I was reading about the Denver Airport closing on Yahoo news. Airline guy says:
“When we get an airplane, we run it 10 hours a day every day,” said Frontier spokesman Joe Hodas. “It’s not like we can decide Dayton’s not important and just pull some planes from there.”
Why can you only run the plane 10 hours a day? Trans-ocean flights exceed this limit as standard procedure. Is this an FAA rule, or just a practical limit, as it there are constraints other than FAA rules and physical equipment limits that limit flight time to around 10 hours in 24?
I think the 10 hours is a minimum not a maximum. Although I still don’t completely understand what the guy was saying. A maximum limit would come about because of the need to refuel and do whatever routine maintenance is necessary, plus at least a little bit of time just sitting on the tarmac waiting.
I don’t know the specific regulations for the FAA but a pilot can only be on duty for a certain period of time. The longer you fly for, the more likely it is that you’ll get fatigued and start making mistakes. On long haul flights you have more than one crew so the duties can be shared and each crew gets some dedicated rest during the flight. On short haul there is just the one crew so they are more limited.
You can also roster the crews in such a way that the aircraft does more than one stint each day with a second crew taking over.
In the context of the quote though, I think he was probably talking about having to fly the aircraft a minimum amount just to pay the bills. They can’t afford to have aircraft parked up against the fence for any length of time.
I’m not sure what the max flight hours are for Long Haul, probably a bit over 13 hours. I don’t think a 747 normally carries a spare cockpit crew - perhaps a Long Haul pilot/cabin crew person will pop up.
Every minute an aircraft is on the ground, it is wasting money.
I certainly know that short haul operators like to keep the aircraft in the air.
I think he’s trying to say that every plane in their fleet is already running a full load of trips every day, but saying that’s only 10 hours a day does seem odd.
Maybe we just figured out why the airlines are losing money.
Former major airline pilot here - the article is crap, the guy’s comment so far out of context as to be meaningless.
What the guy meant to say is there aren’t lots of extra airplanes & crews just siitting around that can be deployed to cover for major operational disruptions.
The details of FAA regulations on minimum & maximum allowable pilot tasking per day, week, month & year are mind boggling. Anyone not steeped in it who attempts to explain it here will just be dropping factoids out of context, meaningless even though perhaps sentence-and-paragraph verbatim from the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). The entire regulation set comes in several overlapping flavors for various types of airlines & domestic versus international operatons. This stuff makes the IRS rules on Tax-Deferred Charitable Remainder Generation Skipping Trusts look easy.
There are also conceptually similar FAA regs governing Flight Attendants. But all the details differ from the rules for pilots.
Then there are regulations governing periodic maintenance of aircraft.
The sum of all of which is that re-planning a disrupted airline without falling afoul of any of the regulatory wickets is a very hard problem.
If there are Unons involved, then there are also union rules for piltos, F/As, & ground crew of all sorts that may further complexify the problem.
So, if we have plenty of crews to rotate, how long can we fly, say, Denver to Chicago and back without pulling the plane for maintenance, beyond the once over I assume it gets while refueling?
They normally carry an extra pilot. Most modern airliners are designed to be flown by two pilots only, however most countries regulations stipulate that at least a third pilot be carried for long haul flights.
In our company we may do 12 hours duty with a normal two pilot crew, and I think it’s up to 15 hours if we carry an extra captain. We don’t do long haul passenger flying, the allowance in our operations manual is for when we do long international ferry flights.
We fly a medium sized turbo prop which gets a line check every 50 hours. This gets done overnight and doesn’t require us dropping a days flying. I don’t know if jet airliners get maintenance that often.