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The app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sequence-decoder/id1439988599 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sequence-decoder/id1439988599 For the public: -Past

• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• ketzo 4y ago
  Two thoughts: 1. Wow, that looks like an extremely useful app if you're a flight attendant! 2. How is their employer not providing this functionality? I guess maybe they are, but only parts, or it's a shittier version. But still.
  • pjc50 4y ago
    The critical bit is probably the "legality checker". Absolutely no way an employer would offer one of those. Reading between the lines, flight attendant scheduling is probably quite .. adversarial, as shift scheduling at restaurants can be. The employer would like employees to have the minimum information so they meekly accept the shifts they're given.
    • badcppdev 4y ago
      What's a legality checker?
      • mannerheim 4y ago
        My guess is it checks whether their shifts are compliant with labour laws.
        • anovikov 4y ago
          These aren't labour laws strictly speaking, more like airline safety laws. I.e. they aren't about well-being of employees but safety of planes operated by overworked crews.
          • adastra22 4y ago
            Well they are about the well being of the employees. That’s just not the ultimate justification for it—rested employees mean safe flights.
          • sidewndr46 4y ago
            They are labor laws. They restrict the exchange of labor for income.
          • shagie 4y ago
            https://www.paddleyourownkanoo.com/2022/10/04/u-s-flight-attendants-win-right-to-longer-hotel-rest-periods-after-28-year-battle/ https://www.paddleyourownkanoo.com/2022/10/04/u-s-flight-att... > Although the law was passed back in October 2018 and was meant to be implemented within 30 days, the Trump administration allegedly put the measure on the backburner and “on a regulatory road to kill it”. > The previous administration initially blamed the delay on a massive backlog facing the FAA caused by a partial government shutdown and then the worldwide grounding of the Boeing 737MAX.
      • dopamean 4y ago
        My guess is that it has something to do with whether or not a trip can be legally flown by an airline employee given the amount of hours of flying time they already have clocked for a given period.
      • toomuchtodo 4y ago
    • gpvos 4y ago
      Reading the descriptions under the sibling comment, it seems to be something that every airline absolutely should offer their employees. You don't want them to work illegally as that could mean huge fines for you.
      • thayne 4y ago
        It's quite possible they consider the benefit of overworking their employees to be worth the risk of having to pay those fines.
        • andrepd 4y ago
          Which clearly indicates that the fines need to me much higher, + probably specific accountability for individuals who made the calls, rather than just the corporation itself.
          • Rapzid 4y ago
            Sure, go increase those fines haha. In the meantime..
        • deleted 4y ago
          [deleted]
      • bronco21016 4y ago
        At most airlines there are two sets of scheduling rules. The regulatory rules, and the union contract negotiated rules. You can guess which one the company doesn’t want audited.
        • fn-mote 4y ago
          Perhaps surprisingly, I can't. Violating "regulatory rules" should result in fines and the government coming down on you. I would think this is the worse outcome, but less likely than... Violating "union contract negotiated rules" should result in grievances ending in legal action if the employer doesn't agree they broke the rules. This should be a lighter penalty but the union seems more likely to pursue the remedy than the government. So which actually is it that the company considers worse?
    • dar610 4y ago
      I would imagine that pretty much every airline offers some sort of legality checker to their crew members. If an FA worked a trip illegally that would mean heavy fines from the FAA and from whatever union contract they also violated.
      • srveale 4y ago
        How does the FA know to complain without a legality checker? They have to go through the work of parsing the legalese and calculating time zone differences etc. And if they did complain, the airline says "Sorry, here's a freebie for your trouble" (worth 0.01% of the fine) Compare that to every FA knowing every single time there's a breach, being able to compare notes etc.
      • karlkatzke 4y ago
        They don’t. Employees are responsible for checking the math of the scheduler. in the case of pilots, the employee has liability in this situation as well as the airline. Especially in situations where there is bad weather nationwide, employees can be and absolutely are scheduled incorrectly by schedulers and employees have to maintain several sets of numbers (rest time, etc) besides the flying hours that are logged in the airline’s app.
    • sammalloy 4y ago
      > The employer would like employees to have the minimum information This kind of old, hierarchical thinking from the 1950s needs to go away.
      • toss1 4y ago
        >>This kind of old, hierarchical thinking from the 1950s needs to go away. Yes, it does, but no, it won't. Just as democracies must always be better armed and prepared than expansionist autocracies, or the autocracies will take over, people need to be better armed and prepared than those who want to exploit them, or they will get exploited. Unfortunately, the exploiters often arrive better armed and prepared, and it is an uphill battle. Often, the only winning move is to not play the game.
        • munk-a 4y ago
          Well the winning move in these cases is usually unionization - when a large number of employees are being exploited by an employer a union that allows collective bargaining can force the employer to act in a more sane manner.
          • shagie 4y ago
            Flight attendants have a union. https://www.afacwa.org https://www.afacwa.org They've recently backed strikes and raised wages https://unitedafa.org/news/2022/1/21/solidarity-works-flight-attendants-who-back-strike-move-closer-to-pay-raises/ https://unitedafa.org/news/2022/1/21/solidarity-works-flight... The rest is part of the contract - https://www.afacwa.org/flight_attendants_achieve_10_hours_rest_faa_final_rule https://www.afacwa.org/flight_attendants_achieve_10_hours_re... > Washington, D.C. (October 4, 2022) — The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) today finalized a rule requiring 10 hours minimum, non-reducible rest for Flight Attendants between duty days – finally implementing a 2018 law that will make aviation safer for over 100,000 Flight Attendants and the passengers in our care. The rule will increase the rest period to 10 irreducible hours when scheduled for a duty period of 14 hours or less. Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, issued the following statement ... What would one have in a contract to help this issue?
    • mrweasel 4y ago
      It should be the job of the employer to ensure scheduling is in compliance with safety regulation and agreements negotiated with the unions. The app should be necessary, but given that it is, that can easily be viewed as American Airlines knowingly breaks rules. That seems legally questionable.
  • acedTrex 4y ago
    They are, it's just spread across multiple websites and datasources as is typical in large corporations. This app scrapes all the sites with the FAs AA credentials and aggregates the data.
    • scarface74 4y ago
      My wife and I are going to be doing the whole digital nomad thing across the US, Canada and Mexico starting in less than 2 weeks, getting one way flights and staying in hotels. Currently, we have been flying out of a major Delta hub and we took for granted what an airline app should be. Now as we are planning flights between Delta, American and United, I can confidently say that American has by far the worse consumer app of any of the major airlines or hotels. I wouldn’t be surprised that their internal apps and websites are a similar shit show.
      • devilbunny 4y ago
        Just wait until you actually fly American. I'll take a flight on Delta with a layover over a flight on American that's nonstop. Of the majors, it's far and away the best. And their app is very good.
      • sokoloff 4y ago
        Related (but anecdotal): I was very pleasantly surprised at how good the Delta app is for flyers.
      • vkou 4y ago
        Do you have work visas for all three countries, or will you lie about your reasons for travel when asked?
        • jaywalk 4y ago
          Working remotely for your employer (as in, you're not traveling for work, but working while traveling) is not in breach of any tourist visa restrictions.
  • TrueGeek 4y ago
    American Airlines was featured in a video at Microsoft Ignite last week. They showed how everyone involved in a flight talks to each other through Teams and how Microsoft / AA has worked closely together to get this working. I'm wondering if AA doesn't want this app being used instead?
    • sidewndr46 4y ago
      That's kind of interesting. I take so many flights I never really remember one from the next. But I do remember at least one flight attendant letting us know that videoconferencing in flight is a felony. I could never find any such regulation, but I guess that wasn't an AA flight.
      • gwillen 4y ago
        Sounds like the flight attendant had an unusually severe case of "making shit up".
        • sidewndr46 4y ago
          I'm assuming the airline instructed them to make this announcement.
  • blantonl 4y ago
    2. How is their employer not providing this functionality? I'll tell you how. It's because the app doesn't exist under the regime of a CIO and multiple layers of project managers, program managers, extensive regulatory requirements, fiefdoms, competing internal political interests, and the other various "enterprisy" crap that will kill off any entrepreneurial spirit. That's why.
• MichaelZuo 4y ago
  It would be surprising if AA doesn't offer this set of information already to their employees via internal systems. It's difficult to see why AA would allegedly want to block it since it seems like a net benefit for their employee's productivity. Maybe AA IT hasn't yet combined all this into one big user-friendly app, and therefore they want to punish the perceived disloyalty of the flight attendants.
  • ryandrake 4y ago
    It seems pretty clear that they want to block it because they want to control how the productivity information is accessed, and that control is more important to them than their employees being satisfied and productive. The article mentioned that the author of the app even previously reached out to partner with them (maybe asked for an API so he didn't have to scrape?) and they were still uninterested. Imagine your company's official expense reporting system is a 35 year old Windows 3.1 application that constantly crashes and doesn't even integrate with payroll so underpaid assistants have to manually copy records over from DOS to ADP's system. One of those assistants comes up with a web-based app that scrapes the database and makes it easy for everyone. Most large companies I've seen are going to come down on that assistant like a ton of bricks, not reward them for their ingenuity. It's just the nature of power structure in large bureaucratic companies.
    • pif 4y ago
      I'm not sure if I understand your comment. What do you mean with "productivity information"? And why access should be so important?
      • ryandrake 4y ago
        The article is annoyingly vague about what information the app actually accesses/provides, so we kind of have to guess and assume it's some kind of information that makes the employees' jobs easier.
    • gtirloni 4y ago
      At a previous job at a certain 3 letter company, we once developed a simple web app so users could do the unimaginable: change their own passwords for an internal billing system. Management congratulated us on the initiative and asked to shut it down immediately. The reason: the users had to previously open a ticket to get their password changed (very secure, right?) and, with this app, the customer would see a 30% reduction in tickets and would probably reevaluate how many bodies they rented from the 3 letter company. So yes, I fully agree that most large companies are not interested in helping their users or workers at all.
• neilv 4y ago
  How is the app getting the information for flight attendants, some of which looks like it might be security- and privacy-sensitive? If it turns out that the app was getting confidential information using flight attendants' access credentials, potential problems: (1) potentially leaking confidential information to other parties, such as app developer, partners, and other users; and (2) potential additional weakness in handling access credentials. If it turns out that special credentials weren't required for security- and privacy-sensitive data, then maybe that's a problem. If it turns out that flight attendants were entering information considered security- and privacy-sensitive, then maybe that's a problem. (Though it looks like the article might've been prompted by the app developer, to pressure scraping access, so presumably there's something from scraping that the app wasn't getting or getting as well from user-entered info.)
  • runjake 4y ago
    The article mentions that it scrapes data from the flight attendants' accounts. The data shown is broken up between "for the public" and "for flight attendants".
• deleted 4y ago
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• Scoundreller 4y ago
  > Save notes about crew members This one must be full of gold
  • bronco21016 4y ago
    You’d be amazed the creative places flight crew find to write down names/notes of people that are just truly wonderful to work with. Each fleet generally has a known place to look and see some notes.
  • fknorangesite 4y ago
    It's not (necessarily) gossip, if that's what you mean. Flight crews are generally only together for a couple of days at most, which means a lot of the time you go to work and have a whole set of new coworkers you've never met before - or wait, maybe you did? Like, last year? Do you remember him because he was a ton of fun or because he was an asshole? Should have written it down.