Are Airline Managements Unwittingly Ignoring Safety?
As someone who is experienced in the airline business but currently not in full time employment I have the luxury of almost acting as a counsellor for many colleagues who fly as pilot with a variety of UK charter airlines.
I find some of their stories quite disturbing with management seeming to constantly put more and more emphasis on achieving an on time departure whatever the cost and, indeed, crews having to justify why the aircraft departed late. With one company they have even been instructed to depart without catering or aicraft cleaning should this delay the aicraft.
One story was of the captain rung by the airlines management to explain why the aircraft departed three minutes late. The captain explained that they could not push back at the STD because they were waiting for another aircraft to taxy behind them to an adjacent stand. It would seem that the handling agent station manager was on a bonus if he achieved an on time departure!
Stories do vary between different companies with some remarkably better that others but the only real issue I am concerned with as pilot (and sometimes fare paying pax) is the safety issue. Putting crews under undue pressure to acheive on time departure times cannot in the long term be safe and is also bad management. Just how long will it be before we have an incident/accident caused by this crazy policy? Whatever happened to corporate liability?