Working time directive
Waterside worker - you are fortunate in being covered by the working time directive of 48 hours per week - as incidentally are almost all other employees including I might add even Junior Doctors nowadays.
Sadly pilots and aircrew are one of the few exemptions under the current rules and so even without the new EASA limits my company according to our crewing agreement can roster me up to 55 hours duty per week and this is extendable to 60 hours if required by them.
I'm afraid I already think that being at the controls after 55 hours on irregular shift work is unwise. It is of course the nature of capitalists such as yourself to want to squeeze more and more out of the workforce in return for lower and lower wages and poorer terms and conditions. There are some - (and perhaps you're one of them) who would like us to go the whole hog and return to Victorian working practices for all, we could even start sending kids of 14 to work so that Captains of industry can pay themselves even larger salaries and bonuses than they already do. Happily to counteract this drive we have unions whose aim is to enhance conditions for the little man and try and get a more equal share of the pie and also a regulator, whose role is to promote safety through law which is of course likely to cost more.
I've been flying only six years since leaving a job in airline management and in that time have dealt with quite a lot of situations that demanded a high level of training and skill from pressurisation problems, flap failures, door warnings, lighting strikes, bird strikes, strong winds and electronics problems to more serious events like landing gear failure and a strong smell of electrical burning necessitating immediate return to the ground with a blue light reception. I can assure you that no spreadsheet or management conundrum ever stretched me to the very limits as much as these occasions. Given that fact I would really rather not be fighting tiredness and trying to think clearly when dealing with them and if your wife/child/Mother etc was on board I suggest they would rather like people like us to be well rested while trying to get them back safely on terra-firma.
There's a notion amongst airline managers, beancounters and the travelling public that we sit there all day everyday with the automatics in sipping coffee watching the Alps roll by, but as you can see from my litany of events above (in only 6 years), it's not always like that. The fact that there aren't smoking holes in the ground all over the place is because of the training and professionalism of aircrew coupled with a regulatory framework that provides some (but not in my view enough) protection from fatigue.
Last edited by Desk-pilot; 15th Oct 2012 at 21:30.