Had someone ask how any changes to flight time and duty time might affect manning requirements. I'm former UAL but haven't heard anything from that end.

Any good info out there on the recent list of proposed changes and the resulting impact? I'm sure they won't go into effect over-night but wondered how they would impact operations as written.

Thanks
Lee

 

Too soon to tell. This one has lots of regulatory hurdles to go through. As I understand it, any changes will be through the FAA regulatory process, not a vote from Congress.

This means a "Notice of Proposed Rule Changes", time for industry leaders to propose amendments, and months (or years) of back-and-forth before anything actually changes.

My prediction on one thing though: it's NOT going to result in a pilot hiring boom. Even if the rule changes are severe and sweeping, at most it would mean a small reduction in capacity to accommodate changes. Airlines are not in a financial position to hire more pilots to cover the same amount of flying.

 

HI!

Congress is mandating that the FAA take certain steps to change Flight/Duty/Rest. It will not take "years". If Congress is unhappy with the FAA's rules, and/or their implementation timeframe, Congress can change them tommorrow, just like they did for the Age 65 rule.

It sounds like the basics for the Flt/Dty/Rest rules have already been worked out, and they are MAJOR changes. At least the regional -121 airlines will have to make MAJOR changes to their schedule and/or pilot manning. Majors, maybe not so much, as they have decent work rules.

cliff
Mafikeng, SA

 

Believe it or not, but airlines (or any company for that matter) do not base their business models around staffing levels. Your opinion is akin to "Gas stations are now required to have two people on duty instead of one. They decide to only be open half the time so they don't have to hire more people". Nonsense. They may require their gas station attendants to work longer hours (that's fewer days off for pilots), pay them less, or *gasp* raise prices in order to cover the increased cost in staffing levels, but they won't cut off supply simply because of the pilots.

Now, there might be a happy medium between "massive hiring" and "no hiring", because the airline might say "it now costs $300 to fly between a and b, and only x amount of people are willing to pay that, so we're going to reduce frequency", but that will only be in a very very few select markets that are teetering on the edge of discontinuance anyway. The cost of a pilot in the overall cost structure is so minuscule, that it would raise the price from $300 to $318 an hour to DOUBLE pilot costs (that means hiring twice as many). A 5% increase in pilot staffing levels across the board would raise that same fare to $300.90.

Do I think that there will be a hiring boom solely due to FT/DT reregulation? No. It will mitigate some furloughs and induce some small scale hiring in places. However, the effects across the industry will certainly be felt. If staffing levels need to be increased by, say 1% across the board, and if we guess that there are 100000 airline jobs out there now, then that's 1000 pilots that either get saved or get hired due to this alone. Combine that with a slowly improving (or not worsening, at least) economy, and those numbers start to look better. Will there be a shortage? Of course not, but hopefully there will be a few people saved from the street.

 

Sounds like what I've read would have a pretty large impact on any domestic op so regional or mainline are equally impacted.

Granted, I have no idea of the true impact. Whether actually being pushed to schedule efficiently would minimize any impact on manning is hard to say. I can tell you that at UAL, much of the impact could be addressed through scheduling changes to comply rather than manpower increases.

Lee