… and then decide to do nothing about flight crew work and rest time regulations. It is tough to know whether to be glad that businesses won’t have to spend money figuring out how to comply with these new rules or sad that tax dollars have been paying government workers to sit in meeting rooms for 17 years to no purpose.
More: aero-news.net.
Actually that sounds pretty typical for government workers, I’m sorry to say.
I don’t really know if this has anything to do with the 17 years of inaction, but 15 years ago in an Industrial Engineering college course (please don’t say “imaginary engineering”, even if that’s what you’re thinking) we built a model for the optimization of airline flight crew schedules, and these regulations were the major constraint. You could theoretically save a lot of money if you didn’t need to get the crews back to their hometowns as frequently, or if they didn’t need as much rest in between flights. Aside from fuel, the crew was the next higher factor in the cost of flights, and since fuel is kind of a given regardless of the scheduling, the labor restrictions for the crew were primary drivers for the optimal scheduling solution. I could just imagine that changing these regulations would have a lot of ramifications, so that could explain why it’s taken so long.
Or, it could just be typical government efficiency.
Ben: There is no current FAA regulation requiring an airline to get its crews back to their hometowns. An airline could legally keep a pilot or flight attendant living out of hotels 365 nights per year for his or her entire employment period. There are flight time and rest requirements that must be met, but those could be met without an employee ever going back to the same city. If an airline makes an effort to get a crew back to its home base it would be due to a union agreement, an effort to save on hotel expense, or an attempt to make the job more desirable and therefore save on salary offered.