Dear All,
As a newbie Nigel I’ve been by and large, pretty happy with life. That said there are a few areas (e.g force drafting and that good ol’ entrenched militant unionism) that have left me scratching my head a little from time to time...!
What I’d like to concentrate on though, is BA’s apparent alleviation from CAP 371 in respect of early duties.
Specifically, CAP371 Section B Part 7 (Jan 2004) says…
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7 Additional Limits on Flying
7.1 Late Finishes/Early Starts
7.1.1 The conditions set in this paragraph only apply when a crew member is acclimatised.
7.2 Sleep deprivation, leading to the onset of fatigue, can arise if a crew member is required to report early for duty, or finishes a duty late, on a number of consecutive days. Therefore, not more than 3 consecutive duties that occur in any part of the period 0100 to 0659 hours local time can be undertaken, nor may there be more than 4 such duties in any 7 consecutive days. Any run of consecutive duties (Late Finishes or Nights or Early Starts) can only be broken by a period of not less than 34 consecutive hours free from such duties. This 34 consecutive hours may include a
duty that is not an Early, Late or Night duty.
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Fair enough, that was maximum 3 earlies in a row or 4 in seven days. Lets compare this with BA’s FCO 1113…
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1113 Late Finishes/Early Starts
a) The conditions set in this paragraph only apply when a crew member is acclimatised.
b) Sleep deprivation, leading to the onset of fatigue, can arise if a crew member is required to report early for duty, or finishes a duty late, on a number of consecutive days. The following restrictions shall apply for crew members to any sequence of duties involving 4 or 5 duties occurring in any part of the period 0100 to 0659 local time between consecutive days off:
i) The minimum rest period before the start of such a series of duties shall be 34 hours.
ii) The sequence shall contain at most 6 duties averaging not more than 9 hours per day
iii) so on and so forth...
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Hmmm, you read it right, whereas the recommendation form the national regulating authority is no more than 3 earlies in a row, BA seem to have an alleviation from this to go up to 6.
I didn’t start writing this post in order to have a public moan, but having now had the joy of the six-earlies-in-a-row experience first hand, I can confirm that particularly by day six, I am a long way from being the sharpest tool in the box
; I imagine there are plenty reading this who can concur. Supposing one was unfortunate enough to have an incident/accident on day six and the Daily Mail got wind of the info…?
Really, I’d just be grateful to hear from others with more knowledge/background on the matter that me and would care to comment, perhaps about how this came to be.
CAP 371 is downloadable from the CAA website.