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Life as airline pilot or cabin crew takes flexibility. Operations can be unpredictable and last minute changes to planned working rosters are part of the job.
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Further, we’re talking about highly educated people that feel quite well when changes are caused by external circumstances, thus inevitable, or when they are the result of poor planning.
Roster instability is a pain for airlines. When motivation erodes, there is less flexibility at critical moments and it eventually causes extra fatigue and higher sick leave.
Other negatives are increased delay risks, inefficiencies and higher risk of FDR breaches.
Given all this, it’s unfortunate that many roster changes are self-inflicted. They could be avoided with better planning policies.
Some of these policies stem from unions sometimes pushing for the wrong type of concessions. Others result from crew planners with over-enthusiastic strive for optimisation, where there is nothing more to optimise.
It’s completely reasonable that the sweet and sour of crew rosters are equally divided over the corps and that individual staff can submit requests and preferences.
Most airlines will make a maximum effort for their people to accommodate.
However, the practical implication is that flexibility in the rosters becomes a second priority. Then stand-by duties serve as last fill-up.
As a result, they are shattered throughout the roster. Such closes the door for “clean swaps” in case of sickness or large disruptions: Every event will inevitably cause a cascade of roster changes.
If flexibility is not well planned in a crew roster, it’s instability is ingrained.
Another source of roster instability lays in the way crew planning systems are used.
Crew are a precious resource for airlines and optimising crew efficiency is critical. For that purpose, airlines invest in expensive tools to optimise crew pairings and rosters.
Of course, once the company has invested significantly in a system, it will be used as much as possible. It’s not unusual that after a major disruption or change, the crew rosters are re-optimised, even on a published roster. Generally this results in a string of changes, stirring everyone up.
However, such focus on optimising crew rosters ignores the fact that crew efficiency is determined way before the start of a roster cycle.
Flight crew is not a short-term variable resource; hiring, training and -for most airlines- the schedule have a far longer lead time than the roster cycle.
This means that crew costs are largely fixed far before the roster is made. Last minute optimisation will not reduce them.
Instead, crew efficiency is overwhelmingly determined by long term crew planning; the planned strength of the corps.
This is often an under-powered stage; many airlines determine the numbers with a ballpark estimation based on fleet size.
However, long term planning is when using a roster optimisation system makes most sense, along with solid holiday planning and good grip on other parameters.
Not getting this right brings extra risks to the operational phase.
So it’s wrong when high roster instability is taken for granted.
Complication is that several causes root in good intentions, working out the wrong way.
For unions, it’s important to be open for alternatives to level workloads. It is perfectly possible to ensure fairness while giving crew planners more latitude to produce robust rosters.
Airlines have to rationalize their crew planning process and give more priority to securing stability.
It’s a great way to reduce frictions and save costs at the same time.
