I can't help feeling that the pressure on turnaround times and targets must sooner or later lead to a flight deck crew error with potentially tragic consequences. I hope I'm wrong.
If I may just pick up on that point and explain a couple of things from the other side of the locked door. At no point are flight crews pressured into meeting an on time arrival and getting away again in 25 minutes.
In the 25 minutes that we have to turn around the flight deck, on a normal day, it goes something like this.....
- Pull on gate, transit shutdown checks and paperwork from the inbound flight. 3 minutes.
- The pilot flying the next leg will pick up the departure weather and set up the flight management computer, and sets the instruments for the departure. 5 minutes.
- The non-flying pilot will have completed an external walk round of the aircraft and rejoins the other guy up front to carry out a departure brief. We'll be talking about the expected departure, emergencies etc. 5 minutes.
- Coffee time, we cannot do any more until the dispatcher presents us with a load sheet. As soon as the load sheet is presented with the correct amount of pax we can then calculate the take-off performance from the tables. 2 minutes.
- Once the last passenger is on, a PA will be made from the flight deck and the before start checks are completed. 2 minutes.
- Once the doors are closed, push and start is requested and off we go again.
90% of the time, we are waiting for the passengers to board, fuel to be up lifted and the crew to give us a correct head count. It's a well rehearsed drill and 25 minutes is ample time to turn around the flight deck.
As for the terrible advertising PA's, constant harrassment to meet sales and that stupid chime they play when we land 'on time', I'm just glad the door is locked so we dont have to listen to that for 8 hours.
