VoiceOfReason

I seem to recall a few months ago, people on here b!tching about a lack of communications. At least they're talking to us.

And to my dude complaining about Spirit Passes...just calm down. A few hundred flights delayed or cancelled due to ADS-B versus an entire mainline IT infrastructure meltdown are slightly different in scale. But, yeah, go ahead and make your case to Daddy D.

JulesWinfield

That's the thing, they don't talk to us about things that are important, you know, like a fleet wide outage that directly impacts our operation. It was clear Saturday night that something was happening to the fleet.

The first email we received was at 9, and had a cryptic ATC advisory with no explanation. At 11, we got another update, this time explaining a little bit of what was going on, but basically nothing to help us operationally.

After all the delays with mx and what not, they have dispatchers filing routes and altitudes we can't take and then arguing with us about it. It was a nightmare that could have been handled a lot better from the top down.

pangolin

Wow. Makes Mesa look like a dream job.

Blueskies21

So much this. We got how many emails about the phones being down? 12? A day?

With this we got one cryptic memo telling us to write up broken stuff, followed by days of radio silence.

I showed up to work blindsided by the impact of the GPS outage, apparently that cryptic memo to write stuff up was supposed to have prepared me for the impending pain.

gojo

My assumption is that they didn’t have a good working knowledge of the system or the problems that could arise with it. Much less what to do if something goes wrong? I would expect more support coming our direction very soon. Again, I’m just guessing here.

Meow1215

It’s like your using logic to arrive at a conclusion, very interesting.

gojo

Yes, but I’m not ready to go all in yet.

Blueskies21

Ok. So that covers Saturday, and maybe Sunday. We're at Wednesday. With potentially the problem resolving itself by Saturday.
By now we've got a good handle on what the challenges are and have had plenty of time to publish guidance that would help the average line pilot and dispatchers navigate this issue and we've had "reach out to a flight manger if you need assistance" (apparently memos don't come with spell check). I'm down with giving people a break but the crisis management of this has been sorely lacking, we had hourly updates on the phone tree but so far we've gotten almost zero operationally helpful guidance or updates with this issue.

Blueskies21

Just to put my money where my mouth is; we should have already seen a memo addressing what equipment codes we should see the flight strips edited to.

For example a normal equipment code is M-SDE2E3FGRVW for a 200, or PQ 900 and M-SDE2E3FGIRVW for an XJ 900. With just the GPS failure, you should see the G and R removed to be M-SDE2E3FVW. PBN and RNAV coding should be likewise modified to indicate a lack of terminal RNAV ability. When these codes aren't modified ATC will automatically reroute you to an RNAV route when you request the PDC, which results in additional delays trying to get back to an non-RNAV route.

All routing should be over jet routes and victor airways (the dispatchers have been filing direct VOR to VOR, which is fine but jet routes and airways provide more situational awareness).

I could go on for awhile about the guidance we should have already seen to assist the average line pilot and dispatcher navigate this situation but I won't.

Maybe we'll get something more comprehensive before the problem resolves itself on Saturday night and we declare victory on the crisis.

prex8390

FWIW, according to the memo, we can go point to point via white needles. No need for VOR to VOR, green needles etc. Just no Q routes, RNAV SIDS STARS or approaches. Also no RVSM altitudes because we get a transponder fail message.