ACMS,
They are winding you up.
It has been clearly explained on this thread what the landing distance is factored by, it has been clearly explained that it takes very little to eat into margins. A recent example has been provided where ATIS reported conditions ("worlds best practice") understated the tailwind (how very common) which could have resulted in an overrun at that landing weight.
It has also been explained that we dont care being vectored to fit into the sequence to get what we want, it is not about saving time or fuel, they are always our lowest priorities.
It has also been explained the queue jumping domestic carriers are a regular beneficiary of by taking intersection departures when we taxi for full length. They never seem to complain if they jump the sequence to land on a shorter runway.
They dont seem to complain when entering the Australian FIR we are asked to drop 30 minutes of flight time before top of descent. People are judging the dicking around they are getting by the last 5-10 minutes in the TMA, they dont look outside their playpen, others have been screwed over with a smile for hours. We are gone beyond caring about saving a minute by the time we get to the TMA.
It has also been explained that the domestic carriers have made a business decision to reduce aircraft size between trunk routes and increase frequency. The 20% of slots being used by all heavies in SYD and MEL is not where the slots gone to, the inefficiency of the slots is coming from the low load factor domestic carriers. If the domestic carriers did not decide to go down that business model, they would not have needed as many pilots.
It has also been explained that CX will not ALWAYS require the longest runway, I would say the majority of ADL-MEL flights I have done I have landed on 27. I have also explained that we land a lot heavier than domestic carriers as foreign AOC airlines are not allowed to use the same alternates as domestic carriers.
A lot has been explained in detail on this thread, many have been too quick to engage the mouth before the brain.
You may correctly use professional discretion when you REQUIRE a certain runway but where is that line and how do we deal with certain airlines simply not understanding a difference in terminology but by lack of experience or training they subsequently gain a commercial advantage through lack of basic ability.
WAGM,
I dont know where you get this sense of "commercial advantage", none of us give a toss about saving 400 kg of fuel or 10 minutes. My experience is the opposite. Just looked at the last 90 days, we had a cracker that burned an extra 25 minutes of fuel going into SYD, about 20% of our flights are delayed by more than 10 minutes or more going into SYD.
Before you make unfounded claims, how about documenting the "commercial advantage" of the domestic carriers using intersection departures, or being put ahead in the sequence on landing, or looking at how the slots are being used by low load factor domestic carriers.
CX have 4 flights a day to SYD, that represents 0.87% of the movements in SYD (December had 28,444 movements in total, of that CX contributed 248).
The question was intended for a broad response in the first instance, not just how one crew may chose to operates on the day if they are caught out fatigued after a long duty.
BTW I don't believe after a long duty you should be fatigue, if your operator is professional enough to put in place correct mitigators.
Fortunately I can sleep well on board having faith in the other crew and sleeping before call having normally been accommodated in appropriate accommodation.
Under the HKG equivalency of CAO 48, none of the flights out of HKG to Australia require a sleep opportunity. None of the CX A330 have bunks, the "leg stretch" as it is defied in our operation is done on a business class passenger seat without a curtin. Where this leg stretch is not required, they may sell the passenger seat and the leg stretch is on the jump seat in the cockpit. The current push from management is to move all flights where possible to 2 crew to Australia which is legal under the HKG equivilant of CAO 48. CX have a rostering practices which sits ontop of the CAD regulatory minimums, this is supposed to be the circuit breaker between what is the regulatory legal maximum, and rostering norms.
I myself always like youself felt more rested after 3 long haul flights month where I have a bunk and a sleep even if that was 100 hours, 75-95 hrs regional/medium haul missing 8-10 nights sleep is no fun. You must also understand only a small portion of the Airbus flying is done into Australia where Wx and terrain hardly exist. I love departing HKG when there is a typhoon approaching HKG going to Australia. We have lovely patterns on the Airbus like CGK/SIN/BKK/ICN return through the night dealing with dodgy Wx and ATC which is fatiguing. You can go through the same typhoon twice in the same day.
Aren't most of the carriers, implied in this thread, flying A330's? Aren't they fairly/relatively light at the end of a 10 hour duty/8 hour sector from Asia?
Biatch,
You will find the mainland Chinese carriers are operated 4 crew into Australia, CX operate either 2 or 3 crew (depending on day/night and city pair, CX operate into 6 ports) into Australia.
The A330 can be at MLW on arrival. I have also landed at MLW with less than 60 passengers on-board, it has the same cargo volume (LD3s) as a 744. It would be not that unusual on say a HKG-SYD flight to be landing 5-10t below MLW, where a regional flight like TPE-HKG you could be landing 50t below MLW.
Flight time alone is not a good indication of landing weight.