At one of the surf to summit gatherings I asked and the Union rep did say a that there were none found on the AS. However, there were some found on the HA. Just passing on what was told to me face to face by t rep that I highly respect.

 

I asked the same question to reps and management at HAL. They said there were a handful of pilots with "high activity clicks." Now these clicks are any clicks on the Flica program, not necessarily opentime refresh or submittals. The approval rates were the same, if not worse, than every other pilot when compared.

Also, was told off record by a reputable source, the usual suspects are clear and have no evidence of Bot usage. So looks like the ones with high ping counts have a bad bot, if there even is one.

 

I agree this is the way to do it. UAL has a system like this.

 

JetBlue and Spirit already have issues with bots. As stated before, it's incredibly easy to write a script or a browser extension to do it. You can even go on google and hire a programmer to do it for you. I'm not even sure how people are able to snipe trips in open time at 9am on Open Time day, because you can click "submit" at 8:59:59 and somehow still be 78 in the queue and the trip you're trading for is gone when your position clears. Then that trip is posted up for grabs an hour later by the person who grabbed it, if not asking for Hawaii trips.

Even if you tried to run a manual program, even if you did it first come first serve, people can create a bot to create forms to submit when trips come up so they're first in queue every time. Other issue is supposedly if you have T-Mobile, which is what the company uses, you get the text alerts first. You can also see if you're just on the crew access, you'll actually see a trip before pop up a minute before the text goes out. Best way to do this is when you get a text, hop on crew access and notice that trip is gone, and the trip the other crew member who dropped for it for is there in open time.

 

It's not a hard fix. You run pickups/swaps/etc a few times a day. Each time it runs, it goes via seniority among those who have requests in. United and Delta both do it this way.

 

That’s a negative on doing it by seniority.

 

You'll never get rid of bots if it's kept first come first serve.

 

Some people will never be senior due to the age at which they were hired. The behavior weather it was via a bot or just someone who is fast at picking up and then used the trip as currency for a better trip has stopped for now. The threat of a pilot or pilots breaking company policy is not a reason to give away first come open time trading or pickup.

 

To each their own. I've operated under both systems and I vastly prefer seniority based. It's not even close, I never want to go back to first come first serve, and that was true even as a new hire.

 

At Alaska you can't have a life outside of work to succeed at manipulating your schedule via trades on reserve or picking up work. You have to sit on your home computer with fast internet to succeed and constantly refresh the website to pick anything up. Somehow, we have gone back to a culture similar to when pilots only had land lines and rotary phones. Even though we have all this amazing technology.