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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

#241

Post by cratermoon »

pc86 wrote: post #133
sidewndr46 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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 coupl…

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.

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

#242

Post by wraptile »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #237
YeBanKo wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Playing devil’s advocate here: this is not the same as scraping LinkedIn data. Linkedin data is public. This app requires a login info from a flight attendants to scrape their schedules. When you try to log in, you can choose to login as public or as a AA flight attendant. It sucks, but I also understand why a company may be unhappy, that a third party handles credentials and accesses internal data. What they can: -…

> This app requires a login info from a flight attendants to scrape their schedules. So? If the flight attendants have provided their credentials to the scraping software, they have essentially authorized the software to scrape the data on their accounts. It's just a custom user agent running locally and the airline company has no business blocking anything.

In other words: "you can write this down by hand, copy paste or browser plugins but you cannot automate this". I wonder if this stood up in any other context and I can't imagine of a similar scenario from the top of my head where automation would be forbidden. I could totally hire a part time student from a developing country to do data entry for me and that would be alright? Strange world - somehow these corporations have people brainwashed.

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

#243

Post by fknorangesite »

Scoundreller wrote: post #190
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…

> Save notes about crew members This one must be full of gold

It's not (necessarily) gossip, if that's what you mean.

Flight crews are generally only together for a couple of days at most, which means a lot of the time you go to work and have a whole set of new coworkers you've never met before - or wait, maybe you did? Like, last year? Do you remember him because he was a ton of fun or because he was an asshole? Should have written it down.

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

#244

Post by fknorangesite »

pc86 wrote: post #133
sidewndr46 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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 coupl…

> 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.

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

#245

Post by Brian_K_White »

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #218
Brian_K_White wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I'm not sure why it reads as 'defending [the employer]'s position'" Saying that the employer has the right to dictate those terms is literally and explicitly doing nothing else but defending their position that they have the right to dictate those terms.

You’re making the classic mistake of confusing explanation for defense. It happens all the time with the Ukraine crisis as well.

I grant that's possible.

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

#246

Post by wraptile »

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 key is: you must make enough profit to justify dedicating engineering and legal techniques to defend your scraping.

That's why web scraping is a huge SaaS market these days (I'm part of one too @ scrapfly.io).

Loads of our customers are tiny businesses and entrepreneurs that could no way afford the engineering effort required to scrape any of these websites and honestly empowering small folk against these giant, untouchable corporations is the best part about my job :)

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

#247

Post by Rapzid »

andrepd wrote: post #225
thayne wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Which clearly indicates that the fines need to me much higher, + probably specific accountability for individuals who made the calls, rather than just the corporation itself.

Sure, go increase those fines haha. In the meantime..

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

#248

Post by YeBanKo »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #237
YeBanKo wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Playing devil’s advocate here: this is not the same as scraping LinkedIn data. Linkedin data is public. This app requires a login info from a flight attendants to scrape their schedules. When you try to log in, you can choose to login as public or as a AA flight attendant. It sucks, but I also understand why a company may be unhappy, that a third party handles credentials and accesses internal data. What they can: -…

> This app requires a login info from a flight attendants to scrape their schedules. So? If the flight attendants have provided their credentials to the scraping software, they have essentially authorized the software to scrape the data on their accounts. It's just a custom user agent running locally and the airline company has no business blocking anything.

Third party having an unrestricted access to the internal system. No sane business owner would be ok with it. This is literally the reason why protocols like oauth2 exists.

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

#249

Post by YeBanKo »

wraptile wrote: post #242
matheusmoreira wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This app requires a login info from a flight attendants to scrape their schedules. So? If the flight attendants have provided their credentials to the scraping software, they have essentially authorized the software to scrape the data on their accounts. It's just a custom user agent running locally and the airline company has no business blocking anything.

In other words: "you can write this down by hand, copy paste or browser plugins but you cannot automate this". I wonder if this stood up in any other context and I can't imagine of a similar scenario from the top of my head where automation would be forbidden. I could totally hire a part time student from a developing country to do data entry for me and that would be alright? Strange world - somehow these corporation…

The issue is not that some app has access to a timetable of work shifts. It is that it has access to credentials and potentially can so something else. In your analogy a part time student from a developing country data entry - this is scrapping public linkedin data. What happens here is an employee giving their office badge, so they can go get a folder from the employee’s desk, open it and make a presentation based on its content. To make it worse, many employees give their badges to the exactly same student.

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

#250

Post by carlmr »

mathieuh wrote: post #82
selimthegrim wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.
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