Originally Posted by
John Carr
Possibly. But the way that 117 has affected regional airlines in the amount of flying done. Granted, NOT ALL, but some.
Meaning, "timing out" at the end of the year is more difficult nowadays.
It's more related to staffing issues, especially at RAH. It's been happening for a while with RAH/DelCon flying.
You can actually time out at any time of the year since it is a 365 day lookback now with no reset.
If you think about it, that is only 83hour/month to hit 1000. As the regionals struggle to staff, they raise their minimum line values up to 95 hours/month. Since we are almost into 2 years since 117 started, you can expect to see 1000/365 issues popping up every day and getting progressively worse as the regionals force their pilots to fly more and more months at the maximum.
With the 100 hour lookback done in 28 days instead of a calendar month, you could see pilots timing out within 9 months. A regional may think it is solving its issues by raising their minimum line value, but it may actually be coming back to bite them as they get a rolling situation where some of their pilots get block hour limited to 50 hours/month or less on a increasing basis.