American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants • Hacker News Board

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

#101

Post by bronco21016 » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 3:55 PM UTC

gpvos wrote: post #70

pjc50 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

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

#102

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 3:56 PM UTC

thayne wrote: post #91

gpvos wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's quite possible they consider the benefit of overworking their employees to be worth the risk of having to pay those fines.

[deleted]

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

#103

Post by 0xbadcafebee » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 3:56 PM UTC

"One flight attendant said of the current situation affecting Sequence Decoder that they had “never seen a company go out of their way to make life harder for their workers.”"

Every large company I've worked for had an IT department (or similar) that intentionally made developers'/sysadmins' lives harder. They don't care. So the good people leave, morale drops, productivity drops, management starts implementing crap policies to force more work to get done.

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

#104

Post by prvit » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 3:57 PM UTC

If we’re talking about apps in the airline industry, take a look at Stafftraveler (https://stafftraveler.com/)

Everyone in the industry uses this app. What is it for? Leaking passenger load data from internal systems to employees of other airlines.

Presumably all the data gets sold by the platform operators to some hedge funds for big bucks.

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

#105

Post by jaywalk » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 3:59 PM UTC

vkou wrote: post #96

scarface74 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you have work visas for all three countries, or will you lie about your reasons for travel when asked?

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.

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

#106

Post by stalfosknight » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 4:01 PM UTC

golemotron wrote: post #35

I came here to articulate the counter position to this because people are solidly on the side of the app developer. If you run a business and your employees access your information to do their work through an un-contracted intermediary, it's a real security risk. The information can be filtered or maliciously corrupted, and the company can be easily blackmailed. I don't think the law offers any direct remedy. The bes…

Or AA could improve their systems so that this app wouldn't be necessary. Or buy out the app. Or contract with the developer.

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

#107

Post by oxymoron » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 4:01 PM UTC

I am not convinced that AA is actively trying to block this app. I used to work for a major anti-bot vendor, so from that I know that all airlines suffer heavily from price scraping and try to protect their flight search endpoints. The impact to them is due to fees from the centralized data services that all airlines depend on.

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

#108

Post by jay-anderson » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 4:04 PM UTC

We have bots scraping some of our pages at work. We've attempted to reach out but haven't received a response. We don't mind the bots so much themselves, but we want them to be well behaved. Currently they are making calls over and over again that return a 4xx response and are a significant portion of our traffic. We want to request that they stop making bad requests and slow down (we do have throttling in place, but this just gave them more errors to ignore and retry.).

I'd love for an open third-party like this one. It'd even help with prioritizing features that we're missing in our first-party products.

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

#109

Post by scarface74 » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 4:05 PM UTC

vkou wrote: post #96

scarface74 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you have work visas for all three countries, or will you lie about your reasons for travel when asked?

Well, I’m a citizen in the US so that’s not a problem and where I will be spending the vast majority of my time. I’m scheduled to be in Mexico at most 35 days and probably won’t be working at all in Canada for the 10 days I will be there.

I’m on a lot of calls and travel within the US for work occasionally. While my company will fly me from anywhere and to anywhere in the continental US, I can’t ask them to fly me internationally

Travel outside of the US is mostly vacations and work just enough days so I don’t burn through my vacation days

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

#110

Post by pimlottc » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 4:05 PM UTC

josefresco wrote: post #12

sidewndr46 wrote: post #3

I don't understand. What does this app do?

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…

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.