Originally Posted by
fishforfun
The first iPhone wasn’t even released until June 2007. Based on the IT and how we use it, unless it was Steve Jobs himself in the cockpit I call complete and utter BS about the claim that this was discussed by anyone at delta in 2008. Maybe that was a typo and he meant 2018?
Could be off on the date. Have to look up the rotation, but this was just after the merger and before the Surface deployment. The manager was all about capturing minutes and shaving inefficiency out of the operation, as well as a way to measure recaptured minutes. His version of a flight family (and maybe it does) measured everything. What he described is very much like the current use of flight family where OCC & Tower were in the comms loop. His initials are JS.
If anything, Plaintiff's ideas probably did not get the usual pushback from Flight Operations because Flight Operations was already of the same mind.
Steve Dickson was talking about doing away with paper flight plans back then as well ... still hasn't happened.
The idea of being able to text message ops & scheduling is (was) a pretty common thought. The "idea" is not worth anything unless it is reasonably protected through copyright, patent and/or trademark. Reading through the complaint it appears Delta was beginning to protect its position through non-disclosure agreements. As a "creator" the plaintiff not only would have needed to protect himself from his client taking his product but also his developers from claiming it as their own.
Again, my friends in this space, as well as customers, investors, and anyone who watches Shark Tank know your business is worth less than nothing if the idea can be taken by someone else. This "product" is tougher than most to protect because it is really just a combination of existing ideas with an obvious solution.