Tiredness is arguably a bigger issue than chronic fatigue
I am with you BUT tiredness, in our job, is a problem too. In my opinion the FTL already permits way too long working days. I am not even speaking of the EASA proposal because it should be illegal only to be considering an increase in the amount already allowed.
If we are
already exhaust while on day one on earlies - and this is the case for me on a long 4 sector duty - just because it is not possible for everybody to fall asleep at 8 pm after you were used to do so at 1am for the previous 9 days - then this is an issue by itself. And, correct me if I am wrong (I have to admit I was not listening really carefully at the propaganda video during last RST), but this is tiredness.
When you say:
Generally it works. I go to work hoping the other guy has had a decent night's sleep on my day one of earlies.
I can tell you that I hope for that too but if you look at the overall situation from the outside, then I don`t think to be in error stating that it shouldn't work like that. It is about safety afterall.
We are two pilots, right, but in commercial aviation everything works on redundancy. Two engines because if one fail, still we can menage somehow to take the ship back on safe ground. So, on the same principle, I would say there is a need for two pilot not because the normality is like you were saying:
We have two people on the flight deck (one of whom MOL would like to see replaced by cabin crew
), both are tired, trying to catch each other's mistakes
but because there is always the chance that one gets incapacitated. This is different.
So, in my opinion, fatigue is a big problem, but here, in the current aviation FTL, we are already pushed way too much on
every single day, and even further in the rolling 28 days. Especially in LoCo world, and even further in Ryanair, where, as fireflybob was rightly stating:
The point that's often missed about the 45 minute report time is that it enables certain duty days (usually with 4 sectors or more) which would be off limits if the report time is an hour, or even more, before STD.
At windcheck: sorry my friend, I like to do that too, but you are entirely missing the point here