Quote:
Originally Posted by Alan Shore
I'm not sure how you get 5-15 minutes per flight here. We're talking about the difference between when we've historically turned the beacon on and when the airplane actually begins to push back, right? I've rarely known that to be more than 1-2 minutes, absent a ramp delay of some sort. Even then, we'll only be losing time if the flight goes over scheduled block, right?
Regarding tow-ins, that counts as flight time as surely as pushback does.
That depends on how they choose to define it. Even if your scenario was the case, that still takes 1-2 minutes of block time off the average flight which is a lot times every flight per day in the system over the course of a year. If they take it up a notch and go for the outdated technical definition that no one uses of "taxis under its own power for the purpose of flight" that could potentially remove the pushback, disconnect, wait to get taxi clearance and the beginning of actual taxi up to the movement trigger (6 knots of forward motion only perhaps?) and that would cost us a lot of jobs and pile on a lot of additional block time pulled from thin air.
Something like that would be devistating to our manning formulas because even if we get "door pay" this is an incredibly dangerous issue that will not only cost us jobs but roll back a large portion of the FAR117 safety gains by playing cheap lawyer tricks way outside the spirit of the new regulations. Yeah, those new block time limits are cute…how about we just tweak the definition of time despite decades of precedence and simply roll some of those gains right back, mmm kay?
If they even attempt something like that we need to disengage and go straight to the Colgan families and make noise about it big time. Even if we don't try to go there, someone will eventually and it could easily trickle down to us, perhaps with our inadvertant blessing as we're counting our door pay money today while ignoring the lost block hours and jobs up the entire stovepipe for our entire careers. Oh and we'll be "flying" more too, it'll just be off the books due to cheap lawyer tricks so perhaps that makes it OK.
This is a huge deal and a potential blunder we can't afford to let happen, much less actively enable it by accident.