Strike strain may ground more FlySafair flights next week

Budget airline FlySafair may have to cancel flights next week as pilots operating the carrier’s vastly reduced schedule may run out of legally admissible flying time.

“Before now, nobody expected the strike to continue through the week,” the pilots said. “Now after management’s overreaction to an initial one-day strike for Monday passed.

“Management scored an own goal and responded by locking us out for 7 days instead. Then the strike was extended to 14 days in response to that, until 3 August. So by Monday, 29 July, many of the crew operating flights could be close to reaching their flying limit. That means, the planes get parked,” the pilots said.

FlySafair pilots warn they are close to reaching legal flying limits

“We’re bound by flight and duty time regulations designed to prevent fatigue. They’re not optional. If we exceed them, we’re grounded. Full stop.”

Under SA regulations, pilots may only fly 40 hours in any seven consecutive days and cannot exceed 60 hours of duty in the same period.

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Monthly caps limit flight time to 100 hours in 30 days and duty time to 190 hours in 28 days.

Annual limits are also in place. The rules also require rest that includes a full “local night”, defined as eight hours between 10pm and 8am, for safety and fatigue reasons.

By last Sunday, most pilots had already logged close to 60 flight hours for the month which would be perfectly normal for a regular roster.

Only one-third of workforce remained when strike began

But when the strike began on the 21st, only one-third of the pilot workforce remained in operation while the airline attempted to operate two-thirds of its normal schedule.

“That effectively doubled our workload overnight,” the pilots said. “You can’t legally stretch one-third of the pilots to cover two-thirds of the schedule. It doesn’t take long before you’re either out of legal hours, or you need mandatory rest.”

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Even if those remaining pilots had started the week with zero hours, they said, the legal limits would have hit fast.

Flying at near maximum daily utilisation, which is about seven to eight hours a day, pilots reach the 40-hour weekly limit within five days.

The 60-hour duty limit is even tighter, especially if delays extend duty days or crews are stuck waiting between flights.

60-hour limits is tight

“Add a delay or long turnaround and you hit your duty time limit even sooner. By this weekend, most of us still flying will be legally unavailable. Even if you still have hours left on paper, you can’t operate without a proper local night’s rest, and that’s another hard stop that the law requires.”

Despite several attempts to gain clarity on the risks, Fly Safair’s media office and marketing manager Kirby Gordon did not respond to queries and subsequent reminders to revert to The Citizen.

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