PPRuNe Forums - AAR invitation for an informal meeting

The following may or may not have helped to inspire AAR to conduct the upcoming meeting. At least it may serve as some food for thought. Earlier this year the report below was filed and acknowledged by EASA and the FAA. The report was also shared with the Office of HH Sheikh Mohammed with the explanation that EK’s pilot shortage is not due to global factors but home made. From there it was delivered to the GCAA. As far as I know the FAA is actively investigating.

“…as a former Emirates pilot I want to report the lack of regulatory oversight and effective labour laws in the UAE. Emirates operates its long-haul fleet with unprecedented "crew productivity" at a crew factor near 7. That is impossible to match for any major Western airline. The issue reported in the WSJ on April 9, 2015 is still not rectified. This is a ticking time-bomb for flight safety and crew health. I highly recommend that you require a rolling 12 month duty record for any Emirates crew member operating in your jurisdiction, covering flight, simulator and ground duties as well as deadheading. The UAE can not be trusted to safely regulate aviation.

The main takeaway of the following detailed information is:

• Emirates are deliberately recording false check-in times for all of their pilots on all flights. Because any duty limit or rest calculation is based on check-in time it is simply impossible to say whether an Emirates crew is operating legally or not. This is not just a problem for individual flights but also has knock-on effects on the following required rest periods, next allowed check-in time and duty totals.

• When the fact was made public the GCAA as regulatory authority promised to regulate it properly. The opposite happened. They covered this up for Emirates because they are by no means independent. Western authorities shouldn’t trust them blindly to regulate Emirates. Please see the U.S. State Department’s Human Rights Report for 2014 to understand that independent control of a government-owned business is impossible under their legal system. The Chairman of Emirates Airline, Sheikh Ahmed, leads the Dubai Civil Aviation Authority but more importantly he sits on the Board of Directors for the GCAA as a Board Member (see GCAA website).

• Emirates are also using other shortcuts and bullying of their employees to make their pilots operate at an unhealthy workload level. On 03 June 2015 Emirates Captain Jim Jacobs (54) died from a heart attack at JFK when boarding the flight to Dubai. He was exhausted and wanted to retire that year.
• As a result of these illegal practices Emirates are achieving great savings by operating at a crew factor of 7 where flight safety dictates a crew factor of 11 in similar operations at regulated Western Airlines (e.g. AirFrance A380 fleet). Emirates presently operates about 250 aircraft (number from open sources) with about 3,850 pilots (from EK seniority list as of 12-2015), some of whom are in training, in management or on sick leave.

1 False Check-in Times

Every Emirates pilot is forced to report for duty significantly prior to the legally registered reporting time. In other words: Emirates is extending their pilots’ flight duty times by registering false reporting times for each and every flight.
Pilots’ flight time limitations are obviously safety relevant and in the case of Emirates Airline the operations manual is approved by the General Civil Aviation Authority (GCAA) in the United Arab Emirates. According to the Emirates Operations Manual the Standard Reporting Time for pilots is 1 hour before a flight. So a pilot is legally required to report for duty only 1 hour before the flight departs.
But the operational reality is very different. Emirates pilots are picked up at their residences by a company chauffeur and arrive at the Emirates HQ at least 1 hour and 45 minutes before departure. The timing of the company transport is set by Emirates and can not be delayed by the pilot. The pilot will then proceed through Passport Control and Customs and he will check in his baggage. He will then conduct a preflight briefing with the other pilot on his flight. The flight crew briefing ends at 1 hour 25 minutes before departure as documented in the Flight Crew Departure Timeline. After that the pilots will join their cabin crew and proceed to the aircraft.
So the pilot has completed all of the outlined tasks at 1 hour and 25 minutes before the flight and yet his reporting time is registered at only 1 hour before the flight. Why doesn’t Emirates adjust the Standard Reporting Time? Even Emirates Cabin Crews’ Standard Reporting Time is set at 1 hour and 30 minutes but Cabin Crew Flight Time Limitations are less limiting than those for pilots.
I am attaching a sample Flight Crew Departure Timeline (Part of the Briefing Pack). It is an example of a 2 Pilot Crew Turnaround. EK 544 and EK 545 Dubai-Chennai-Dubai. B773, A6-EMR on April 25th 2014.

Pickup by Company Car 00:30 Dubai Local Time
Flight Crew Briefing End 01:20 Dubai Local Time
Reporting Time 01:45 Dubai Local Time
Scheduled Departure 02:45 Dubai Local Time
Actual Departure DXB 02:57 Dubai Local Time
Actual Arrival MAA 06:37 Dubai Local Time
Actual Departure MAA 08:02 Dubai Local Time
Actual Arrival DXB 12:06 Dubai Local Time
Scheduled Arrival DXB 12:30 Dubai Local Time

After the WSJ reported this issue on April 9, 2015 Emirates removed the internal document “Flight Crew Departure Time” from the process. But that’s the only change.
“The GCAA’s Mr. Al Balooshi said reporting requirements for duty time should be “black and white” and begin when a pilot is expected to report for work and finish when his or her last flight taxies into the gate. Emirates said it abides by state-approved flight-time limitations. “(WSJ article).
This is clearly not the case. Please see the following evidence:

Attachment 1: Flight Crew Departure Timeline for EK544 on 25 April 2014

Attachment 2: Pilot Transport Pickup Schedule

Attachment 3: Internal Memo ‘The Waves’ Flight Crew responsibilities page 6

Attachment 4: Signage at the Crew Terminal outlining that the combined Pilot & Cabin Crew briefing finishes at Standard Departure Time minus 80 (20 minutes before the pilots’ legally registered check-in time).

Attachment 5: EK Pilot Recruitment Video @5:00 runtime. Quote: "I get picked up 2 hours 30 minutes before departure.” http://youtu.be/A53VRz_KhnY

Attachment 6: Emirates OM-A Section 7

Attachment 7: Wall Street Journal Article, April 9, 2015

Attachment 8: Internal email by the Manager Regulatory Affairs telling the related parties in Emirates to remove the Flight Crew Departure Timeline document from the briefing pack, 22 April 2015

2. Further Issues

Here are some of the other issues that I can also back up with evidence and further witnesses:

• Pilots are bullied not to report sick. They receive warning letters if their annual sick days go above a fairly low threshold and may not receive the annual bonus. The first thing is usually to withdraw the right for self-certification of sickness, meaning you can’t call in sick for a single day without a doctor’s certification (not very practical giving the nightly duty schedules).
• the process for reporting sick fatigue is a lot more complicated than just calling sick.
• the Emirates Clinic is overcrowded and understaffed with doctors. Long waiting times are the result.
• the process for cabin crew to report sick is completely prohibitive now. They must drag themselves to EK HQ at any time of the day or night where they only get the sick note but no treatment.
• there is no proper East-West time-zone curfew applied to the rosters
• on Ultra-Long-Haul flights there is now a factoring for 'stick time', meaning you only get half the credit for a flight if you are on the augmenting crew that didn’t do the take-off and landing. This has implications for the following rest times etc.
• No credit for time in a certified full-flight simulator. That’s another 22hours of flight duty per year that just disappear from the records.
• No proper leave allocation. Out of 42 contractual leave days only 30 days are awarded and then many times in forced blocks of 4 days in a row which would have been OFF days anyway.
• No credit for ground training, simulator training, dead-heading or leave days. An EK pilot will fly max hours in a vacation month. I had this several times myself, doing 80hrs block in 14 work days.
• no documentation or limitation on radiation anymore. ULRs over the north pole are daily business.
• the overall results are just shocking rosters year-round without any breaks, most of it through the night and through many time zones. People are getting sick up to incapacitation and death on duty.
….”end of quote.

Let’s throw in some business figures. The EK crew factor is about 7 and that is including a lot of ULRs. Lufthansa long-haul crew factor is 10, AirFrance 380 crew factor is 11. Both do LR but no significant ULR so should actually require less crews than EK.

Assuming that a crew factor of 10 is required as calculated with German accuracy by Lufthansa then 3,900 EK pilots are doing the job of 5,570 required pilots. In other words you are permanently working 43% overtime.

From a cost perspective that equals annual savings of 1,670 pilot salaries and expenses which can be conservatively estimated to be at least $200k per pilot per year. => more than $ 330 million savings per year.

From a revenue perspective Emirates Airline achieved $24.2 billion in the fiscal year ending 31 March 2015. That is about $ 6.2 million of annual revenue per pilot. The 43% overtime productivity in the total annual revenue equals $7.3 billion. Per pilot it equals about $1.9 million.

The Airline’s 2014-2015 profit was stated as $1.2 billion. So you see that an additional expense of more than $300 million for proper pilot staffing would indeed have a big impact. Let's not even think about the $7 billion of revenue created by your generous overtime work.