In the last few years that I have been at American, every hiring class had a handful of internals in it. One internal that got hired in January had only been at AA for one year. There very well could be internals in the hiring pool this round too, but yes majority we hire from is Envoy. Although we did have one come from JetBlue last round as well. That FKYs experience does help.
The only two people I have personally seen fail so far in dispatch were actually externals. One because the guy just straight up did not try at all, isolated himself and made no attempt to train. The other had a bad attitude and constantly blamed everyone else but himself for not passing. I have heard at Delta sometimes the internals can struggle or take longer to train but majority of their hiring does seem to be internals and work for them. AA usually has a Fall class so I’m guessing they would be hiring in a new round sometime between September to November as well. I was just told by a friend at Delta they will begin using Flight Keys soon themselves. Heard Alaska is as well.
I do agree, I think we are putting too much emphasis on needing FKYs specific experience. It’s a different program, but it’s not insanely difficult to learn. To me as someone who didn’t come from Envoy, FOS/DECS was harder to learn with all the coding and special inputs needed for any command. Had its own weird glitches too. Calculated faster but had more steps. I overall prefer FKYs, I’m just used to this type of set up from previous dx programs. It’s a much more modern version of Saber Flight Plan Manager, and created by the same people. Surprised we don’t favor companies that use FPM as well. Also, as long as you lock in everything when you’re planning on FKYs, even if it optimizes a new route or altitude, etc on a new tab it does not change what you have released or the information that the crew get. So it may optimize and change things on a separate tab, but unless you choose to revise the release with that new info, what you have planned and locked in should be set. There’s not usually a need to re-release unless you want to, or have a tail swap, crew change, etc. The set up at AA is getting better and better with time, although it still has some glitches to work out. Our FKYs team has done a pretty good job working with the developers, and even take trips to Vienna sometimes to collaborate with them on how to improve FKYs for what we need.
Good luck to those in the pool.
