You do realise that many management teams use the hard limits as "targets" and that you can still become extremely fatigued even when staying within "hard limits", don't you?
Yes. Why do you ask?
Nothing wrong with an FRMS. Nothing wrong with hard limits. It's the managerial support and culture that makes a rostering/limiting system, whatever it is, good or bad.
True. So looking around Australia and New Zealand at the industrial relationships that exist between say, Rex management and their pilot group, Virgin management and their pilots, QLink pilots and their management, Jetconnect pilots and their management, Jetstar pilots and their management , how much ‘managerial support’ are we seeing for the respective rostering systems? Quite a bit of support for maximising commercial efficiencies with zero regard for the employees who are not enjoying the rise of optimisation software , their bodies and brains think it is sub-optimal. In those circumstances had legal limits are preferable to an FRMS. The limit is the limit. An FRMS operating within a framework of non negotiable and sensible legal limits would be the answer but the exemptions are sought and granted and we have two crew operations signing on at 6pm to do planned 11.5 hour two sector duties with the inevitable diversions off the return sector......simply rediculous yet legal. A train driver, taxi driver, truck driver couldn’t do it even in dalylight hours and they’re not sitting at 8000ft. An FRMS managed by the wrong crowd will allow this to continue regardless of how many reports go in simply by regularly reminding pilots that they can call fatigued at any time. The system doesn’t account for human nature, pilots will rarely call fatigued on the duty and the reports they do send afterwards achieve nothing.
My main point to Lookleft was that an FRMS alone is not the answer and if I was him/her I wouldn’t get too excited about its arrival.
What is the answer? In my opinion a regulator with real leadership that implements sensible non negotiable limits and mandates FRMS to operate within those limits thus forcing Airlines to hire sensible numbers of pilots which will in turn increase ticket prices by $2.50 per sector.
posted at the same time as RatedDe