Bashing the Union
Hi folks.
Just a view thoughts: some previous commenter's are right that within LH there are much stricter FDT limitations, due to the collective labour agreements between the LH employees and the management. Nevertheless these agreements are substantially based on the specific current German regulation, still in power. But these will become obsolete when the new EASA proposals become law in all Europe, which soon will be the case. The airlines will then argue with the same old wordings which we have seen on other occasions already (such as after the introduction of the EU-OPS): we have to do the same as so and so as otherwise we have an economical disadvantage compared to our European competitors.
Don't forget: the EASA proposals are only partially based on scientific research (as it is the case with the new FAA flight duty time regulations). It were the Unions that forced EASA to rework their first set of regulations published early last year.
It seems that what EASA is going to push into concrete now is more or less a wishlist of the airlines. And don't fool yourself: once this is regulation in Europe it will be the base for all agreements, even future collective labour agreements. So you would like to have flight duty times up to 16 hours by commanders discretion (now the max is 15 hours)? This given the fact that most dispatches already take into account that the Cpt. will use this "tool" in order to get the bird and pax home? The cited survey of VC has shown that in most cases the planning of some schedules is that tight that you may only fly it under commanders discretion.
Also I really don't like the idea that crews are forced to be awake for 24 hours and then land an airplane - as it would be (besides commanders discretion cases) the case with "split duty" schedulings.
Do we really need to lay out the ingredients for incidents and accidents to happen by a new - European - wide - regulation?
"Safety in aviation is the absence of accidents and incidents by preventive measures taken BEFORE something serious happens as a consequence of previously known deficiencies." I stick to this!