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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!!!
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?
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.
You wouldn't quit if you were a pilot. Where would you get a new job?
Airline pilot economics is a little different than your average IT or development job. You invest years and years in training, and know everything about how the aircraft types you're qualified to operate work. It's also kind of like military experience, in that it's not easily transferrable to jobs outside the industry. Pilots often buy "loss of license" insurance because losing the ability to fly basically means you've flushed all that investment in training and time-in-grade down the toilet. Imagine being an A380 or 777 captain making $250K+ a year flying all over the world, then getting hit by a car or losing your vision.
So the airline isn't totally powerless in this scenario, but their options aren't good either.
It's not getting a job that is the issue, it's keeping your seniority. Pilot jobs are easy to get if you have the necessary hours and ratings. What you cannot do though is retain your seniority. Seniority is how you get the routes you would like to fly. Without seniority you get the routes nobody else will take.
"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, ..."
They made an agreement, and now they need to back out of it due to their own fault (they bought the crappy software or misconfigured it). Paying the pilot some money to change plans that they made depending on the promise made to them seems reasonable.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Those giant executive salaries? We're told the unicorns who make this money do so because their leadership genius is that good and there's so few of them able to do it.
And fuck this "we'll cooperate with management" idea. That is the *same* management that would fuck their employees out of a nickel if they could get away with it.
Imagine being an A380 or 777 captain making $250K+ a year flying all over the world, then getting hit by a car or losing your vision.
You go on long term sick leave and still make over 6 figures. And the way airlines are hiring right now, any commercial pilot who leaves an airline not due to performance or loss of medical will find a job somewhere else, they will just start over in seniority and pay.
Long term disability insurance tends to cap out at under six figures, or at least it has at the last three employers I have worked for. While my company's plan covers 60% of salary, that caps out at $90k per year so it doesn't actually reach 60% of my salary. It also doesn't account for bonuses which is a significant part of my total compensation.
A pilot making $250k a year certainly wouldn't be poor if he became too disabled to be a pilot, but he would probably take a $7500+ reduction to his take home pay each month which is no small thing.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
There is a proper way to say something completely idiotic, like "y'all".
"Y'all" is a useful word and used daily by millions of people. What is idiotic is a language without a "standard" second person plural pronoun.
"You" used to be plural, while "thou" was singular. That is why we still write "you are" rather than "you is".
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.
And the way airlines are hiring right now, any commercial pilot who leaves an airline not due to performance or loss of medical will find a job somewhere else, they will just start over in seniority and pay.
While it's true the Regionals are hiring - So getting a job earning $30K flying from Fargo to North Platte isn't hard - Getting a job at a mainline American "big three" carrier remains extremely competitive and difficult.
And don't forget the super-plural, "all y'all".
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Indeed.com :P
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).