We may get the luxury or more to the point the open mindedness and forward thinking of a company to heavily involve the crew in Europe but I think it highly unlikely that companies in other regions who currently run CAP 371 and who seem to manage by fear, would even tolerate "heavy crew involvement"! I heard a rumour that one CEO was quoted as saying "I don't tell you how to fly an airplane, don't tell me how to run an airline"! Clearly if true, heavy involvement will be possible there!
Yeah right! Like I said, I think we are handing the sheep costume to the wolf.
In terms of open mindedness and forward thinking, I think it took a lot at what was Britannia when they introduced day off payments and blocked rosters; how can giving pilots more money save us money and how can giving them stable blocked rosters help towards flexibility when there is disruption?
To which the answer was that instead of taking pilot B off a flight to cover Pilot A who was sick or out of FDP and then using pilot C to cover Pilot B etc etc, call Pilot Z, offer him a day off payment to do Pilot A's flight. Job done. Rest of the program stayed stable. I seem to remember a figure along the lines of in the first year it cost them several hundred thousand pounds in day off payments but they saved about four million in program stability. Every roster change had a about 130 associated roster changes which all ended with forward thinking.
Whilst I have digressed somewhat, it will take a forward thinking company to operate without imposed FTLs who can see that running crews into the ground does not necessarily save money. Sickness spreads more easily as as had been mentioned, peoples immune systems go down etc. And of course the occasional hole in the ground is bad for business.
Mind you, on the plus side, if a company is running its own FTL based on its own FRMS as opposed to legislative FTLs, and there is a fatigue related hole in the ground it would maybe make a company more nervous about being in charge and responsible for FTLs and prefer the Legislative ones so they can blame the government!
In short, is/are the proposals by EASA a good thing?
OK it wasn't short! Just too knackered to get out of bed and do something useful like play a round! Purr purr!