Originally Posted by
sailingfun
Cross country turns will cause no reduction in pilot jobs at Delta. Again pilot jobs are based on block hours. If you can have all your pilots fly 80 hours in 10 days or 80 hours in 16 days the manning required is the same. In fact if you build a lot of turns it tends to make your 3 and 4 day rotations less efficient and can lead to more credit time which increases pilot jobs. Even if allowed it might be the company chooses not to build a lot of turns because of that credit increase. It can be difficult to get a 4 day trip up to the 1 for 3.5 duty rig without a couple of long legs. I once helped try and build better rotations and the key was getting the long legs otherwise credit kicks in.
There will be a reduction in pilots needed on some turns to the Caribbean if we make the contractual changes to allow it. Since we currently require the company to double crew those flights and FAR's only require a relief pilot I am not sure we will change things. If we do it will be more then offset by all the Europe flying going to 3 man crews.
I must have missed something. Hub bank times permitting, management could just schedule the Europe flights to leave on west bound legs between 0700-1259 Home base time and not augment flights less than 9 hours instead of the normal 8. If the schedule change is acceptable to management, then you could actually reduce augmentation needs to/from Europe if the contract permits. This comment isn't airline specific because I don't know every carriers augmentation contract language.
This would also be pretty crappy for Hawaii to mainland flights like HNL-ORD and HNL-ATL if they moved those departures to the 9 hour home base time window. If you were based on the East Coast you could be leaving at either 0200 or 0300 Hawaii Time depending on DST.
In Asia some eastbound legs to the west coast could also possibly lose augmentation in winter time. Example: east coast based pilot could leave Japan at 9pm japan time and fly unaugmented for 9 hours at night to the USA.
It doesnt sound bad unless you have been in Asia for 10-12 days and have fully acclimated to the Japan/Asia timezone. Allowing a 9 hour redeye based on Home base time really doesn't help with fatigue at that point.