Delta Air Lines has long marketed itself as the most operationally reliable carrier in the USA, but recent operational struggles have exposed a vulnerability that becomes so much more fascinating when you unpack the details. A word of warning: this is a pretty geeky article.
Delta’s Pilot Scheduling Software Slowed Recovery And Created A Costly Crew Coverage Problem
Over the past weekend, a winter storm in the Northeast took its toll on carriers across the United States. All airlines faced delays and cancellations, but one pattern stood out: Delta appeared slower to recover than its peers. Delta never reached “meltdown” status and so I was not going to even write about this, but then One Mile At A Time published a fascinating piece about the root cause of the continued delays, which have persisted long after other carriers have fully recovered.
Interestingly, many cancellations are being coded by Delta as “Flight Operations-Crew Uncovered- Normal Ops,” meaning Delta is not blaming the weather for these delays and cancellations.
Behind that lag, insiders and community members on Flyertalk suggest a surprisingly mundane culprit: the airline’s pilot scheduling software (and specifically the way it interacts with contractual coverage rules).
We heard that first from JonNYC:
One Flyertalk member, jjglaze77, shared a detailed breakdown of the problem, explaining how the software and related crew coverage processes have created inefficiencies that are now hurting Delta’s ability to staff trips at the last minute. Here is that explanation in full, with a warning that it is very dense:
The issue is with the ongoing back and forth with the pilot group. Basically, both the pilots and the company are exercising contractual loopholes that have crippled the company’s ability to staff trips that become open with less than 18 hours to departure.
Ironically, it started when the company introduced some new software to try and improve the situation. Several years back, the company introduced a 3rd party crew staffing app (ARCOS) to help automate some crew scheduling processes. Prior to this software, the last minute overtime coverage (“Green Slips” / double pay) was done manually by a crew scheduler and if they got the pilot on the phone, the trip was theirs.
With this software, the company could contact pilots in groups (“batch sizes”) instead of 1 at a time. This created situations where pilots would be woken in the middle of the night to acknowledge a trip that they in fact would not be given because 10 pilots had been called, but only the senior pilot who acknowledges gets the trip. So, they negotiated an option to “auto-accept” a trip which would then give them a 12 minute window to contact the company and acknowledge the trip.
Eventually the company decided that they didn’t want batch sizes and ALPA essentially gave away batch size limits for free (a controversial move). Now that the company could call everyone at once, this created more nuisance calls in the night which drove up the use of the auto-accept feature. More recently, they negotiated to also have this same app be used for normal last minute pickups (“White Slips” / standard pay).
Because of the increase in auto-accept and reduced staffing in crew scheduling, the company found they were having trouble staffing flights. So, they turned to a previously obscure and little used function in the contract called 23M7 which allows them to skip all of the coverage steps (the app) and simply award a trip to anyone they can get on the phone (“Inverse Assignment”).
In order to do this, they pay the pilot who flies the trip 2x pay and then they have to identify a “harmed” pilot who was skipped over (since they skipped the app) and pay them 1x pay. It costs Delta 3x to staff trips this way, but it eliminates all the steps that are normally followed – making it much easier for a crew scheduler to get the trip covered.
The proliferation of this method of staffing has created an even greater use of the “auto-accept” feature of the app because a pilot has to have this feature turned on in order to potentially become the 23M7 “harmed pilot” and get 1x pay without having to fly.
So, let’s say a trip needs a new captain 12 hours before departure. They will begin to ask pilots through the app if they want the trip, but imagine in a large base (ATL 320) that 200 pilots have “auto-accept” turned on. That means that each of them has 12 minutes successively to acknowledge the trip.
As you can see, the math doesn’t math and they then have to go into the emergency coverage step / 23M7. All of that is a manual process though and they have staffed the department at a level that expected / anticipated automation.
Weather may be the initial cause of why a flight needs new pilots, but make no mistake – the reason they are cancelling like this is because of this contractual catch-22 they find themselves in. There is of course a great amount of finger pointing behind the scenes about who’s fault it is – good arguments on both sides.
What a bizarre system! If the above block quote is too verbose, I’ll try to summarize:
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Delta relies on scheduling software that automatically pushes open trips to pilots, many of whom have enabled an “auto-accept” feature that gives them 12 minutes to confirm or reject a trip. On paper, that sounds efficient, but in large bases you can be cycling through hundreds of pilots one by one, which quickly turns into a bottleneck.
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Because the system is so rigid and time-consuming, Delta often ends up having to step in and manually assign trips anyway. When a flight needs coverage at the last minute, showing that trip to only a handful of pilots per hour is simply not a workable solution, especially during irregular operations.
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The truly perverse part is that this setup creates an incentive problem. Pilots are effectively encouraged to auto-accept trips and let the clock run, knowing that the longer the process drags on, the more likely Delta is forced to invoke emergency staffing rules. At that point, the airline pays triple pay to get the flight covered, double pay for the pilot who actually flies the trip and single pay for the pilot who initially accepted it but then lost it.
That may satisfy the contract, but it is an astonishingly inefficient way to run an operation (and frankly helps to explain why many people think pilots make too much money).
It also points to an industry-wide issue of outmoded crew scheduling software, but once again (like the CrowdStrike issue) it appears that Delta may have set itself up for failure by not sufficiently investing in technology that could have avoided this.
CONCLUSION
Delta’s reputation for operational excellence has been built over years, but it appears that its pilot scheduling software and associated contractual processes may be creating a bottleneck at exactly the worst possible times. It is one thing to blame weather or storms as the culprit, but when the underlying systems that keep flights staffed and planes flying become part of the problem, it becomes a much more nuanced story and an urgent concern for America’s most profitable carrier.
image: Delta
To the attention of Delta Air Lines management!
It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.
– Warren Buffett –
And, if we had proper air passenger rights legislation like EU/UK 261 and Canada’s APPR, affected passengers likely would have been entitled to compensation (usually $250-700) in addition to rebooking or refund, since this was under the airlines’ control (not ‘the weather,’ etc.) Instead, it’s ‘tough luck’ and here’s 2,500 SkyPesos, if you’re lucky.
But yet, they’ll do this knowing full well they do not have pilots and make flight attendants come in anyway and sign in and sit in the airport unpaid, or sit on a plane for hours with passengers even though a relief pilot is nowhere near the airport “just in case” one shows up.
It’s a complete disrespect of time.