Originally Posted by
northwesterner
Absolutely brutal.
They literally need to be pairing off legal Captains with F/Os, finding them 3 F/As, giving them a 73G for the day and handing them a schedule to fly.
No complexity. No splitting crews. No moving from this plane to that plane at PHX. We have a legal crew with a legal plane and they're going to stick together all day.
And they should get on the phone to Atlas and see if they can charter a few 747s. Don't worry about assigned seats. Just fly focus city to focus city and get these people moving.
Except pilots and flight attendants have different contracts and different legalities. So if they flew from point A to B to C and now one group goes illegal, that ends the day for both groups in city C. And say city C is not a city in which that the airline has a hotel contract. Crews layover in specific cities where hotel contracts have been negotiated. It can take hours for hotel rooms to be approved in a city without a hotel contract. And if city C is not a base for pilots and/or flight attendants, then that airplane is now stuck until both groups get hotels authorized, transportation set up, legal crew rest and are available to fly again. And there could be a further problem that some of the crew were only legal for one day and are stuck overnight in city C. Or are only legal for 2 days and must return to city A. And I can come up with multiple other problems with your solution. This is why crew schedulers exist. They track crew legalities. And why crews contact crew scheduling with any irregular operation.