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Old 1st Apr 2014, 22:38
  #12 (permalink)  
Old Akro
 
Join Date: Feb 2006
Location: Melbourne
Posts: 1,693
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It disappoints me that there is often a flavour on pprune that all bosses are exploitative crooks taking advantage of young pilots.

The relationship with your boss should be good enough to ask honest, open, enquiring questions like these. This applies whether you are a pilot or the office girl. If your relationship with the boss is not good enough for this, it would be a signal to look for a new job.

Regarding the oil changes, I agree that I would prefer to change oil more frequently. But from the pilots perspective its what's on the MR that counts. It will have a validity date, airframe hours and notes on interim maintenance. If the MR does not require the oil change, then its legal. If the MR requires an oil change that has not been signed off, then its not legal and he shouldn't fly it. If the MR is not requiring an intermediate oil change, then frankly its as much a question for the LAME that signed it as the owner. If there is an accident attributable to lack of oil change (which there won't be) then it will be the LAME in the gun, not the owner. Once again, this would be an entirely reasonable question to ask the signing LAME. The owner will pay the price of lack of oil change in increased engine wear / shorter engine life. Its very unlikely to be a safety issue.

Regarding duty times, frankly who cares about CAO 48. Its probably the single worst written CAO. If you want evidence, just look at the huge volume of exemptions granted by CASA. The real question is whether the pilot is happy with the duty hours? This varies hugely with the style of operation. If the aircraft is flying VFR in good weather west of the J-curve and the owner is also a pilot who shares some of the duty (not an uncommon scenario), then I'd suggest you could easily, safely and happily fly twice the duty hours of (say) a single pilot IFR freight run in bad weather (ie across Bass Strait).

But, really these are both conversations that an employee should have with his / her employer.
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