Same reaction, I'm totally lost.

"it displays information required by crew members to manage their rosters and work lives"

What does this mean? I read the entire article and still have no clue what a "roster" is, why a flight attendant would need to "manage" such a thing, and what data is being pulled to make this easier/better

"‘reserve’ flight attendants "

Also have no idea what a "reserve" flight attendant is...

Edit: Apparently there are some of you you think I actually need these words defined. I do not. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> still have no clue what a "roster"

> ‘reserve’ flight attendants

These words aren't specific to flight attendants. They're just english words with standard definitions. You're reading this on a device with an internal dictionary as well as internet access.

When I run across words that I don't understand, I often find a dictionary gives me faster response than posting on HN.

But HN can be more entertaining.

I didn't write the article, but I wasn't aware there were English speakers who didn't know the word roster either. It's a calendar of times employees have to work i.e. It tells you when your shifts are.

What do you call that?

Also a reserve is something you have spare in case the original planned one can't operate. So a reserve flight attendant would be someone who is on call in case someone else is sick, etcetera.

Usually we'd use the word "schedule" for that (American here). "Roster" is used mainly to mean a "list of people".

That's a schedule.

A roster is a list of people and their roles. A schedule is a roster with chronological information.

Reserve is probably something people should understand but backup works as well.

Wow dude really?!? I don't need you to define the words - I need CONTEXT.

>I wasn't aware there were English speakers who didn't know the word roster either.

I know what it is, but maybe the people that don't use schedule or timetable?

Don't they say 'rota' in the UK?

Yes, “rota” would be the commonest word for this idea. Although I did immediately understand “roster” in the article, so maybe that’s also in use. “Rota” is definitely what I would say though

Rota I don't know, but I'm not from the UK.

Many flight attendants don't have a regular schedule. Instead, they can browse upcoming flight itineraries and choose ones they are interested in. For example, a sample itinerary might be Chicago to Cleveland to Boston to New York to Chicago over a 2 day period.

All of these features are available in the internal applications provided by the airlines, but they're not always that easy to use or flexible. Obviously, as a flight attendant, being able to get notified of new itineraries, book quickly, and perform complex searches is a big advantage to getting better flights, so there is a small but very motivated market for custom apps like these.

Of course, these apps aren't supported by the airlines, so they operate in a grey area and use techniques like credential passing and screen scraping to get access to sensitive internal data.

My second-hand impression is that aircrew scheduling is a bit different from most jobs.

The flight attendants are not assigned a fixed schedule, but instead “bid” on specific trips: depending on their preferences, some crew might want flights of a particular length or on a certain type of plane, to arrange layovers in a specific city (or none at all), or even to work with/avoid certain colleagues.

They also alternate between periods where their bids set the schedule (“line”) and where they are on reserve/standby to fill in on flights where someone is missing. This could be because of illness, but flight delays and working hour restrictions (via safety regulations) add a lot of complexity. Another added wrinkle is that most crew don’t get paid until the flight doors are closed, so they really do not want to spend a lot of unnecessary time at the airport.

Thus, it’s a lot worse than managing schedules at a coffee shop, and I can totally imagine how a specialized app could help.

More: https://www.cabincrewchitchat.com/flight-attendant-bidding/

From TFA:

"it displays information required by crew members to manage their rosters and work lives in a single app.

The app is particularly popular among the large number of ‘reserve’ flight attendants at American Airlines because it gives them more control over their schedules, and the app has other features such as a calculator to make sure crew are working to legal limits."

That's pretty vague.

Yeah, this was what I was trying to understand. This makes it sound like the app could be a daily listing of flights they need to work. Is that all it is?

The article suggests this is a single app which offers a single entry point into many disparate systems, which currently flight attendants have to access individually in order to do their jobs.

There is a top-level comment higher up that lists the individual features. One is notably absent from AA's internal systems: checking that FA schedules are consistent with the regulations governing how much they can work. But the crux of it is that is takes the FA's AA credentials, collects their personal data from disparate internal AA systems, and displays it in a sane way to the FA. And presumably at least a couple of the features (like the legality checker) are sugar on top.

I would not underestimate how terrible internal legacy systems at a company like AA could be. It seems completely reasonable to me that this app could save FAs an hour a day or more. And if they're like pilots (who are typically only paid on time from wheels up to touchdown) that is likely an unpaid hour.

As someone who is currently consulting on an airline industry project, you are absolutely correct in identifying how terrible the internal legacy systems are. Everything is built on SABRE, which was first created in 1960 and absolutely shows its age. If SABRE was a person, it could retire.

What's worse though is that inside the industry there's little awareness of the possibility of doing things differently. Everything is just layers of wrapping around the old system without any abstraction of the processes.

Actually if SABRE were a person it could run for president I think.

> And if they're like pilots (who are typically only paid on time from wheels up to touchdown) that is likely an unpaid hour.

The same is true of flight attendants; they are paid from door close to door open. All that boarding and deplaning time is unpaid.

There's been at least one incident where I spent hours sitting on a runway after landing. The pilot was professionally, but obviously very agitated. Does the crew not get paid for that time?

"Door closed to door open" is not just a figure of speech, so if the doors were still closed and the plane was not yet at the gate: yes, they did (thankfully).

My source here is that my wife was an FA for many years. She has a couple stories of pilots deliberately not pulling all the way up to the gate if they know they're going to have to wait anyway, purely so the crew can stay on the clock (and it doesn't make any difference to the passengers either way). Though for every one of those instances, there are a hundred of being delayed in the airport or after-boarding-but-before-closed-doors or whatever that ends in hours of unpaid work time.

According to https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sequence-decoder/id1439988599

For the public:

Past and future departure information for all airports, Past and future arrival information for all airports, Individual flight info lookup

For flight attendants:

Flight specific info inflight, ETB alerts, Open time alerts, Flight alerts, Open time display, Sequence details, Calendar, Reserve call out list, Standby list, Crew chat, Save notes about crew members, Display prior sequences flown together with others, Layover weather forecast, Pilot sequence info, Legality checker, Hotel amenities and pickup locations