Originally Posted by
Harry Wayfarers
In my day I did crew scheduling under UK, Australian and The Netherlands regulations whilst writing our own FDP's for a Luxembourg registered operator, never have I seen anything like 13 start times of duty days, it would literally be impossible to memorise them and as soon as a problem may occur the reference manual would need to be referred to, in Luxembourg I attempted to introduce a 6th duty start time of day and I was given a slap.
Who would memorise them anyway? Use a computerised scheduling system like everybody else, which will warn crewing well in advance of any problem coming their way.
Now, the table posted here can be extended by up to one hour twice within 7 rolling days with certain conditions attached (longer rest times). And then of course companies can still write their own flight duty time (FDT) regulations, those have to be more stringent than those put into the EASA regulations as those are the minimum standard which cannot be extended. To write your own FDT regs you have to introduce a fatigue risk management system (FRMS) into the companies operation that always tracks both the planned and actual (calculated) fatigue scores of the crew, as well as the possibility for crew to call in fatigued at any given time. Usually a FRMS leads to lower possible duty times than the law allows, but is better tailored to the operation of the airline or AOC in question. An approved FRMS however is the law within that operation and the times in the FRMS manual for that operation cannot be exceeded except for the usual discretion that will be still possible.
Working in an airline with a FRMS, the table i have to follow for our FDT limits looks very different to the one posted here, although we do fly under EASA rules. And OPS actually tracks it, i've gotten several ACARS messages during duties that were running long, warning us we would probably go into discretion and asking for our plan of action, no pressure applied to go into discretion. That said, the company in question actually has several tables, depending on where the crews are based, which might be confusing at first.