Originally Posted by
lederhosen
The difficulty comes when the limit of duty time seems like it is the target and getting as close to it as possible on a regular basis is a measure of crew planning effectiveness. I vividly remember an overnight to the middle east and back to Scandinavia followed by minimum rest during the day in an airport hotel and another overnight to the middle east arriving back at home base at six in the morning. I had a frustrating chat with management who just kept repeating that it was legal. A couple of months later sanity prevailed and it got changed to a 46 hour very pleasant stopover.
In a previous life I did a number of weeks contracting for BAe Systems ATP, J31, 146 & 125 'club', to enable them to operate for third parties, Airbus for one, they had needed to acquire an AOC so needed to transition from a flying club mentality to an airline mentality, they had brought me in to manage the crewing.
For Airbus they operated a J31, 5 days a week, morning and evening service CEG/FZO/CEG, they were operating this with just one crew per day utilising the split-duty rule and, daily, if I recall, the crew would perform something like an 11hr 50min duty period followed by a 12 hr 10min rest period so anything more than a 10 minute delay on that evening service then the next morning's departure was going to be delayed with Airbus being a strict customer expecting their services to operate to schedule, with the crew unable to reduce that rest period having already extended their Flight Duty Period, even if by means of the split-duty, and by operating 12 hours per day they would need to be swapped over with another crew during the week to avoid busting the maximum number of duty hours in a seven day period.
Split-duties, on this type of scheduled basis, are a fool's economy, yes they might be saving 'pennies' on operating costs but a recipe for disaster, with no leeway to play with in the event of the most minor of unforeseen circumstances and building up accumulative duty hours for crews resting in hotel rooms.They had brought me in to manage the crewing, to set up a crewing department so to speak, and this was just one example of when I suggested change I found myself fighting with a flying club mentality, they didn't recognise that change was necessary because what they were doing was legal and suited their budget.
They, not so long afterwards, lost the Airbus contract due to their poor timekeeping
