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Bug Businesses Transportation

American Airlines Accidentally Let Too Many Pilots Take Off The Holidays (npr.org) 200

Posted by msmash from the best-error-ever,-pilots-said dept.
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.'"
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American Airlines Accidentally Let Too Many Pilots Take Off The Holidays More

American Airlines Accidentally Let Too Many Pilots Take Off The Holidays

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  • Sounds familiar (Score:5, Insightful)

    by amalcolm ( 1838434 ) on Thursday November 30, 2017 @09:41AM (#55650105)
    Do they use the same holiday scheduling software as Ryanair?

    • Re:Sounds familiar (Score:4, Insightful)

      by hcs_$reboot ( 1536101 ) on Thursday November 30, 2017 @09:47AM (#55650139)
      Indeed [independent.co.uk].

      • com (Score:3)

        by antdude ( 79039 )

        Indeed.com [indeed.com] :P

    • Would a rewrite in Rust help? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 30, 2017 @09:52AM (#55650161)

      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?

      • Unlikely -- this seems more a bad input than a software bug per se.

      • Re:Would a rewrite in Rust help? (Score:5, Funny)

        by Sarten-X ( 1102295 ) on Thursday November 30, 2017 @10:05AM (#55650229) Homepage

        I give your troll about a 4/10.

        You have the required unsubstantiated claim and pretty decent bait, but overall it's not very catchy, mostly because it's almost completely detached from the subject of the parent post. It would have been more effective to first steer the conversation towards your bait, such as with a tie-in line like "The legacy airline software often has major bugs that have been left in because they're too hard to find and fix. I have to wonder if..."

        You also cast your net too wide, by targeting three languages with wide dissimilarities. Just "Rust or Go" would have been more effective as a compiled choice, or "Node.js or Python" would target the interpreted languages, but combining the two without addressing the differences weakens your overall presentation.

        Better luck next article.

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward

        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?

        Only if you use Agile and DevOps.

        Of course, then the planes would just fly themselves.

        For free, after being outsourced.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward

          I'm a former software engineer, now airline pilot.

          Trust me, you NEVER want airplanes to fly themselves. Airplanes have no fail-safe mode. Software can ALWAYS fail even in the most advanced HAL9000. Worst case, if sensors that feed the computer fail, or if power fails, you're shit out of luck and everyone dies.

          Even with pilots in control, the software that helps automate routine tasks fails constantly. I've personally prevented at least a dozen tragedies.

          • Trust me, you NEVER want airplanes to fly themselves. Airplanes have no fail-safe mode. Software can ALWAYS fail even in the most advanced HAL9000. Worst case, if sensors that feed the computer fail, or if power fails, you're shit out of luck and everyone dies.

            Because mechanical parts can never fail, so electronics are automatically less safe? And I'm not an aeronautics expert, but I seem to recall that if a plane loses power, you're pretty screwed anyway.

            • Planes can land just fine without power. There's about 5-6 miles of vertical height they can use to glide to safety. If the power loss was due to fuel issues or engine failure, power can be partially restored by deploying the APU (which essentially uses the energy contained in that 5 miles of height they still have) in order to use fancier electronics to help land.

              Even the landing gear is designed to lock into place via gravity alone.

            • 767 ran out of fuel, glided for 17 minutes
              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Rakarra ( 112805 )

            Software can ALWAYS fail even in the most advanced HAL9000

            What you say??? The self-driving car advocates tell me otherwise, as do a number of the utopian visionaries in Silicon Valley.

          • I'm a former software engineer, now airline pilot.

            Was the software engineer gig before or after your service as a Navy SEAL?

  • Yeah.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Chris Mattern ( 191822 ) on Thursday November 30, 2017 @09:43AM (#55650115)

    I'm gonna need you to go ahead and come in on Christmas. That'd be great.

  • United drags passengers off the plane (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 30, 2017 @09:44AM (#55650123)

    American drags pilots on. What a lovely industry!!!

  • Software must have been written by Clem and Bubba Software, Inc.

  • American Airlines Accidentally Let Too Many Pilots Take Off The Holidays (npr.org)

    Merry Xmas Delta.

  • Nightmare before Christmas (Score:4, Informative)

    by ErichTheRed ( 39327 ) on Thursday November 30, 2017 @10:27AM (#55650359)

    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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by keltor ( 99721 ) *
      And in fact my friend over at AA claims it was some issue with the human input aspects that cause the issue rather than a simple code update bug.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Nidi62 ( 1525137 )

      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.

      It didn't necessarily give them all vacation, it just didn't schedule the line holders to rotations over that time period. Vacation is certainly bid for a whole year period and not given on a month by month basis (barring any vacation moves of course). But you are definitely right that they wouldn't have assigned enough pilots reserve schedules to cover all of those flights (some of whom might have be senior enough to have Christmas off as a reserve pilot but too junior to hold a line and be off on Christ

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      So what happens to the passengers who are affected in the US?

      In the EU the airline has to either get you on another flight reasonably close to the cancelled one (in terms of time and location), book you a flight with a different airline or refund you and pay compensation on top.

      • Refund for the ticket, a travel voucher worth half the ticket price that expires in 12 months, and some flapping lips saying that they're sorry and committed to your travel satisfaction.

        Luckily they spotted this a month out and not just a few days before. Now they'll have most of the twitter angst die down before the holiday travel season starts. Then they'll just face the normal level of angry delayed holiday travelers. Well, less than the normal level, since they'll be flying a lot less planes.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by k6mfw ( 1182893 )
      Going OT here, I'm thinking of the "pilot shortage" diatribe that has been going on for decades, even recent AWST had extensive article about this. I was chatting with a pilot who said it isn't a pilot shortage but a pilot pay shortage. He went on to say for someone to get qualified enough to fly the majors, it will cost that person at least $300K. Now with this fiasco, will it address this issue? I remember Capt Sully testifying in front of congress saying before the famous Hudson river landing, him and hi

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Nidi62 ( 1525137 )
        With sign-on and retention bonuses, a regional pilot makes about $50-60k starting out. At a legacy carrier, a 1st-year pilot makes about $70k a year base(can be more if they pick up certain trips, etc). The second year it jumps up to over $100k. As for Sully, well, as a 320 captain (who was most likely topped out pay wise on his aircraft) he was making well over $200k (and had the time to run a side business and had income from that) a year, with extra pay and bonuses/etc likely getting him close to $250

  • trust (Score:2)

    by guygo ( 894298 )
    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.

  • "As much as we're allowed by the contract"??? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Wrath0fb0b ( 302444 ) on Thursday November 30, 2017 @10:52AM (#55650595)

    "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 [wsj.com] 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% [cnn.com] 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, ..."

    • Re:"As much as we're allowed by the contract"??? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Registered Coward v2 ( 447531 ) on Thursday November 30, 2017 @11:13AM (#55650759)

      "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?

      My guess is the union wants to limit the incentives for pilots flying the maximum hours they are allowed by law in order to get the airlines to hire more pilots. Some statistics I've seen show pilots may fly 900 of the legally allowed hours per month, on average. If the airline could pay enough to get pilots closer to 1000 hours per year they could cut the number of pilots they need. I would hazard it'd take more than a 50% increase to get enough pilots to forgo vacations, etc. since the extra 50% would not make that much of a difference in your annual paycheck for pilots with enough seniority to avoid the less desirable routes the airlines would need to fill.

      • So the union wants to limit the ability of the pilots to make lots of extra money in order to increase the number of people they represent? Sheesh, that's cynical even by American labor standards.

        I would agree that it will take more than a 50% increase. And that in normal circumstances, the company would rather hire another dude than routinely pay 200% or 300% bonus. But this is not a normal circumstance, this is a extraordinary fuck up and the obvious thing to do is to pay enough to solve it.

        It seems mutua

        • So the union wants to limit the ability of the pilots to make lots of extra money in order to increase the number of people they represent? Sheesh, that's cynical even by American labor standards.

          Union management is like any management. The more people you have under you, the higher your status. In this case, the more people who have to belong to your union times the amount of money they have to pay for the privilege means more money you control, too. Cynical, maybe, but not outrageously so.

      • Some statistics I've seen show pilots may fly 900 of the legally allowed hours per month, on average.

        A pilot flying 900 hours in a 30-day month is flying 30 hours per day. On average, of course. Some will fly less, some will fly more.

        I'd guess that the monthly limit is more like 240 -- 8 hours, 30 days.

        • Opps. Should be per year
          • 900 per year averages less than three hours per day. For an 8 hour duty day, that means flying only every third day. (900/8 is 116). That doesn't make sense. Do you have a cite?

            • Flight hours only count parking brake to parking brake, if I recall correctly. Crews work more hours and spend time traveling to hubs that don't count as flight hours. Depending on the schedule a pilot could use h=their hours in a few multi day trips, after allowing for required crew rest. Training is also not counted for legal hours flown.

              Cite: https://aviation.stackexchange... [stackexchange.com]

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Rolgar ( 556636 )

              Link. [google.com]

              Consider most pilots probably fly multiple times per day, and have to run pre-flight checklists and other prep (and post flight?) responsibilities that wouldn't count as flight time. If you make a two hour flight, you probably also have two hours on other responsibilities. Do that twice a day, and you'd fly 4 hours and be doing other work for 4.

              Some pilots may be on a schedule where they fly something that's in the air less than an hour, even more often, and some pilots probably are on four hour flight

          • Opps. Should be per year

            Metric or imperial?

    • Re:"As much as we're allowed by the contract"??? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ErichTheRed ( 39327 ) on Thursday November 30, 2017 @11:15AM (#55650779)

      Not every union contract has terms that benefit only one side. Don't forget that pilots make the ultimate judgement call about their fitness to fly. By specifying a maximum bonus, the airline doesn't end up in a bidding war with the pilots, with the pilots as a group staging a sick-out unless they get 10x their pay. So in this very situation, a pilot who was awarded time off but begged to come back could easily say "Sure, I'll do it...for a price." It's a way to limit liability, and even though it makes this tougher to deal with it's a good safety valve. Labor contracts are give-and-take on both sides. For every perk, benefit and favorable work rule the workers get, the company also throws a few things in that go in their favor too.

      People complain about unionized workplaces being inflexible, and it's true that the contract is the contract. But don't forget that every executive in every company has an ironclad employment contract, specifying what perks they get, how much the company has to pay them regardless of performance, etc. Why do you think Marissa Mayer got hundreds of millions for dismantling Yahoo!? I'd definitely work in a unionized environment as opposed to being subject to the whims of HR...at least I could plan my life a little further out than I do these days.

      • Not every union contract has terms that benefit only one side.

        Indeed. But my claim was that this benefits zero sides.

        By specifying a maximum bonus, the airline doesn't end up in a bidding war with the pilots, with the pilots as a group staging a sick-out unless they get 10x their pay.

        Sick outs are anyway an illegal labor activity. The APA was fined millions [nytimes.com] for it.

        It's a way to limit liability, and even though it makes this tougher to deal with it's a good safety valve.

        Indeed. And good safety valves always have an emergency bypass that can be used in rare events.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      All other things being equal... but they never are. People look at the bottom line and dollars/hour actually worked, not how it's structured. More bonus pay = more flexibility for the airline to decide who, when and how much while the pilots think that even though the base pay sucks they get these sweet 200-250% gigs. Or they feel railroaded because they "have to" take those gigs to get a decent pay. Or that such high overtime lead to pilots taking flights they shouldn't, which can end badly for both sides.

    • 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 benefits the company as to the max they will pay. Also remember a contract is an agreement that should have benefits to both parties. The workers via the union probably got something in exchange to agreeing to cap their maximum bonus.

    • 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, ..."

      Now, THAT ^^^ makes perfect sense.

      So, naturally, it won't happen. // flying to Hawaii for Christmas from Boston on American :-( /// ...maybe

  • 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.

  • Hey, I'll fly one (Score:3)

    by roc97007 ( 608802 ) on Thursday November 30, 2017 @02:08PM (#55652207) Journal

    I'll do it. I've got like 1000 hours in Falcon 4.0.

    Where's the switch for the AMRAAMs?

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