Nice try Rat 5, but I wouldn't be holding my breath. Isn't is strange that a so-called line pilot refuses to answer any question that may have the potential to expose even the tiniest chink in the armour of his self-professed utopia? Surely a regular line-pilot would have the ability to keep an open mind and at least discuss the issues? That's called CRM and MCC, skills in which LHC would not appear to be practiced. Of course, LHC is no more a regular line-pilot than Ali G is, so it's all rhetorical.

Leo, sir...

I do not know you or have any fight with you, but I was just wondering how it is that, should a chap decide he is fatigued and therefore unsafe to fly (and that is his call alone, for whatever reason), it is somehow shirking his responsibility? Surely, and as a line pilot you must agree, he took the only responsible course of action.

Commercially inconvenient? Yes. Irresponsible? No.

God forbid, but should the nightmare scenario occur and let's say the skipper survives, the court hearing should make for some very interesting debate - how it was that he faced two choices:-

1) Take the aircraft, with all those passengers and crew aboard, knowing he was fatigued and therefore unsafe to fly.

2) Make the call to Ops, remove himself from a potentially dangerous situation and be demoted (precendent now set).

I'm not a lawyer but seems like a no brainer to me. The European Courts (the passengers/crews families would make sure they were involved) would certainly have something to say about a company putting someone in that position.

Or am I missing something?

Leo, as I recall from various encounters with you somehow we never get clear answers. Just in case you may have reformed in recent times I'll try again. Can you just confirm for your eager fans that you are still unable to provide answers to straight questions, and, in particular that:

(a) you will never answer a question that would in any way prove to be critical of Ryanair's behaviour,

(b) you willl always refuse to condemn Ryanair written intimidation of pilots, and will ignore direct evidence even if it is posted here on PPRuNe,

(c) you will be associated with comments which reflect poorly or adversely on the name of pilots who have incurred the wrath of Ryanair management,

(d) you will disappear when there is a court case in session and the news is not so good for Ryanair,

(e) you will continue to appear after the court case to announce that it was really a Ryanair victory,

(f) you will promote and prepetuate stories remarkably similar to those of senior Ryanair management,

(g) you will continue ignore any comment or question that might demonstrate how shallow your grasp and logic might be,

(h) you will continue to make personal attacks on the President of IALPA,

(i) you will continue to construe any adverse comments on a certain Mr. Michael O'Leary (the Guru of Gigginstown) as an attack on all that is good, worthwhile and civilised in the world,

(j) you will continue to take the "happy propaganda" pills provided by your mentor, "Great Leader MOL" - he who is saviour of the universive and eternal font of all wisdom.

Now Leo the Lamentable, have I got that right?

Answer the questions Leo, why dontcha?

I'll answer for you. You are corrupted by the management "ethos" of an airline that puts greed at the heart of everything it does, and you ARE a manager in that organisation, for sure, and as such greed most likely benefits you directly you simply perpetuate it.

Greed that demands payments off wheelchair passengers for a basic act of common humanity, (provide them with a chair to reach the plane), greed that pushes its pilots so hard that a decent operator nearly goes off the end of a runway with a planeload of YOUR passengers, greed that pushes your SAFETY CRITICAL EMPLOYEES so hard that a man who gets off a flight he is all but forced to take after several sectors already is demoted to send the fear of God into the remainder of the pilot body should they think of going crew fatigue, greed that makes those self same SAFETY CRITICAL EMPLOYEES pay for safety critical evolutions like simulator training, greed that has trainee pilots living off a pittance, greed that has your chief exec living like a king whilst preaching to pilots about how "workshy" they all are. And on and on and Ariston (see numerous previous threads).

And do you know what, Leo? Like any gluttony, it is quite sickening. You are a manager, of that there is no doubt. Take responsibility before the cumulative effect of "the Ryanair way" has consequences you may live to regret.

Take a stand for the good of YOUR pilots and YOUR company and YOUR passengers and THE GOOD of the profession and industry as a whole. Introduce a FTL scheme based on science, not the convenient ways of the IAA, stop having multiple bases and contracts with the simple aim of endlessly playing one group off against another and have one definitive Ryanair pay scale and contract, stop denying your pilots any meaningful representation and negotiate representation with a trade union of the pilots choosing. What have you got to fear from such obvious best practise? By your own admission the company is making money hand over fist. These straightforward acts of decency and safety derived sense would render you perhaps invulnerable as a company in a way that you are not now. Now you are exposed to the serious risk of an incident becoming an accident and there are legions of posters on the Ryanair threads who can elaborate why and how this is so, AND YOU KNOW IT.

Is this why your only response is to trash the character or reputation of any perceived critic and never deal in honest answers? You have a Taliban-esque faith in your invincibility that defies logic and, of itself, speaks of a blinkered and wilfully defiant refusal to even consider that you are running significant risks in managing your operation in the way that you do.

And you Journalists! Get out there and do your job! Research pilot fatigue and its links to air safety, question Ryanair and EVERYBODY else in Europe about it to establish what best practise is, compare the results to Ryan and other operators. Name and shame the recalcitrant.

Leo you are dragging the whole industry into a mire from which the consequences will be the continual erosion of the boundaries that have made air travel the safest form of mass transport. As you "slash cost" by the techniques outlined above, ignoring the real risks that that provokes, the whole industry has to follow suit in a spiral to the lowest common denominator, which is your company's current practices.

You are a professional pilot, you say. Act like one. Make these changes now.

Perhaps Leo is on loan: chief pilot/ops director for Zimbawae/Mugabe airlines. Should he need a future, there awaits one; likely to be very short though if the union under the guise of MDC gets its way. Surely such a country, which suppresses any opposition is a perfect place for Leo to plie his trade. Take all his ill gotten gains and drift off into the bundu. Become king of the castle; big fish in a small pond with no worthy apponents. Sounds ideal for such a puny mind. It would rid the UK of a sour thinking one who, by his own utterances, must aspire to higher than a line pilot. UK airlines are awash with the dross of useless managers. Please do not add one more. Go, I say, Go. We wish you God speed.

Please. Oh please. do not let this deteriorate into Leo bashing; just as it should not be a RYR bashing thread. My comments were trying to keep the focus on the taregt, but I had tears in my eyes.

Well girls, I don't work for FR, but have just had 2 months off to get my annual hours back to JAR limits, and I'm not fatigued.

When I worked for a UK carrier I was always knackered but had very few flying, as opposed to duty, hours.

Flying hours vs duty hours are what count: if I have to do 190 duty hours a month, I would be quite happy to do 120 FLYING hours per month, if I'm not being messed about, if I have a stable roster, and by FLYING 120 per month, the company can plan, and have available standby crews.

What I dislike is the 190 duty hours, 35 flying hours month and being messed about, which is fatiguing: "rest must be planned" say the CAA.

Your opinions???????

So tired.....tired of waiting
 

Slim, whilst there is a certain amount of logic in the whole duty hours vs. flying hours argument, it's not really the point.

900hrs in the 12 previous months is a LIMIT, not a TARGET.

100hrs in 28 consecutive days is a LIMIT, not a TARGET.

However, nobody has to work to the limits in order to feel fatigued; people can easily feel tired in the middle of the day; equally so in the middle of the night. Unfortunately for some, fatigue does not just fall into a neat series of boxes that can be ticked off.

The question is, regardless of how much/how little one flies, should you expose your crew and passengers to your fatigue if you feel it is at an unacceptable level? Trip Switch has quite nicely pointed out the most responsible thing to do is to take yourself off the flight.

Now Slim, is it acceptable to be demoted for making such a decision?

We can all expect Leo to come back and play to the gallery and deride all this "fatuous waffle," but we will all be waiting for the answers to atse's 10 points for a long time yet.

Minuteman asked,

No. The regulations are quite clear.

Are there any issues which we aren't aware of which muddy the waters slightly?

Was the demotion a result of a more complex incident?

Was it a kneejerk reaction?

FR Demoted Captain
 

I know this is being discussed somewhere on this site but I can't seem to find the thread.

The following memo was posted on the Ryanair pilot's internal website yesterday:

To: All Pilots

From: David O'Brien

Date: 28th November, 2005

As many of you may be aware one of our Dublin Captains was recently demoted to Senior First Officer for a six month period following the outcome of a disciplinary investigation. I am aware of much of the uninformed speculation, and false claims being passed off as fact on various anonymous websites, and I feel in the circumstances that you are all entitled to an explanation of the facts in this case which are as follows;

1. The pilot in question was asked to contact Ryanair Operations on a turnaround in Gatwick between his third and fourth sector. He failed/refused to do so.

2. Upon landing in Dublin at the end of his rostered fourth sector, he was asked to do another rotation from Dublin to Newcastle and back, which was well within his FfL's that day. He refused to accept this roster change and volunteered the next inbound crew to operate the flights instead of himself.

3. As a consequence another crew which arrived later into Dublin were asked to undertake this additional rotation and did so, giving rise to a further delay for the passengers travelling on the Dublin-Newcastle flight.

4. No mention was made by this Captain at any time during his duty of tiredness or fatigue or any other reason for his failure to accept this change.

5. It was only when the Captain was requested to fill in a special report after his duty that the issue of tiredness or fatigue was first raised by him.

6. This pilot was completing his fifth rostered day of late duties, which had been preceded by ten days annual leave. In each one of the five days of duty, his report time was after 1200hrs and he had suffered no inordinate or unusual delays.

7. The roster change he was requested to undertake that evening was within his daily, weekly and monthly FfL's.

8. During the previous three months this Captain experienced nine changes to his published roster. Three of these related to the cancellation of planned simulator flying, two related to his being called into fly from standby duty, and two roster changes involved the reduction of duties from six sector to four sector days. Not one of these nine mandatory changes involved an increase in duty time of more than 60 minutes.

In the circumstances, we considered that since the issue of tiredness or fatigue was not raised by the Captain during his duty, that there was in this specific case, no basis for the refusal to accept a schedule change that evening. Furthermore his refusal meant that another later crew had to shoulder the burden of minimising the delays for our customers on the Dublin-Newcastle route. It also seems clear in this case that the issue of tiredness and fatigue was only raised after completion of his duty.

The actions of this Captain could have led to the stranding of over 300 of our paying customers that evening. His refusal to accept a reasonable roster change which was within all of his FTL limits, and in circumstances where he had suffered no other request in the three previous months and where he had just returned from 10 days annual leave, were unreasonable and were grounds for gross misconduct.

We concluded however that whilst this was an error of judgement on his part, it would have been unreasonable to dismiss him from his post. Therefore we decided on the less severe punishment of a temporary demotion, as being preferable in this case to a dismissal.

We can only exist as an airline and a company if everyone of our people continues to place our passengers as our No.1 priority. We cannot operate the stable and advantageous rosters we do unless on those rare occasions when we need a crew to accept a roster change (that is within our rostering and FTL limits) in order to minimise disruption and inconvenience for our passengers, that we receive some co-operation. In this case where a pilot simply refuses a request to contact operations and subsequently refuses to accept a reasonable roster change, then this system of goodwill breaks down.

This will not of course alter our position that any pilot who feels he is genuinely tired or fatigued should of course always inform the company accordingly and absent himself from flying duties, and we will continue to fully support any such decision, as long as it is genuine and reasonable and not - as in this case - something that was raised after the event to retrospectively justify unreasonable behaviour.

Yours sincerely

/2~:--,, avid O'Brien

Director of Flight & Ground Operations

they normaly never care about that

Neil

.............even though the airline management seems to this on a weekly basis!!:confused: :confused:

......sorry we crossed with the same thought.

Quote:

"We can only exist as an airline and a company if everyone of our people continues to place our passengers as our No. 1 priority"


The 150 passengers left stranded at Murcia last week were certainly not Ryanair's No 1 priority.

No scheduling agreement then?

Neither do they seem to care a jot about this group of paying guests, also from last week:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/4477580.stm

I have to say that, after some of the stuff written on this forum about FR, that was a measured and reasonable letter and it wasn't aggressively written either.

Of course, it only tells the company's side of events so,
having said that, it doesn't explain in any depth the Captain's desription of events (apart from tiredness/fatigue), nor does it give details of why he didn't contact Ops in Gatwick.

Ouch! Very naughty Flap40 :E but I do think, as others above do, that David O'Brian has somewhat shot himself in the foot when one considers how often RYR management policy have left their "paying customers" stranded!

Just for the record: by all accounts from Dublin pilots the description of events by Ryanair management in the DOB memo is strongly disputed. It is equally the case that this matter is clearly being handled with particular care by everybody except Ryanair.

This one has a slow burning fuse and if the stories from Dublin are to be believed we can expect developments "in due course".

It does seem a rather balanced piece from FR, all in all. While I've no doubt that the pilot's version differs from FR, I do wonder whether the developments we are led to believe will occur in due course might fizzle rather than bang.

As for comments regarding passengers being number 1, let's not confuse operational "nessecities" (for want of a better word, but I'm sure people will know what I mean!) with corporate desire to stand passengers on a daily basis for the sheer hell of it.

The Capt concerned flies a 200. Therefore how could he have stranded 300 pax 200s only hold 130 pax. Did they want him to do three sectors?

Usual Ryanair lies and spin.