Longhaul Layover Question - With Infrequent Flights

[Iver]

I noticed that some European airlines that operate to the Caribbean or Cancun only have 1-2 flights per week. For example, Edelweiss operates one A330 to Punta Cana per week from Zurich. During April, Austrian evidently served Punta Cana with a 777 one day per week.

In these cases, do the pilots and other crew remain in Punta Cana for an entire week? Or, are the crews repositioned to another location (i.e., perhaps Edelweiss serves another island on another day) or sent home via the airlines after a few days? I am pretty sure that Austrian did not serve other islands in the Caribbean with the 777 during April - what happened to their crew during that week?

So, how does that work? I've seen this with Lufthansa too in which a once-weekly A330 will serve an African destination. Do the crews stay at this location for a long time?

Cheers

[Denti]

Dunno for those specific rotations, but yes, it is, or used to be, one of those perks that you sometimes have a week stay in a holiday location.

Nowadays rotation planning and crewing try to reduce those as it is lost revenue if the crew is unproductive.

[AircraftOperations]

Crew might fly as passengers to/from these destinations on their airline, or their employers will try to find other carriers to fly them back home on similar routings.

Use the search function for several previous posts on this subject.

[Bealzebub]

Writing this from one of those destinations, where I have been for a week.

The answer is fairly simple. A flight from Europe to the Carribbean/Mexico is in the order of 9-12 hours outbound and 8-10 hours inbound for the most part. Given a two hour turnaround and a 90 minute report, the average rotation start to finish is 21-25 hours. Obviously the rotation requires two full sets of crews. On top of this there are considerations for minimum crew rest and allowable duty periods that are in turn influenced by the fact a crew may or may not be accimatised to the local time zone. It takes 3 local nights free of duty to become acclimatised to a local time zone in this particular case.

A crew of 10 to 14 people requiring a one way airline ticket is also a very considerable expense, that often far outweighs the costs of allowances and hotel accomodation at the resort location. Multiply these one way costs by a factor of two and allow for the fact that a crew still needs to be pre-positioned at a destination to operate the return flight with adequate pre-flight rest to satisfy the normal requirements, as well as any contingencies that might arise, (cancelled or delayed positioning flights being but one example) and the economics of leaving a crew abroad for a week become very attractive. In addition by the time you have otherwise positioned a crew home and provided the requisite rest periods there is in reality, little productivity gain in any event.

If a company operates more frequently than once a week, then obviously the previous outbound crew will likely operate the next cycles inbound flight. It is also possible for crews to be used in a similar fashion within a geographical area where positioning availibility is a practical proposition, bearing in mind the rest requirements and contingency planning already mentioned.

So the short answer to your question is yes. Crews often do remain at the destination for a week.

[411A]

Crews often do remain at the destination for a week.
And, if the location is otherwise suitable, generally have a jolly good (party) time.:ok:

[DBate]

And, if the location is otherwise suitable, generally have a jolly good (party) time.http://static.pprune.org/images/smilies/thumbs.gif

Don't tell the 'beancounters' ;).

A friend of mine used to fly for a major charter airline in Europe. Sometimes they were indeed so lucky, as to have a week off at one of the sunny destinations in the Caribbean. On other occasions the crew was just sent 'dead-head' with a local carrier to the next island, to fly the return trip of a different rotation - so they just had about 24h off.

Concerning that Lufthansa flight to a certain destination once a week - as far as I know the airplane sits on the tarmac while the crew is on minimum rest at the destination, thereafter they do the flight back to Frankfurt. So no week-long layover for them.