Originally Posted by
Sailvi767
I am still trying to wrap my head around the crew duty day if this is about safety. Most airlines report 90 minutes prior for an international flight. 12.5 flight hours puts the day at 14. 2 hour delay leaving FRA and 2 hours on the ground at OAK puts them at 18 hours before departing OAK. How the pilot in command justified a departure at that point is hard to understand and illegal under under US rest rules.
Since you’ve brought up the subject of rest, a bit of slightly off-topic background. Our standard is 6 on/4 off (6/3 for non-H24 units). The US standard is 5/2, however a lot of units are so short of staff they have a mandatory rostered overtime on day 6, so they’re effectively doing 6/1. This would break a whole heap of our rules in the way it’s rostered, but the biggest one is 3 periods of at least 54 consecutive hours off in any 30-day rolling period. Without going sick, there’s no way for them to even get a single 54-hour rest period, let alone 3 every 30 days. I’ve no idea if Norcal is on 6/1, and it doesn’t appear to directly impact this event, but I’d tend to be far more worried about how much rest the average US ATCO has had in the previous 12 months, than the DLH pilot going a couple of hours over in this case.
If you want I can breakdown all the different ways “the rattler” roster they get would break our rest rules (including finishing a morning shift at 3pm then back for a night shift the same day…)