ROSTERING
Considerations
Reserve on-board crew
When reviewing over our schedule, we have considered this is a must for sectors that have daily or less frequency during the week. As in the case of crew being ill oversea, this is a great solution during delay recovery process. This allow the set of crew/aircraft continue operate as normal without having to delaying the next inbounding service to recover from the situation, furthermore, this provide flexibility in the case of emergency. On the downside, this would increase the cost of each pairings as there would be an additional crew on-board that is not performing any work duty. Another solution of this could be setting up a separate crew-base oversea. However, in our view, would be uneconomical for our airline.
Minimising overnight stays for crew
If the selected pairings had one or more pairs that had overnight stopovers, we would have tried to further optimise by tweaking the timetable to bring our crew back to the Homebase each day. However, in our case, most of our pairings have exceeded the maximum daily hours for both crew and pilot if we were to return on the same day. As such it is not possible to further optimise in terms of costs minimisation or crew utilisation hours. Therefore, we have balanced out the cost effectiveness by allowing majority of the pairings to stay overnight instead of having a spare set of crews on-board to extend the daily hour limits.
Maximising Crew Duty Hours vs Optimising Crew Duty Hours
Besides balancing the crew workload, we had tried to maximise crew duty periods each day while meeting our given constraints. This, in our view, would give the most productive roster possible. When we factor in the monthly/annual maximum hours’ constraints (which we have set our own constraint in the EBA), this have required us to add in a few additional roster lines to reduce the monthly duty hours of each crew.
This would yield a more optimal roster in terms of working hours, as compared to one that simply maximised productivity. This would bring the daily duty hour to a more desirable level for our crew in the long run.