Originally Posted by
acl65pilot
They seem to be. I know their ultimate desire is to determine the size jet that flies a route two days prior to departure. A pipe dream for sure, but something that many would love to do .
As for how they do it, yes, they have good computers. What we have is just enough to get the job done. There is no ROI on new homegrown software.
Heyas ACL,
This actually came up at NWA a few years back...NWA IT, always a sharp bunch, developed set of programs that would dynamically schedule the airline on a day to day basis.
One catch, of course, were the crews. They wanted it set up where you would basically have a report time, a number of duty days, and a release time, and that's it. I'm not sure if this hurdle was ever jumped, but I heard there were talks with the unions about it.
The other catch was the seat assignment issue. Right about this time, the charging for the "premium seats" came into vogue, and you can't sell something 30 days out when that seat might not even exist at departure.
If NWA IT people really did come over with the merger and that same expertise is still there, not just on the programming side, but on the conceptual side, then it CAN happen. These guys were using self check-in and had agents in line with PDPs way before anyone else.
Nu