Duty time: Rest overnight

Cherokee_Cruiser

Cherokee_Cruiser

Bronteroc
When on an layover for a Part 121 air carrier, is it true that pilots are alloted a minimum of 8 hours rest from flight arrival time to the next flight departure time?

If so, there's an example of a DFW-CLE flight that arrives at 11:15 PM, but turns around back to DFW at 6:56 AM, which is less than 8 hours.
 
Wait a minute, going below 8 hours isn't safe! How many CDL can you do consecutively? I bet airlines would love to have CDLs every night for pilots. Any FAA limits on this?
 
You're on duty the whole time. You get the rest of the day off.

i.e. you sign in at 6pm and you are released at 730am, so that's just 13.5 hours of duty - completely legal.

In fact you can do 3 or 4 of those in a row, though I have never seen more than 2.
 
well, a CDL isn't really a layover. Consider it flying into an airport at midnight, staying on duty (in a hotel room) until a 0600 depature the next morning and then getting to a "real" layover within the FAA legal rest limits.

Don't ever confuse "legal" with "safety" in the airline business!
 
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well, a CDL isn't really a layover. Consider it flying into an airport at midnight, staying on duty (in a hotel room) until a 0600 depature the next morning and then getting to a "real" layover within the FAA legal rest limits.


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So the little time you have in between midnight to 6 AM, you couldn't even get a 3 hour nap?
 
I had a flight where we'd check in say around 9pm at Skyway, fly MKE to MQT, get in about 11:30 or so, then fly out from MQT to MKE at 0600, and then do a MDW turn.

Sometimes I'd stay up, other times I'd get a couple of hours of sleep.
 
Who says it is the same crew that works the flight in at night and out in the morning?? There could be a crew that got in at noon the day before that does the early flight out, the guys that get in late at night may go out the next day at 5 pm. Just because you bring it in does not mean you are going to take it out.
 
At Eagle we had entire bid lines of CDLs, or as we called them, Stand-Ups. You'd do usually 4 in a row, then have 3 days off.

Personally I hated them, but a lot of people, especially the Moms who lived local would bid them so they could spend more time with their kids, but still technically have a 'full' month. Though you'd only actually fly about 30-35 hours a month, you still got paid for 70, because that's what the monthly guarantee was.
 
Doug/Amber,

On your bid packages, can you clearly see those lines that are CDLs ??? Also, I know what regular and reserve lines are. What about relief lines ? What are those?
 
It was really obvious which lines were standups, they were the lines with the evening showtimes & early morning finishes. Also where it shows what the line is worth, they were the lines that were only worth around 30-35 hours.

As for relief lines, in the bid pack these lines showed up as lines at the very end of the bid pack, and had no set days off and no set value. You bid these lines last (usually) because you are bidding blind. A relief line is better than reserve, but you don't know what you're going to get. After the bids are final, your relief line is then constructed out of trips from people's vacations and various other trips that came open for whatever reason. You can send messages to crew planning before your relief line is finalized asking for specific days off, if they're in a good mood they might give them to you. It can be a pretty sweet deal, some guys have gotten good trips that way, but again, you're bidding blind not knowing what you'll get. But it is better than reserve!

The only time I ever bid a relief line was when I was a very junior line holder and I needed a weekend off to be in my brothers wedding. I sent a very pleading message to crew planning telling them why I'd bid relief & to do anything they wanted to me for the rest of the month but to please please pretty please give me the one weekend I needed off. I got the weekend off, but damn the rest of the month sucked!
 
Some of the FAA's defnitions of a full night or day's rest seem like disasters waiting to happen. I hate to sound morbid here, but accidents do happen, and I almost hope that the cause of a future air crash is related to crew fatigue so that it is examined. (Again, I'm not hoping for a plane crash. Nobody likes that, but it'd be a more meaningful thing to investigate than simply flying into extreme weather, etc.).
 
Thinking about it a little more, there's at least one plane crash in the past decade that I can think of that seemed to be partially caused by fatigue and that was the American MD-80 that skidded off of the runway at Little Rock, AR. They were at the end of the last leg of a long day, and, from what I've read, seemed to have a "let's just get there" mentality.

I'm not blaming the crew; perhaps they would have been more patient if they had't been working for so long continuously.

Can anyone think of other accidents caused at least partially by fatigue?
 
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