Ace App?
 

Has anyone actually gotten any money using this app? All my claims either say "submitted to the union" or "claim in progress." Some of these are from a few months ago. I don't think I've ever waited this long before the app.

Yes. 1 took over a month and ALPA told me it was due to the company. Every one is backed up with the amount of PWA scheduling violations.

Patience grasshopper. You will be a fan of the app.

*edit* Besides, the back-end process for the scheduling vols is basically unchanged. It’s mostly the interface with them that is the ace app right now. One which gives you the feedback for where it is in the process, vice having to guess/ping them before.

Company isn’t a fan of the app.. wonder why?

Keep using it folks

Ditto taking over one month to this point. Good app though, easier to follow and keep track of submitted issues.

Exactly. I think the fact it’s an app makes people think/assume it’s instantaneous rather than like the old email or scheduling form submission.

We’ll submit a dispute and the company will pay it in 10 minutes, meanwhile they’ll still be sitting on something we submitted September 2020. Not much rhyme or reason. They have increased their staffing on their dispute payout side and now have a small team to handle these issues. Hopefully that improves the turn around time.

Don’t hesitate to reach out through the Ace for Unions App if you are unhappy with your service! We have growing pains on our side as well and sometimes things do fall through the gaps.

I thought ALPA said putting a rep in scheduling office would solve this problem? I had 2 illegal rotations just last month ..That whole thing is a joke, except for the company, which is saving a few dollars here and there when the ALPA rep tells them that's illegal.

So are we no longer using the ALPA Scheduling Form?

The app is good. I had about a 10 day turn around on a detailed report for an illegal reroute.

Included screenshots of rotation and about 3 paragraphs about what happened.

ALPA turned it to company. Company approved it. I got paid and a few others got paid as well as a result. I think for that one trip they ended up paying out about 250 hours of credit to everyone who got paid. I know for me alone is was 63 hours. Other pilot got 63 hours. Guys who flew it and didn’t have to got extra.

So yes, it works. Is it an overnight process? No.

Remember, the power of the ACE app is that it ALSO looks at all the data and tells you when delta has violated the PWA …

I don’t think the WOPR has been fully turned on yet… but it’s coming

10 days? I'm going on 2 months on my claims.

Same here. Union got back pretty quickly but the company is taking forever to fix it.

Download
 

Where do we download the ace from?

Apple App Store. I assume Google whatever-it-is-called has it too.

search “Ace for Unions”. First hit with sihouette of three stick figures on dark blue background.

Thank you. I was looking under ace and got nothing that resembled. Missed the for unions. Got it!

The app is a garbage communication system. I asked a question about a company interpretation that doesn't align with an ALPA scheduling alert. It took one month to get a one sentence response saying the company was correct. Follow up questions about the content of ALPA's newsletter were never answered. The whole system seems designed to avoid a human conversation.

Ooooor maybe handle four times the work with half the people?

It really depends what the violation was. Some the company pay out instantly, others they drag their feet on


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Two totally separate and unrelated issues here. The Scheduling committee decided to reallocate their resources and not have a phone line anymore.

Totally independent of the introduction of the ACE app.

The service has gone from personal to volume. Good I guess, but that has shifted calls to the reps because they are the only ones directly contactable. In the past a little coaching from the scheduling committee went a long way, now it is all trial and error with the app allowing for more volume. The summer flying series was gold though and is applicable year round. Manipulating schedules should not be a dark art.

However DALPA does it, 100% of all trip coverages, RR's, GS's, PB/PR days and other things needs to be automatically audited and reviewed. If they can do it with a program, great. If it has to be manually reviewed, so be it. I bet airlines save billions over the decades playing the "deny deny deny" game knowing that every single pilot can't catch it every single time. Worst case they only pay what they should have paid, best case they pocket it. We can't depend on individual pilots being complete CBA experts and catching everything, or even knowing when to flag everything. Especially when sometimes a cascade of pay protections is missed because one pilot upstream wasn't a CBA expert and didn't know something should be flagged. Some things should be 100% automatically reviewed. If it costs us 0.05% dues money to properly do it, so be it.

Exactly this. Follow the money. The PWA needs a provision to dissuade company mistakes. If we made it 600% pay for errors caught by the pilot/union, they would be highly motivated to do it right the first time.

Finally got a claim paid out. Progress.

How many people do you think DALPA would need to hire to accomplish what you post? The dues refund check you just got would have been notice of a required substantial supplementary payment. Many issues can take hours to research. If someone is smart enough to fly airplanes for Delta they should be able to research their issues and if in doubt use the current options to clear up anything unresolved.

The full features of the ACE app will do most of this when activated.

Ive completely ignored the ace app stuff. I admit it, sometimes I'm a grumpy old man who hears about something new and ignores it. With that said, would someone, in maybe one or two sentences, tell me what its for?

bonus pay, complaining, and general review and analysis of scheduling practices ...but really

big data crowd sourced collection of intentional scheduling violations

I would be quite surprised if the union will be granted via a app the kind of IT access required to research a lot of issues that come up. We already enjoy far greater computer access to Delta data than probably any other airline grants to a union. Letting a App deep access into crew Skeds, crew tracking and reservations seems like a tough sell given today’s concerns on corporate hacking and espionage.

No we don’t. The access at AA and it’s wholly owned regionals is far greater than anything we have. Actually it’s shocking how little access we have compared to them.

Care to explain? Delta has granted the union scheduling experts the exact same access crew schedulers and supervisors have. What exactly does American allow APA? This access allows are scheduling reps to look back and reconstruct almost anything.
This is remorse access from DALPA HQ. We don’t have to go over to the company for access as I am told APA does.

Two words:

DECS and RES.

Every pilot has access to them and the Union reps generally have even deeper access than that. If you don’t know what DECS and RES are then you shouldn’t be commenting about how “awesome” our access is, because it isn’t.

Well I am just commenting on exactly what our union put out a few years ago. I also personally know one of the union contract admin workers who was a ex Delta scheduler. Isn’t DECS simply the program American pilots and flight attendants use for scheduling function like DBMS? What does that have to do with the union being able to look back and follow trip construction and assignment sequences?

The ACE system pulls most of its data from publicly available DOT sources. The company can’t turn off the access.

When you say crowd sourced, its populated by information from our side of icrew? Is this simply a issue form submission process or are they trying to get some transparency by using our end of the data?

As many as it takes, whatever the cost.

That said, much of the existing delta between CBA compliance and status quo could be caught by a good automatic review system/programs. Part of the rest could be significantly reduced by the DALPA scheduling SME's in the same rooms as the schedulers etc. The remaining could be easily reviewed by hand. If it can't be done within the existing budget, keep the 0.05% and apply it towards that.

Its unreasonable to expect 13,000 pilots to know the entire CBA in real time and properly flag everything including things that depend on a million other moving parts including other pilots's schedules and interconnected coverage sequences. PB/PR days are messed up all the time; the rolling thunder ninjas probably have that on lock, but not everyone does and some situations can get pretty esoteric. Beyond an individual pilot getting shorted, that creates in the blind errors no other pilot could possibly catch unless they are scheduling forensics experts. Its very hard to review something you should have gotten when you have no reasonable expectation to know you should have gotten it. That's 99% DALPA SME or programming review dependant.

Companies know this, and there is a built in default incentive to "deny deny deny" as there is no penalty and substantial reward for doing so. Its also the inevitable result of hard (over?) working schedulers sincerely doing their best while simultaneously trying to put out hundreds of interconnected fires at the same time. Its not all nefarious intent, nor is most of it. But errors can rapidly cascade into missed money/days off for numerous pilots down the line, directly and indirectly. If someone else doesn't get the proper PB days for example, 30 pilots down the line someone gets a trip instead of stayng home, or someone else misses a GS they had no ability to ever knew should have existed. All the errors add up to costing DALPA dues money too, so there's that.

100% compliance on RR, coverages, PB/PR and other major interconnected scheduling items should be the goal. These things should be automatically caught by computer review or manually looked at by SME's who are the ninjas that 13,000 line pilots can't ever be.

I would also add that NWA permitted 3rd party access to PARS and ACCESS, the NWA reservation system and scheduling software, respectively.

This allowed a healthy little market for cool programs, such as JS & non-rev booking and websites like EZOPENBOARD.

”BUH BUH BUH Flightline!”…which is shutting down leaving users with no alternative.

My American and United friends can find boat loads more information about things than I have access too. Even simple things like looking up schedule history is difficult and sometimes impossible for us (which is why ALPA says to screenshot everything). Dupe trips and missing iterations make reconstruction of a trip impossible for Joe Shmoe line pilots. We don't even have access to a glossary of iCrew codes to know what something means on our schedule, you just have to piece it together through the years like some kind of ancient language. Don't even get me started on the non-rev side! The Kompany actively restricts the amount of information we have. Even on a DH you can't see open seats in economy if you've been booked in a C+ middle seat or the C+ seat across from the lav on the 75.

I agree 100%. I know the contract pretty well and catch scheduling assigning illegal rotations on a regular basis. Last month I had 2, and this month I've had 2 so far. Every time I get an illegal rotation, I call scheduling and tell them. 99% of the time they deny it's illegal and come up with some poor reason why it was assigned. I keep pushing and tell them the exact section in the contract it violated. After that, they always agree, and pay me..I think Delta mgmt tells them to initially deny all illegal rotations when a pilot calls, Putting an ALPA rep in scheduling does nothing for Delta pilots except take money out of our pockets..He helps the company occasionally avoid an illegal rotation.

There is a big, big difference in what the line pilot can see, and what ALPA can see. Big. Huge.