CREW PAIRING
Stages of Crew Pairing
First Stage:
This method of crew pairing allocates different regions (i.e. airport) to different team members for crew pairing. The disadvantage of this method is that the start and end points of each route contains two airports, so it is difficult to establish a separate crew pairing. Hence, it is difficult to know whether a route is classified as Airport A or Airport B. This will bring difficulty to the crew pairing by making it hard to find efficient pairing.
Second Stage:
This program is to give all the crew members 4 different aircraft, and then doing crew pairing. There is no problem when this scheme is implemented, because this scheme clearly distinguishes the planning area of ​​each group member. But it is found later that because A1(aircraft number) has a very long block hour, to improve efficiency, it is necessary to borrow A10 with a short block hour. Route aircraft to make up for the vacancies. This requires the coordination from different individual team members, which brings a burden to communication and management.
Third Stage:
Based on previous experience, this time we first arranged the crew pairing, according to the airline's duty time, flight time and vacation regulations. Under the premise of complying with these rules, our group made an efficient crew pairing and made a crew based on it. However, in this process, one of the drawbacks were that, it was not efficient to use the duty time of the pilots for the cabin crew. If a set of cabin crew and pilot are bound together, the block time of the pilot is relatively short compared to the crew. Therefore, the crew is not able to work efficiently, because the crew will rest with the pilot, but their remaining duty time will be unfulfilled (i.e. the crew are resting more than they require to).
Fourth Stage:
This time, the program was very successful and efficient. Our group separated the crew from the pilot. We utilized the longer crew duty time for the cabin crew (separating their duty times from the pilot). This gave us the advantage of being able to serve more pilots. We enabled the crew to go to different aircrafts for service on the same day to seek maximum efficiency and minimise costs. Meanwhile, the number of crew groups will be less than the pilot group. After that, we create the crew roster and pilot roster, according to crew pairing and pilot pairing.
Layovers, Extended Duty Time and Switching Aircraft
Number of layovers required for our pilots and crew is 3 (out of our 50+ pairings for pilots), which is kept to a minimum (considering that most of our pairings are day-trips from Jakarta and back. This is done specifically to reduce the chances of touching the legal limit of duty hours (14 hours) and stick hours (9 hours)
KT6421-KT6422 (CGK-DJJ)
This flight has a longer than normal block time (5 hours 30 minutes) hence the return trip has to be crewed with a “fresh crew”. The time difference between West Papua and Java also makes a slight impact on the scheduling/ crewing decision.
KT6301-KT6302-KT6303 (CGK-SOQ-DJJ)
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These trips are mostly longer haul flights to more remote areas of the country, for example like West Papua. The crewing costs of having a sit time there in outport outweighs the benefits of fitting them into a single roster, because there are no other aircraft coming in that outports that could be swapped (take-over) the equipment from Jakarta.
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Layover costs: Hotels for 2 pilots and cabin crew (if needed) for personnel
Layover costs for Holding the aircraft at outport = holding the equipment for 45 mins+30 mins+4 hours of hotel rest
Because our airline does not have the luxury of laying our equipment in West Papua for that long, we have instead schedule for a layover for our crew. Unfortunately, our airline does not have any provision for late-night flying (because it will disrupt our normal roster), a compensation for the irregular circadian rhythm in terms of rest hours is required for flight safety/ fatigue avoidance reasons.
Extended Duty Time, however, is used in other situations when the crew could take rest in our base in Jakarta. In this case, the equipment will still be utilised in the day without laying over on the tarmac to waste capital costs. The crew will then take over another pair of sectors that fits their flight duty time and block time limitations in the rest of their tour of duty.
Examples include : PP16A, PP48, PP49A.
Aircraft swapping for pilots
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This manoeuvre is frequently used in our rostering because of the great gap between the block time is relatively higher than other countries’ rules. Out of our 54 pairings for pilots, we have about 13 pairings that require a change of aircraft. The maximum change of aircraft is only 2 because it takes time and other requirements (such as preparing the aircraft, external walk-around and document checks) to get the pilots to familiarise with their aircraft.
CREW ROSTERING
Kita Air’s crew roster was designed to maximise the crew’s productivity without violating regulations, providing flexibility with an optimal balance between days ‘Off’ and ‘Blank’ days, and to absorb any disruptions. Kita Air employs a staggered roster- in each 28 day period, all crews are rostered for duty for each pairing by alternating on the days of the week in which the pairing operates, hence every pairing is covered for every day it operates in the week. The roster also achieves a balance between days off and blank days without over rostering for days off. Below is an example of a staggered roster Kita Air employs.
Features of the crew roster:
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Over time all crews alternate in total hours monthly resulting in balanced hours annually
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The roster design functions like a cycle- over time each and every crew will have performed the same pairings, and days over an annual period.
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Reserves/Standbys are staggered therefore 3 reserves are available each day and every day in every 28 day period.
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Cabin crew rostered in triples per regulation
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Pairings are designed so they form a bundle of flights with similar total hours across 28 day roster periods.
