During the opening of the ATTOT window, the AA DECS server is hit with a huge amount of requests at once. DECS is responsible for taking your trade/drop request, checking its legality, and awarding or denying the request. When it's tasked with doing this for thousands of crew members all at the same time, it will try to conserve memory and processing time by disregarding certain other requests such as the N4TL entries.

N4TL entries are what QuickTrade uses to show you the "(X Trades)" next to your trips. It's a DECS command in the format of "N4TL/(your seq #)/(date)" and it will tell you what trades DECS believes is legal. You probably notice a little bit of lag when QuickTrade runs the "Searching for Trades" step for each trip. This is DECS "crunching the numbers" and normally only takes a few seconds. When ATTOT opens, things are changing fast and DECS will refuse to calculate this legality to save processing time. If it didn't refuse, it would take a long time to wait for results and the results would likely not be reliable anyways.

It is important to note that, during a DECS overload, only the ability to run N4TL entries is affected. Trade commands can still be processed. You don't have to wait for the overload message to disappear.

Just because the trade legality can't be calculated automatically for you doesn't mean you can't trade trips. Under normal circumstances, the app shows you the results of the N4TL entry for your trip. Since the N4TLs are unavailable during the DECS overload, QuickTrade will fall back to showing you "possible trades". This is simply a list of open trips that don't overlap with your other trips, and have greater than or equal number of days in the trip. Without the N4TL entries, it's unknown if these trips can actually be traded for your trip, but the app will let you attempt the trade. Without the N4TL entries, you will probably run into denial messages more often, such as "Pickup Status - Red, Drop Status - Redder".

"Red vs Redder" is a common denial message by DECS that refers to staffing levels for the month. Each trip is assigned an amount of "redness", and each trade you make has to leave Crew Scheduling's staffing levels the same or better than it was before. It will not, for example, allow all crew members to trade into weekday trips and leave the weekends unstaffed. Staffing levels change constantly with each trade, sick call, and scheduling change for any crew member, so what's rejected now for "red/redder" may be accepted shortly after.

Your best bet at getting the trades you want during a DECS overload is to use the Trade Queue feature of QuickTrade. Find the trades you want before the window opens and press the "Add to Queue" button on the Trade window. On the main menu, you'll have a new option for the Trade Queue. There you will be able to drag them into the order you want and press "Start" a few minutes prior to ATTOT opening. It will do its best to run through your list of trades exactly when the window opens. A lot of work has been put into the Queue the past few months to make it more and more reliable.

After the queue has run, you will probably notice the DECS overload message as DECS gets hit hard with requests. Your open time list should refresh with new trips and you can attempt any trade you like, with the understanding that the trips shown to you during the overload are not guaranteed to be successful. Once DECS traffic dies down, the N4TL entries will be reliable again, and the app will return to normal.

The best solution would be to stagger the opening of the trip trade window. This is the way AA handles the ATTOT window at mainline. For example, LGA could open at 10am central, MIA at 11am, DFW at 12 and ORD at 1pm. This would space out the web traffic so DECS could handle it better. This would eliminate or greatly reduce the amount of time DECS blocks N4TL requests. We have asked Crew Scheduling if this is possible, and the only answer we got was that the opening of the ATTOT window is defined in our contracts, which doesn't technically answer the question. We know it's possible because AA does it.

The barriers to this solution are:
We are looking into other ways to help reduce DECS traffic while still providing you with the information you need for trades. Sorry for the trouble.