Originally Posted by
beautiful_butterfly
Yes.
They would be a highly engaged member of the team, with appropriate qualifications and recurrent training.
Cruise relief is an old legacy concept which is redundant in a modern flight deck, particularly for operations requiring four pilots.
I think you missed my point. Is the issue with the name and salary or is it related to the qualifications of the cruise-relief role? FWIW, my former operator, where additional pilots have been CP/SFO/FO and natural crew for 4 pilot ops, prior to COVID was looking at using cruise-relief type-ratings to reduce the training burden. They would have been new entrant FOs, not SOs. Hence my question to Rex as to whether this would be safer rather than cheaper.