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

#111

Post by Syzygies » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 4:07 PM UTC

oxymoron wrote: post #107

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.

"Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence."

I fly American between JFK and SFO regularly, including today. They have the best prices these days for an "international" business class on this route. The food is good, the flight attendants are friendly and good at their jobs...

Automobile manufacturers offer pathetic "center console" software compared to Apple, Google. American's in-flight entertainment system makes auto makers look like geniuses. They just don't understand software.

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

#112

Post by vkou » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 4:08 PM UTC

jaywalk wrote: post #105

vkou wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When Canadians travel down to the US for work, they are always instructed to answer any questions with 'I'm just here for meetings/training', because telling CBP that you're going to be doing any programming for your Canadian employer while in the US is a great way to get denied entry.

I'm not sure how this works in the reverse direction, or in Mexico.

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

#113

Post by mattkrause » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 4:09 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…

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/

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

#114

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 4:10 PM UTC

shagie wrote: 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…

[deleted]

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

#115

Post by pb7 » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 4:10 PM UTC

dcdc123 wrote: post #76

elmerfud wrote: 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.

Everyone has “that story” about one particular airline but AA is particularly bad because a large portion of their fleet is old and requires a lot of maintenance which unsurprisingly causes delays and cancelations.

I echo the statement that I’ve never had an uneventful flight on AA. I fly a lot and can confidently say other major airlines are more reliable but usually also more expensive.

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

#116

Post by runjake » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 4:13 PM UTC

jay-anderson wrote: post #108

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…

Isn't this where you put a stop to existing requests and implement free API keys?

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

#117

Post by lostdog » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 4:14 PM UTC

OJFord wrote: post #94

arciini wrote: post #21

I'm sad that this is happening to an app that's useful to its users, but the reality is that scraping is legal, always possible, but difficult. This particular case is a bit harder since it's not purely using public data, but may still qualify since it's likely scraping with legally-obtained credentials. I know of businesses (scraping for ride-sharing, scraping for business intelligence for retailers, scraping from L…

> the reality is that scraping is legal, always possible, but difficult. > This particular case is a bit harder since it's not purely using public data, but may still qualify since it's likely scraping with legally-obtained credentials. No, it's easy: they're employees, they can be told they're not allowed to do that. Doesn't matter if the app's legally allowed to exist or not.

But they also deserve to have access to their work schedules, and I bet a good lawyer could argue that "access" should be interpreted broadly here.

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

#118

Post by runjake » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 4:14 PM UTC

neilv wrote: post #85

shagie wrote: 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…

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…

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".

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

#119

Post by pc86 » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 4:17 PM UTC

OJFord wrote: post #94

arciini wrote: post #21

I'm sad that this is happening to an app that's useful to its users, but the reality is that scraping is legal, always possible, but difficult. This particular case is a bit harder since it's not purely using public data, but may still qualify since it's likely scraping with legally-obtained credentials. I know of businesses (scraping for ride-sharing, scraping for business intelligence for retailers, scraping from L…

> the reality is that scraping is legal, always possible, but difficult. > This particular case is a bit harder since it's not purely using public data, but may still qualify since it's likely scraping with legally-obtained credentials. No, it's easy: they're employees, they can be told they're not allowed to do that. Doesn't matter if the app's legally allowed to exist or not.

They can always tell their employees they're not allowed to do something, and punish the ones that do. I think it's an important distinction though that whatever they tell their employees, the app isn't doing anything wrong in a legal sense. So still legal, possible, and difficult.

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

#120

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

MichaelZuo wrote: post #31

shagie wrote: 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…

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.

If I was AA I would absolutely want to block this.

One example: Seems like it sends information about the whereabouts of all the American Airlines staff via an unauthorised third party.