I ask partly because it’s Sunday and it may be a diverting discussion and partly because on my flight just now to Geneva (BA 728), there were six working.

I’ve never seen this many on this type of aircraft. I asked the crew and they didn’t know why, only that it was a high yielding route. The service was very good!

Anyhow , any thoughts on whether this is usual, and what’s the most you’ve seen working on a short haul route?

I believe the minimum is 4 and depending on the CE load up to 6 if there are more than 45.

There are 6 cabin jumpseats and one in the flight deck on a 320. So that’s 7. However, if the crew complement goes above this number then cabin seats will be used (not that this happens in the day-to-day operation).
I believe the company are playing around with crewing levels this summer on high take up BOB flights to see what works. I came back from one of these destinations the other week with about 50 pax and 6 crew.

The flight was packed , with 12 rows of CE.

Interesting . That’s what the question was getting at! Whether this was a one off or a move to more dynamic crewing levels (or maybe there are already here and I didn’t notice - I’ve barely taken any SH in Europe for the last year).

Presumably one issue is that there can be a markedly different load in each direction.

It would be crewed to the highest CE load so you the return could be empty but if the outbound had 45 or more in CE there would be 6 crew rostered.

thank you.

I had a LHR/OTP flight that was fairly lightly loaded in CE. However, there appeared to be 5 CC. One seemed inexperienced and was probably still in training. There was another CC sat in CE throughout the flight. At the end of the flight, chatting to the CSM, explained that they were extra for the morning flight due to CE loads taking it up to 6 CC.

Basically it depends. If it’s a location where we simply do there and backs (e.g PMI) the both rotations will be crewed with six crew. If it’s a station where crew nightstop, then chances are it’ll be correctly crewed for that individual flight. If crew nightstop, they don’t necessarily return the next day with the same crew. For example, 6 go out on the morning flight to VIE on a 320 as it’s busy. They all get off in VIE. 4 of them leave on the early flight home the next day as it’s a quiet 320. 2 come home on the evening flight with another 4 crew that came out separately as it’s a busy 320, or a 321 which requires more crew for example.

Crew will rarely (although it can be done as part of a split duty) take a flight out in the morning and come home in the evening. Short haul scheduling is relatively complex, I can barely get my head around it.