At the moment, the tempo of operations is fairly low. When I arrive at the gate the aircraft is there waiting and at the end of the flight the COVID cleaners take over, no 30 minute turnarounds. No slot times and no delays carrying through. Traffic is pretty light and the workload isn’t too high. During my last turnaround flight I had to ask the F/O what the departure time was supposed to be as it was so far down my list of priorities I had forgotten.
This is a big help that we can start slowly and build up instead of instantly going to normal levels. Our profession has very strict recency requirements in recognition of skill degradation over time, these mitigate the effects but do not eliminate them. Three circuits in the sim once a month ticks the box and is fine for a short absence from the flight deck but now over half of us have been grounded going on for a year.
With major layoffs and slow recoveries in the airline world, next year we may have large numbers of pilots coming back to work who haven’t flown for two years or more. Already there is an increasing trend of unstable approaches as crews are behind the aircraft.
We need to start preparing now to mitigate the effects of the lack of currency that will be evident next year when, hopefully air travel starts to recover. The incidents we are seeing now are just a taste of things to come.