This message is for pre-merger Alaska Airlines Flight Attendants
On May 17, AFA filed grievance #36-99-2-130-18, requesting that Alaska Airlines management investigate the circumstances regarding the Company’s alleged violation of Section 12.C.3 “Trading Procedures”. The grievance contends that the Company’s Jeppesen Crew Access (JCA) Open Time Trading System failed to synchronize time across the system, resulting in some users being able to complete their tasks while others are temporarily blocked from trades, pick-ups and/or drops.
After investigating the concern, management provided the following email response:
Jeppesen found two issues that need to be resolved. The first issue has to do with the worker processes that handle the request and what it thinks is the current time, which is stored in a variable Jeppesen refers to as “NOW”. Each worker process has its own NOW variable and if a worker process has been idle, its NOW variable gets out of date and when the first request comes in, for example when Open Time trading begins, it still believes the Trade window is still closed because NOW lags behind the system time. The second issue is the Transaction Report timestamp is the time it logs the transaction is logged and not the NOW time.
Jeppesen has proposed the following solutions to address these two issues. The first is the worker processes will ensure the NOW variable is updated with the latest system time, rounded down to the minute (Note: The NOW time granularity is at the minute level), so if a worker process has been idle, it will have the current system time. The second change is to add the system time used in the processing of the request to the message so the FA and the transaction log knows what the system time is. For example “Trip window has not yet opened for 24198” will be changed to something like “Time HH:MM, trip window has not yet opened for 24198”. Jeppesen and AS believes these changes will resolve the issue.
Jeppesen will be providing an update in the next week concerning the interim solution. We are expecting Alaska Airlines management to sustain the grievance and work with us on improving your Open Time processing.
In Solidarity,
Your MEC – Jeffrey Peterson, Brian Palmer, Linda Christou, Lisa Pinkston, Terry Taylor, Mario de’Medici, Melissa Osborne, Tim Green, Brice McGee; and MEC Scheduling Committee Chairperson Jake Jones
