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Old 31st Dec 2011, 14:21
  #20 (permalink)  
Denti
 
Join Date: Mar 2001
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Denti is there a flight time associated with the duty time?
Well, max scheduled flight duty time is 14 hours for a two pilot crew. That includes up to 2 scheduled landings, for every additional landing you have to subtract half an hour. Since flight duty time begins to tick with your reporting time the maximum block time is usually 13 hours, however if you go with a reduced briefing time you can probably get it to 13:15 or so. There is no limit on time at the controls though.

With captains discretion, which can be used before starting the first sector, up to 15 hours flight duty time is legal as long as you do not do more than two landings.

We had a route from central europe to south africa which was usually planned at 13:59 with a reduced reporting time to stay legal. We had to discontinue that after a couple years when the authority began to question why there was a need to use captains discretion on more than 95% of the flights. That was back before we started to augment crews, which was introduced by pressure from crews via their union. Since none of our aircraft has crew bunks (it's just a blocked business seat) our augmentation system is not considered legally as augmented crew so we are still limited by regulations about non-augmented crews.

Captains discretion has to be reported to the authority. Since the amount of reports is so huge they decided that everything with less than an hour of discretion won't be looked at. They told the airlines as much which increased the number of reports to several thousands a month from our 1400 pilot company due to very bad crew planning. Thanks to a much more rigid CLA we managed to decrease that somewhat in the meantime, however planning is still bad and the limit of whatever regulation is still the target, not a limit.
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