Originally Posted by
vagabond
One thing has always nagged me about the crew rest issue. It's easy to say that 8 hours of flying has been reached and therefore the crew gets a 16 hour rest, but this implies that waiting around for the airport van, checking in at the hotel, etc are included in the 16 hours. I do not believe that is what the law intended.
I suspect the rule made some assumptions about the quality of hotel accomodations and ground transport available to crews back in the day.
I think the current rest mins are probably OK, but need to be adjusted so that rest begins when the crew has access to their room (ie they have key in hand) and ends when you report for ground transport in the hotel lobby. I would probably also get rid of eight-hour reduced...no less than nine.
The airlines would then build in an extra 10-45 minutes on each end of the day, whatever is appropriate for the distance and responsiveness of the hotel. If delays exceeded the allotted time on a reduced overnight, the crew would call and inform their schedulers of the need to push the showtime.
This would not affect the vast majority of existing schedules, but would save the occasional crew from working eight hours, having van/hotels issues, getting four hours actual sleep, and then coming back for more...