Reserve and standby
 

Just a question relating to the recent disruption: can anyone give me an idea of how much of the pilot force of their airline is typically on reserve or standby, or how much of a roster that would typically be? An indication of the type of airline would help as well. Asking because I have a gut feeling that it is a lot less htan it used to be years ago, but I don't know if that's true.

For your typical A320, B737 operation, the minimum number of Captains and First Officers per aircraft is 5 each, so that's 10 pilots

1 CPT / 1 FO flying it right now
1 CPT / 1 FO just having flown it
1 CPT / 1 FO who will fly it next
1 CPT / 1 FO who are on standby
1 CPT / 1 FO on annual leave (and therefore you might be able to offer them overtime)

As you guessed, the reality is something else. Many airlines are trying their luck with 3 or 4 CPTs / FOs per aircraft. Worse, some have outsourced 20% of their operation to wet lease partners who don't even have 3 or 4 CPTs / FOs per aircraft. I left such a company who cancelled 3 flights on behalf of their "customer" airline in a week because I called sick. Some airlines (1) with economies of scale on their side can absorb compensation claims and would rather pay that than hire more crews because that's a longer term burden in case they need to downsize in a hurry. Smaller airlines (2) can't hire afford to hire more crews given the price most people pay these days for a flight. They can't raise those prices because of (1). The economics of the airline industry are broken.

How much of the pilot workforce is on what?

There are plenty of airlines these days which operate without standby or reserve crews. If need be, they either try to get hold of someone who's off right now or cancel the flight.

And no one who has their normal off days or is sick. With realistic roster generations and high density operation i would argue you need more than 5 crews per aircraft. I would consider that the absolute minimum and rosters will be quite unstable, for a stable roster you need more like 6 to 7 crews. Less in low density ops.

My airline has so called reserve blocks around our fixed pattern. However it’s no longer a month of standby reserve, it’s just a month of variable roster instead

Something I’ve always wondered is how pilots who commute manage standby?

E.g. I’ve heard of LHR-based pilots living in Scotland. Do they just go down to hang around LHR on their standby days?

Or they sit in a service station on a motorway for a few hours

Quote:

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Something I’ve always wondered is how pilots who commute manage standby?

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We had a system of Reserve months during which trips and /or standby blocks (standby= 2 hours notice of a trip) could be assigned the evening before the duty.

As a long range commuter unless you were somewhere with lots of daily flights into London you pretty much had to live at the airport for the reserve block (and hope for work), during a block of hours on standby you certainly had to be very adjacent.

The B&Bs that allowed short notice bookings/cancellations did a fair bit of trade….

With my employer, we have two types of Standby, one allows 2 hours to report from being called and the other Standby allows 30 minutes to report from call out. The 2 hour one is obviously much easier for commutes, the later is more challenging to meet, so people tend to either live very close by, or carry out the duty in the vicinity of the crew room.

Thanks for the comments. I asked because there was a piece by Rhymer Rigby in the Times business section on Saturday that I responded to. The piece was actually about what a pain the hyper-complicated fares system is now, compared with some other businesses where there's one price that covers everything you actually need, and making meanigful compariusons of value impossible.

- see below if interested. It got several "recommends" for what that's worth - which is not a lot!
"Rhymer, writing as a now retired airline pilot I fully agree with your piece today. However you missed the fundamental cause of this price fragmentation, which has incidentally led to the problems on the front pages all week - the transfer of "cost of disruption" from “supplier” to “customer” after “low-cost” airlines arrived 25 years ago with a new business model.

Airlines sell a highly perishable product - moving seats to destinations – but have ZERO control over many factors affecting its production - air traffic control, complex machinery, weather, security, strikes in ancillary services for example. The airline “production line” is exceptionally vulnerable to disruption which can and should be expected in general terms, but is impossible to predict precisely. We know it will be foggy at Heathrow in November, but we don’t know what date and time. We can expect a major aircraft system to break down once in 2000 hours, but not which aircraft and at what airport.

Previously airlines assumed they had an obligation to complete the paid-for transportation using their own resources, such as reserve aircraft and crews, and employing their own staff around their networks. This cost a lot of money, which was reflected in high fares about which people complained. But it did spread the cost of dealing with disruption that affected a very small minority of passengers across all of them.

“Low fares” were initially achieved by dumping the cost of disruption onto the specific passengers affected because the airline chose not to have those reserves. In the “full service” model, an aircraft unserviceable away from base might have been dealt with by a standby aircraft and crew, dispatched to pick up passengers who would have been automatically accommodated at airline expense in hotels organised by the airline’s local staff. The low-cost model simply cancels the flight and abandons passengers to solve the problem by their own resources and “claim compensation” if they can.

This major cost (and headline price reduction) was then amplified by outsourcing as much as possible to the lowest-cost suppliers, which themselves apply the same principles, and squeezing the maximum out of every employee and every bit of equipment every day. Loss of market share due to price competition then drove “full service” airlines into trying (less successfully because of legacy systems and working methods) to lower their costs in exactly the same way. Foreseeable disruption occurs, but airlines now have no capability to deal with it apart from cancellations. Consequently while the vast majority of passengers’ experience adequate “low” price service, but a small minority have a totally unacceptable one with financial losses and enormous emotional distress from being “cheated” by an entire industry, as well as being driven to fury by the complex pricing you describe."