I’m Not Cabin Crew. Here’s Why I’m Building For Them.

I should probably get this out of the way early. I’m not cabin crew. I’ve never worked a galley. Never been woken up at 4am for a short-call assignment. Never sat reserve wondering if the phone was going to ring.

So why am I building an app for flight attendants?

Honestly, it started with a Reddit thread.

The post that stopped me scrolling

I was deep in r/flightattendants — probably deeper than anyone who’s never worn wings has any right to be — and I came across a post from someone who’d just got a conditional job offer from Frontier. Excited. Nervous. The usual mix you’d expect from someone about to start a completely new career.

But the questions they were asking weren’t about flying. They weren’t about turbulence or difficult passengers or what to pack for training.

They were asking: once I hit 75 hours for the month, am I still on call? Do I get any time off while I’m on reserve? How do I budget when I don’t know what I’ll actually earn?

Basic questions. Completely reasonable. And nobody could give a straight answer.

The replies were all some version of “it depends” — on your base, your airline, your seniority, the season, whether someone else is already off that day. Helpful people doing their best. But essentially saying: you won’t know until you’re in it.

That bothered me. Not in an abstract way. It actually sat with me for days.

Then I found the wedding post

A few days later, same subreddit, different post. A flight attendant — hadn’t even finished training yet — asking strangers on the internet whether she’d be able to attend her own sister’s wedding.

Not because she hadn’t been invited. Not because of money. Because she was about to start reserve and genuinely didn’t know if she’d be allowed the day off in June.

Think about that for a second. She’s not asking for a month off. She’s asking if the system she’s about to enter will let her be at her sister’s wedding. And the honest answer from experienced crew? “It depends on your base. Your seniority. The season. The staffing levels. Whether someone else already requested that day.”

That’s not information. That’s a shrug.

The rabbit hole

I kept reading. Kept scrolling. Kept finding the same pattern everywhere.

A former flight attendant saying — her exact words — “reserve life would be impossible with a child.” Not difficult. Impossible. Because the system requires 24/7 availability but gives zero predictability in return.

New hires who didn’t realise that hitting their 75-hour guarantee doesn’t mean they’re done for the month. You’ve flown your hours. Great. You’re still on call. Still tied to your phone. Still can’t make plans.

People comparing AA’s 12-hour Reserve Availability Period to United’s 24-hour one — and talking about it like it was the single biggest quality-of-life factor in their careers. Not pay. Not routes. How many hours per day the airline controls.

I’m not going to pretend I understood all of it straight away. I didn’t know what PBS meant. Had to look up FLICA. Spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to understand how preferential bidding actually works in practice versus how airlines describe it in training materials.

But the more I read, the clearer one thing became.

The airlines have the data. Crew don’t.

This is the part that really got to me.

Airlines know their callout patterns. They have historical data on every base — how many reserves get called on a Tuesday in February versus a Saturday in July. They model staffing needs weeks in advance. They have weather disruption forecasts, seasonal trend data, crew utilisation projections.

What does a reserve crew member get?

A queue position number. And a phone that might ring.

That’s the information asymmetry. The airline has everything it needs to predict what’s coming. The crew member has to guess. And the guessing is what ruins birthdays, anniversaries, family dinners, and apparently weddings.

The tools that exist don’t solve this

I looked at what was already out there. RosterBuster. Flight Crew View. CrewZApp. The airline’s own apps.

They’re not bad tools. Some of them do sync and schedule viewing well — when they work. But here’s the thing: they’re all reactive. They show you what’s already happened. Your schedule. Your position. Your roster.

That’s like checking the weather after you’ve already been rained on.

None of them answer the question that actually matters to a reserve crew member sitting at home on a Tuesday afternoon: am I getting called today or not? Can I commit to dinner? Can I tell my partner I’ll be home?

The information to answer those questions exists. It’s just locked inside airline systems that crew members can’t access.

Why an outsider?

I’ve had people ask me — politely and otherwise — why I think someone who’s never been crew is the right person to build this. Fair question.

Here’s my honest answer: I don’t think being an outsider makes me better than someone who’s lived it. But I do think it gives me a different angle.

When you’re inside a broken system, you adapt to it. You learn the workarounds. You build mental models for managing the uncertainty. You get good at it, because you have to. And after a while, the brokenness starts to feel normal.

I came at this from the outside and my first reaction was: wait, why doesn’t this exist already? Why is nobody taking the data airlines already have and giving crew members something predictive instead of reactive?

Maybe that’s naive. Maybe someone who’s actually lived reserve life would have a hundred reasons why it’s more complicated than I think. And honestly, some of them would probably be right.

But I’d rather build something imperfect and improve it with real feedback than wait for a perfect understanding that never comes.

What I’m actually building

CrewIQ is an app for flight crew — especially reserve crew — that tries to do what no other crew tool does: predict rather than report.

Instead of just showing you your queue position, it tells you the probability of being called. Instead of just displaying your schedule, it helps you figure out whether you can commit to plans. It looks at the patterns — time of day, day of week, base, season, weather, staffing — and gives you a signal.

Is it perfect? No. Not yet. The prediction model is only as good as the data feeding it, and right now that data is limited. But every crew member who uses it makes it better. That’s the whole point.

I’m not building this to tell crew members something they don’t already feel. They know reserve is unpredictable. They live it every day. I’m building it because the information to reduce that unpredictability exists — it’s just not in the right hands yet.

A question, not a pitch

If you’re reserve crew — or you’ve been through it — I’d genuinely like to hear from you. Not because I need beta testers (though I do). Because every conversation I have with someone who’s lived this makes the product better and my understanding less wrong.

What’s the one thing about reserve that nobody outside the industry understands?

I’m still learning. And I’d rather learn from the people who know than assume I’ve got it figured out.