Originally Posted by
South London Bon Viveur
I often wondered why at some outstations on SH you would get a new crew boarding a flight just arrived from London, for example a 14:00 departure from Vienna or Zurich? I always assumed that the only crew staying the night would be those from the night stopper, and that they would then take the same ac back to Heathrow the next morning, but it seems that that is not the case (maybe to do with minimum rest periods?). Therefore presumably at some stations there will be two sets of BA crew staying the night? It seems that the rostering is a rather more complex thing that one might at first glance expect.....am interested to hear the inside track.
Yes it's to do with minimum rest and the sort of schedule you want to run. So LHR-NCL there is usually a late service departing around 20:30, arriving into Newcastle around 22:00 hrs. Next day there is a service departing NCL-LHR at 06:50 and that's clearly too early for the crew that arrived last night, perhaps late due to the rotational delays that built up during the day. So if you want a location to offer an early service to LHR and also you want to offer an evening service from London to that location, it's not unusual to have 2 crews overnight. One gets (for me) the rough end of the stick with the early departure, the other swaps an early afternoon service (and thus gets a few hours spare in the morning). You can tell in the schedule if the turnaround time is about 10 minutes longer than usual turnaround times - that indicates a crew swap.