Delta Virtual Airlines Water Cooler

Delta Virtual Airlines Water Cooler | Airline Operations | Schedule Issues

DVA2315
Senior Captain, MD-88

Joined on April 30 2005
Long Beach 250 Club
Six Century Club
Online Quintuple Century Club
DVA Ten-Year Anniversary

"www.harborcounty.net"
Cypress, TX USA

674 legs, 1,380.9 hours
506 legs, 907.6 hours online
495 legs, 1,029.0 hours ACARS

Posted onPost created on December 13 2006 21:06 ET by Daniel Shaw

Not to say that our current schedule is a problem exactly but, I was just looking for a flight from ATL-Tel Aviv. I know it used to be in there, and I know that Delta still flys it because it shows up on th Delta.com website; however it is not present in our schedule. As our schedule is the only valid place to get routes from, perhaps we should consider more frequenct updates to make sure that no flights are left out and that our schedule is accurate and complete.

Daniel Shaw

Senior Captain, MD-88

DVA650
Senior Captain, B767-300
E-MAIL

Joined on June 28 2002
Online Double Century Club
Quatercentenary Club

"IRS NAV ONLY"
Lynchburg, VA USA

466 legs, 2,117.4 hours
301 legs, 1,436.8 hours online
163 legs, 781.4 hours ACARS
6 legs, 30.6 hours event

Posted onPost created on December 13 2006 22:53 ET by Chuck Gehman

Funny, 152 leaves in 8 minutes bound for Tel Aviv. 777. Do not know why it is not on our schedule.

To be honest I have been using the real Delta schedule. I get the pax loading that way by using the "view seats" page they have on their site. And I have not run into an issue yet.

Chuck Gehman (DVA650)

DVA3787
Senior Captain, CRJ-200
OLP

Joined on December 01 2006
Double Century Club
50 State Club
Online Double Century Club

"Small planes don't make small brains"
Western Europe

277 legs, 515.9 hours
204 legs, 397.0 hours online
244 legs, 456.2 hours ACARS
39 legs, 80.6 hours event

Posted onPost created on December 16 2006 18:46 ET by Mark Salter

Who knows, its just one of those things i guess! You should find someone that deals with this stuff regularly. Its not like the DVA can be 100% realistic, but pretty darn close!

Mark Salter

Senior Captain, CRJ-200

Posted onPost created on December 16 2006 20:18 ET by Chuck Gehman

Why should I "find someone who deals with this stuff regularly"?

I kind of thought thats what a forum was for. And I am sure DVA does not mind hearing when something is out of whack as how else are they supposed to know and fix it? Seeing as thread is 3 days old it probably is already fixed by now.

Chuck Gehman (DVA650)

DVA3196
Senior Captain, MD-11
OLP, COMM

Joined on June 03 2006
Online Double Century Club
50 State Club
Six Century Club

"pitchpowertrim.com"
Anderson, MO

619 legs, 1,093.4 hours
292 legs, 503.1 hours online
580 legs, 1,026.5 hours ACARS
89 legs, 191.0 hours event
236 legs dispatched, 110.1 hours

Posted onPost created on December 16 2006 20:23 ET by Michael Brown

ROFL.....Mark, your not exactly batting a 1000 today.

Michael Brown (DVA3196)

DVA043
Senior Captain, MD-11
OLP

Joined on June 10 2001
Event Half Century Club
Online Double Century Club
50 State Club
DVA Twenty-Year Anniversary
Everett 1500 Club
Bi-Millennium Club
Four Million Mile Club

"Col. Panic"
Marietta, GA

2,347 legs, 9,466.0 hours
240 legs, 553.9 hours online
2,005 legs, 8,259.1 hours ACARS
75 legs, 196.3 hours event
2,383 legs, 9,600.9 hours total
91 legs dispatched, 66.4 hours

Posted onPost created on December 16 2006 22:31 ET by Luke Kolin

Chuck, please DO keep mentioning things here. Ultimately, the only way things are going to get fixed is if I hear about them.

To give everyone an update on the schedule, I believe we're at the point where we can get an accurate snapshot of the Delta schedule FOR THAT DAY. I can run a schedule update task as a scheduled job at 9AM GMT every day (that's 4AM or so eastern time) and update the schedule with the live feed from Innovata. There's a bug in Builds 119 through 121 that doesn't add airports back to the schedule properly, but that's going to get fixed tomorrow or worst case Monday.

The real issue we're running into is that this is a one-day snapshot of Delta's flight schedule. There may be flights (especially the long-hauls) that only operate on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, so what you'd see is the flight appear on the schedule one day, disappear the next, reappear the following day, disappear and then reappear. I think that is going to be a fact of life, because if people want the same level of detail and accuracy as the Delta schedule, this is what we're going to need to do.

There's also the problem of what to do if a flight gets reserved by a pilot, started, and then gets removed from the flight schedule while in flight. smile

There are a few changes we are implementing in the latest ACARS client that will get around this, by allowing the client to validate the route pair on flight startu so even if the schedule changes midway through, it won't throw up a spurious route warning on the PIREP. Once I'm satisfied that the download works reliably on a scheduled basis, I'll let Terry and Matt know and we can implement it in production.

Cheers!

Luke Kolin

Senior Captain, MD-11

Posted onPost created on December 16 2006 23:19 ET by Chuck Gehman

Appreciate it Luke.

Chuck Gehman (DVA650)

DVA3710
Senior Captain, DC-6
OLP, COMM

Joined on November 12 2006
B757 100 Club
50 State Club
Quatercentenary Club
Piston Prop 100 Club
DVA Fifteen-Year Anniversary

"God is my pilot. I'm just the First Officer."
Apopka, FL

432 legs, 690.6 hours
35 legs, 60.8 hours online
385 legs, 620.1 hours ACARS
6 legs, 7.7 hours event

Posted onPost created on December 16 2006 23:49 ET by Sid Dudley

Thanks, Luke and the rest of the staff for all the hard work that y'all put in to keep everything running as smoothas possible.

Sid Dudley

Senior Captain, DC-6

DVA483
Senior Captain, B777-200

Joined on June 02 2002
Online Fifteen Century
Everett 1500 Club
DVA Fifteen-Year Anniversary
Four Million Mile Club
Bi-Millennium Club

Port Orange, FL USA

2,004 legs, 8,830.6 hours
1,962 legs, 8,652.6 hours online
1,335 legs, 6,262.8 hours ACARS
4 legs, 22.3 hours event

Posted onPost created on December 18 2006 09:24 ET by Eric Fisher

A classic example of the problem with the sked here and the Delta.com one is the JFK-BUD flight 98. It only operates a few days of the week. You fly it on a day that it does not operate and it gets kicked back to you from someone because it shows it not being in the schedule. So what is the solution? 1- put a comment in that you got it off the delta.com site? 2-Only be allowed to fly it on the day of the week it actually operates?

Eric Fisher

Senior Captain, B777-200

Posted onPost created on December 18 2006 10:11 ET by Luke Kolin

Thanks for chiming in, Eric. With the schedule, I'm actually a lot more interested in hearing from folks who have questions or concerns because that'll very quickly identify the weak spots in our plan. I may have misspoken a little bit earlier when I said that things might appear or disappear from the schedule on a daily basis. That still IS possible, but looking back over the code it may be less often than I originally thought.

Let me explain. When I get a feed from Innovata, each flight entry has a start and a stop date, and then a third field that lists the days of the week that the flight operates between those two dates. The start/stop dates can be used by an airline to denote times when there is higher or lower service (like Thanksgiving or Christmas), or when they're discontinuing or starting service for a particular flight number. The first filtering pass I make is to exclude any entries I get from Innovata whose start/stop range doesn't include the current date.

Now the DVA/AFV schedule databases are incapable of storing days of the week for service. I may get three or four different schedule entries for the same flight that have passed through the first filter, that differ only by the days of the week that they operate. I then order these by the number of days per week that each entry is valid for and out of that I get a single entry to stuff into the database.

Therefore, if something operates less than 7 days a week but does so consistently over a number of days, the schedule is going to remain the same from day to day. Even if it's a flight operated only one day a week, you'll get to fly it every day. Where you're going to see inconsistencies is where airlines (ab)use the start/stop dates to bring flights in and out of service from day to day, and cases where there's different service on weekends. There are a number of flights that depart at a different time on weekends, and those won't be reflected in the schedule on that day.

I apologize if my answers seem to change from earlier; the Innovata import rules are slightly complicated and often I need to review the code to determine how it truly operates. I would suggest again that if you see a flight on our schedule that you want to fly, please book a flight assignment with that flight and its validity will be "locked in". Additionally, ACARS Build 83 will validate a flight when you start it.

Based on the limitations of our schedule database and our pilot community, we will never be able to guarantee 100% that flights match the Delta schedule. I'm trying to get us close, and the differences we have should be based on consistent criteria that can be easily explained. That much I can guarantee.

Cheers!

Luke Kolin

Senior Captain, MD-11

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