Icurus, you are spot on.
Certain FOI's turn blind eyes to astoundingly obvious breeches of 48. While making sure that the t's are crossed and the i's dotted on trivial matters.
The sense of rage that many pilots feel at having to breech 48 (no work no job) is compounded by the lack of it would appear,ANY CASA help or recognition regarding these obvious breeches of 48.
In fact one FOI was heard to mention to management after an audit "well the flight and duty times have been falsified correctly"
One not even need to plough through MR's and tower logs to spot the discrepencies between actual duty and logged duty. Simply look at the booking system in many of these places and look for the hours rubbed out with an eraser. Some pilots in these places do thier flight and duties with thier sheet in one hand, and the booking sheet and eraser in another. Funny how they are always just under 90 hours duty.
Some organisations I have heard have gone through so many audits without compliaint about thier flight and duty times, that compliance to 48 is a non entity, they simply don't bother trying to hide it anymore. Why bother? In these orgainisations this obvious non compliance is about the only thing that the operators do to reduce pilot workload (refer above, flight and duties in one hand, booking sheet and eraser in another).
As we are told time and time again, a breech of safety, accident or incident is never caused by a single factor. Many things contribute. This rife and it would appear sanctioned breeches of 48 are to be a large cog in the wheel that will eventually bring a lot of people down. I hope this discracefull behaviour by the operators and certain other individuals in a position to do something about it stops before the wheel falls off.
Last edited by twentyelevens; 21st Aug 2002 at 06:21.