Rat 5
In fairness, I think most rosterers would agree with your comments. If a crew member is happy then it makes everybodies lives so much easier, and they are more likely to be willing to accept out of the ordinary changes when they come along. The problem comes with managment perception of productivity. Excessive days off on a roster are looked upon with with a very high degree of dislike by senior managers. It gives the impression of having too much time off. A lot of rosterers end up putting crew on standbys, even though they know they are worthless (the standby not the crew), purely to give the impression that the crew are busy.
The other problems arise from flight schedules. What may look, at first glance, to be a perfectly logical sequence of duties, may be totally unsuitable because of min rest, consecutive earlies or lates, etc. CAP371 does not lend itself to logical patterns of work or to realistic body clock phases. Why is the body able to conduct a 14 hour FDP at 08:00 local yet can only do a 13 hour FDP at 07:58?
The only sensible approach would be to allow individual crew members to have high degrees of input into what patterns they want to work. All the discussions that have taken place have highlighted the fact that no two people will like the same type of work. Some prefer earlies, some prefer lates, some prefer long blocks of work and days off, some prefer shorter periods with fewer days off. Until the industry as a whole realises that CAP371 does more to impede sensible rostering than to promote it, then we are going to be stuck with only pleasing some of the people some of the time.