Company Rostering Policies
 

Is there any UK airline (apart from the one that I work for!) where it is company policy for days off to finish on lates and start on earlies. E.g. off duty at 10.30pm on Sunday and back on duty at 6.30am on Wednesday.

If your duty week are earlies then expect the day before the day off to be a late so as to accommodate this company policy.

2 periods of three days off are supposed to be assigned in a rolling 2 month pattern - but if you have leave then it is counted as being part of that.

Just looking for any parallels in a substantial airline in the UK.

Don't know which one you work for, but I've worked for three, two of which were "substantial" and they all did it.

Starting on earlies finishing on lates is the easiest way to make a roster work as you can do 3 earlies then onto lates whilst complying with CAP371, but you can't do lates to earlies without a short duty in the middle which would probably require more crew per aircraft to make it work.

That's for multi sector shorthaul, don't know about charter/longhaul.

The problem is that unless seperated by non flying days one cannot go from lates to earlies, from my experiences as a previous crewing manager it would be nice to start duty cycles with lates, or middles, but often not possible.

10 years ago at Jersey European on the mighty F27 I seem to recall a period when we did 2 lates, sby, 2 earlies...which was quite nice. Then more routes opened and we were short of pilots again so it didn't last long.

Try Ryanair, the one everyone loves to bash - 5 earlies, 4 days off, 5 lates, 4 days off. Set in stone.

who wrote CAP371??
 

i view it as obvious that the one who wrote CAP371 knew they were not going to have to do it.

the 5 earlies and 5 lates actually work out quite well.

i would personally enjoy all earlies and it wouldn't matter how early either. in anchorage, flying twin otters, i told crewing that i would do all the super earlies and it worked for quite a while because NO ONE wanted them. a 0500 local takeoff!!!

after the director of operations came in and saw that someone actually was getting something they wanted-he stopped it!!!

some people enjoy being bastards---i am convinced he did.

There ain't a lot of point in rostering a standby between lates and earlies because an operator can't use the standby for very much without changing the earlies thereafter which will impact upon changing other pilots rosters also.

"The problem is that unless seperated by non flying days one cannot go from lates to earlies"

Though does happen.

Floppy Link - those were the days eh? 'twas very civilised back then.