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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.
"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, ..."
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
And don't forget the super-plural, "all y'all".
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