Originally Posted by
GKOC41
Rated De
Sorry I disagree. I'm currently in my 10th Airline spanning nearly 40 years and never has any Director mentioned regulatory limits being targets. Yes KPI are more of a buzz word these days as much as the word graduate required for any sort of job. And without doubt the cost of a decent crew hotel was never mentioned. If you know your stuff you can get great deals out of the Marriott etc. So please don't tar all Airlines with the same brush (or CAA's)
As for weekends off and no sleep disruption - I once complained I worked 12 hours at a weekend and got nothing as a Manager whereas a Pilot could work 1 minute past mid night and get ££££ - My DFO said "go get a Pilots job" - so my advice to you is go get a Office workers job and take the £££ that goes with it.
Thanks for the advice, we weren't actually asking for any.
Nonetheless, one person's experience may be sufficient to form their opinion, and we thank you for your contribution, however our experience is broad, both from an operational and administrative perspective, so we respectfully differ in opinion.
Airline efficiency however is not a confined to one person's experience. Airlines themselves face two large operating costs. One they can't control (so, many airlines claim) fuel and the other one they can;
labour unit cost. How each individual airline calculates the labour unit cost is an internal black box, suffice to say knowing your stuff would entail minimising it, lowering it where you can and extracting productivity improvements where able. This is perhaps why empirically it is axiomatic that changes around the margin have moved crew roster practice ever closer to the regulatory limit in the last forty years.
Students of airline finance understand one key metric of the Low Far Airline was utilisation. Improving utilisation and limiting stage length allowed Low Far Airlines the opportunity to squeeze an extra point to point sector, which a full service carrier faced complexity doing with a hub and spoke network. Naturally crews both cabin and pilot followed the aircraft and tours of duty needed to reflect this key point of difference. They did.
Full Service airlines have trimmed turn around times, increasing utilisaition all to drive efficiency. Some airlines have achieved substantial improvement in labour unit cost. Full Service Airlines can and have replicated Low Fare Airline practices where able, and empirically have bettered and closed the unit cost advantage once the sole domain of Low Far Airlines. As with the Low Far Airlines, crews follow the aircraft and consequently changing roster practice reflects this lower unit cost (at least in part)
Therefore to drive efficiency, often targeted by KPI inducements is a whole department's endeavour. We maintain contacts in all sorts of areas, some efficiency targets may be crew hotel cost, others are focused solely on the contract elements and extracting greater from the existing contract, identifying where savings may be generated in the next negotiation and securing these savings.
In the last summer we have seen British Airways captured by the Low Fare Airline mindset drive down the unit cost by removing included menu items on their flights. Whilst this singularity ignore the yield premium a full service airline can generate it is but another example of perceived 'efficiency' which by definition will include the highest source of cost controlled by airlines; labour unit costs.