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American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants

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Re: American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants

#71
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t need specific permission to scrape data.

If it’s your employers you do If it’s an app on apples App Store you do

Source? The courts have consistently ruled the other way on the question of scraping.

If you then share confidential information with third parties your employer may (or may not) have a case.

Re: American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... E…

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.

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

Re: American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants

#73
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants

#74
post #30
post #7

The app: 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…

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.

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?

Re: American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants

#75
post #23
post #20

It is commonsense to use the hardware/software authorized by your employer to do the work. One side story. It is third party app that is not authorized by AA. Instead of get permission through a contract, the app developer scraped AA's data without AA's permission.

You don’t need specific permission to scrape data.

Nope. You don't need permission to scrape publicly accessible data, and that's only on the legal side of things. Data behind any kind of login is not fair game. Apple also has rules against use of any scraped data you aren't explicitly authorized to access.

Re: American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants

#76
post #2

I guess these flight attendants have never flew their own airline as a customer. This doesn't shock me at all from AA.

I have never had an uneventful flight on American. I avoid them even if it costs me more time and money.

Re: American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants

#77
post #38
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

> The employer would like employees to have the minimum information

This kind of old, hierarchical thinking from the 1950s needs to go away.

Re: American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 c…

I'm not sure if I understand your comment. What do you mean with "productivity information"? And why access should be so important?

Re: American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants

#79
On the developer's Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/tschaff) there's a few more details. He's a former AA flight attendant, seems like there was a somewhat similar project underway internally in the airline union which he was on but got kicked off of and built this separately.

Re: American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants

#80
post #36

One side story. There is no comments / voice on the AA side. Read like a biased article. "become a must-have" reads like exaggeration

Then perhaps AA corporate should have responded more promptly to the writer’s request for information had they been interested in being more fairly represented.
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