pay software the company could use is unironically called “rainmaker.” Was used at Pinnacle/Mesaba/Colgan. Works great lasts long time.

I think the problem is that Rainmaker was designed to work with Sabre. If that is indeed the case, outside a few majors, who have their own proprietary systems, just about everyone contracts with Sabre for their crew management, so it's easy to port over.

Not so easy when you have a totally proprietary system like OSS/DBMS.

The larger problem is that even if the rainmaker software were somehow plug and play into each airline’s system exclusive of Sabre, Delta’s desire for an in-house solution would trump its selection.

8/10/23 it started auto notifying the company for any report submitted.

First mention of ACE I found after the 8/10/23 date you mentioned was the 31 Aug MEC Alert Email and regarding ACE it said:

"Before submitting your report, the Delta MEC asks that you contact your Delta Crew Scheduler and try to get your issue or question answered. If you've made contact, and the Company was unable to answer your question or resolve your issue, you can then submit your ACE report.

If you have submitted an ACE report, but have not contacted the Company about the incident, please contact crew scheduling or your chief pilot immediately and send a message in your ACE report with the date you contacted the Company. The RLA grants 120 days from the incident, and this stops that clock."


This message was repeated in the 7 Sept MEC Email, and 14 Sep, and 28 Sept, and 5 Oct, and 12 Oct...

So was the intent not to tell the pilots in order to make sure they kept calling schedulers directly in hope they would fix the errors at lowest possbile level (and get paid the fastest), and just let the auto notify function run in the backround as a backup just in case the pilots forgot to call?

Or was there a memo telling pilots to stop calling and I missed the memo?

Most likely it was a call the company because it's thier problem instruction. The only way to get resources on it from the company's end was to make it a big enough problem i.e. overwhelm the schedulers.

If we published to the pilot group, no one would try to contact the company first and solve the issue with the company....which is what is technically required....but it stopped the clock for you in case you didn't contact the company.

such a true statement