Flight time restriction: need clarification/informal poll
 

This is from ALPA: if the crewmember is scheduled to fly eight hours or less but due to circumstances beyond the control of the certificate holder the schedule is exceeded, the crewmember may complete the schedule even if the pilot flies more than eight hours between rest periods.

But what's a schedule? The entire day, or the next leg?

Let's say you have a day trip:

PHL-CVG-PHL-CVG-PHL-SYR-PHL

It's SCHEDULED at 7.8 hours.

After some delays, you find yourself in SYR already at 7.2 hours. You're not going to make it to PHL without going over 8 hours. Can you go?

How would your company interpret this?

What if you're in SYR at 8.1hrs?

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I'm sure this has been discussed before, but we could use a refresher, and I"m interested how other carriers and their respective FSDO's interpret it all.

a day is legal to start, legal to finish. you can do that last leg. the exception to this for a day is witlow

what he said. If you are legal to start your duty period, (scheduled 8 hours or less between rest periods) you can fly any amount of block hours (up to your duty period limit) so long as there had been no change in your city pairings.

If I remember correctly, Whitlow was for duty time limitation only, isn't it?

I know, an extreme example;

Say a 16 hour duty day is scheduled, start duty at 6am, scheduled block in from the last leg is 21:45 p, 15 min debrief for a 22:00 duty off.

Now say that last leg is delayed for whatever reason and now your duty day with the scheduled block time for that last leg and the 15 min debrief will exceed 16 hrs. You are not even legal to start that leg since you will be exceeding the FAR 16 hour duty day, correct?

If not, please refresh my memory as to what exactly the Whitlow interpretation entailed, thanks.

I concur. Legal to start legal to finish. If you are scheduled less than eight to start the day you are ok if little delays put you over. if they REschedule you then you "restart" and they again would have to make you legal to start a reschedule.

Yes, the 8 hours is legal to start legal to finish for the day ... now if something happens and they change your schedule they must make it within 8 hours again, but as long as it's within 8 hours when you start, you can finish it regardless ... now if you hit 16 hours in one day ... well you cannot exceed 16 hours ... so if you're sitting on the ground with one leg left and you're at 15.5 hours, unless you're going 10mi away, you'd better get a hotel :)

correct. furthermore, it applies to both block and flight time. You may not push past the time that a push from the gate plus the block time plus your duty off time, would put you over 16 hrs of duty. You may not takeoff if the expected flight time plus taxi time plus duty off time puts you over a 16 hr duty day. however, legal to start the flight, legal to end it (say you got delayed in the air).

It's also probably in your FOM under "interpretation of policy" or something similar, chapter 3 or 4 I believe.

I agree with the above comments, to put it simply:

Legal to start, legal to finish. You can do your schedule, however long it takes, as long as nothing changes (city pair, trip number etc)

--->HOWEVER<---

At 16 hours duty you turn into a pumpkin.

I always thought legal to start legal to finish a 8 hr flight day but a Capt here has a email from our POI saying that's not true and saying that it's exactly like the 16 hr rule so that has caused a lot of confusion at our base I got clarity from our director of ops who said legal to start legal to finish but people still don't believe it so I dunno