low cost carrier pressures
 

Having been out of the flight deck for 11 years and now retired I watched the UK channel 4 documentary which implies that low cost carriers cut corners when it comes to flight crew hours. I find this difficult to accept from my personal knowledge of the industry and experience from talking to colleagues still flying. I am curious as to what thoughts current flight deck crew have on this matter, especially those on short haul european routes.

Said documentary added nothing to the debate and was so vacuous it was difficult to watch. But I'll give you one example, pilots maximum regulated hours being used not as a maximum but a target. You don't run your car at red line all year why do airlines do it with their crew? Well I think we all know the answer to that.

Wizz Air even included this practice in their IPO Brochure, boasting of how high an extent crew were utilised as a percentage of their maximum flight hours. In this poster's opinion this is nothing to be boasting about, just screams cowboy operation all over.

The log
 

Balpa has an article in the Log on page 36. 'safety in numbers' It discusses a single pilot operation on LH when in the cruise, enabling pilots to have a rest for hours. The agencies are a consortium of 35 aerospace partners and 12 European countries who are considering you only need 2 pilots and 4 sets of eyes for T/O and landings! The cost savings to an LH operator are in the millions.

DO AIRLINES NEVER LEARN!!!!?
Conclusions to be completed by June 2016.

The problem is that the regulators are not regulating, they are bowing to the airlines. The only measure to deem acceptable regulations seems to be hull loss. They're not crashing so everything's ok!

Not only that D&F, another issue is that if an aircraft crashes, the 'regulators' (i.e. facilitators) and airlines walk away from it without any blame, or perhaps only get some vague recommendations from the crash investigation teams.

The real blame will be quickly placed upon the pilot(s), because my dear colleagues, that's what we've become: cheap scapegoats. :=

Hip hip hurraaaay for the P4T/P2F pilot who flies with the least amount of fuel and the least amount of rest, because theoretically he can always uplift more or call in fatigued, right? :ugh:

Macdo
 

Just out of interest, which UK legacy carrier cut travel benefits 50%, and how did they go about it?

Annual entitlement reduction, or reduction in eligible carriers, or reduction in companions/family members?