcon 4.0.
Where's the switch for the AMRAAMs?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
This is what's called 'artificial' intelligence.
(*prepares by turning his back, and fixes hair with his left hand, then turns around to say*)
You can do that?
> American Airlines Accidentally Let Too Many Pilots Take Off The Holidays
It would lead me to ask: what's wrong with having an excessive number of aircraft departures on the holidays?
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
I remember Microsoft flight simulator with meigs field can I fly
Hey creimer!
Here is another one that will repeat itself regularly in the future, although not as often as the shit you post, I have to admit :-)
creimer confuses his Slashdot signature with an animated gif.
--
Balena!
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This user is a Pedobear Troll! Hide your chikdren and goats!
That's true enough!
Creimer came in my cubicle the other day around 1:30 PM to fix my Ethernet connectivity. He had to crawl under my desk to reach the cable and oh my god! While crawling under the desk, he released an unbelievable amount of gas and the whole floor had to be evacuated for the rest of the day.
An HAZMAT team was requested to approve the condition before we could go in again the next day and entrance was delayed until 10:45 AM.
3 workers with respiratory problems had to go to the hospital and 1 is still in critical state.
--
Balena!
I have a flight next spring, and it was very recently cancelled and rebooked on another flight. Coincidence, I think not?
What are "chikdren", Chris?
767 ran out of fuel, glided for 17 minutes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The pilots are even luckier than that: they don't have to read your awful ebooks or your abysmal "author blog" (distinct from your "author website")...
Where does someone with so little accomplished get your kind of ego, Chris?
Indeed.com :P
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
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It's not "union science", it's contract LAW.
AA management has been killed by bad CEO and executive's decisions. However, they had a contract in place that gave those people big parachutes no matter how badly they screwed all their employees (and passengers). If you want to fix problems like this, start with executive overcompensation, not the pilots who have the hardest job out there. Sure, the company finally made a mistake that benefits the pilots, but you need to consider all the treachery that management is effecting on a daily basis. It's literally 1,000,000,000 : 1.