Is it at all possible to measure how effective regulatory rules are? Such as the rules governing work and rest time for pilots coming from EASA, FAA and the CAAC?
Join us in a series of articles, here in the FRM News Flash, where we will step by step take on quantifying the safety and cost differences between rule sets. We will initially focus our efforts on the current EASA FTLs, comparing them to the former ones, the EASA Subpart Q. We will do so by building realistic working patterns for crew governed by these rules, for a huge number of airline fleets, using actual flight schedules both before and after COVID, and perform the planning with real production systems. This will be followed by suggesting and applying a crisp definition of FTL effectiveness - to finally arrive at answering: ‘How much lower risk did the new rules deliver?’, and ‘At what cost to the industry?'. Our hope with this work is to complement on-going efforts to investigate FTL effectiveness, hopefully even pointing out the individual rules that are most in need of improvement.
Welcome to join in and read about one of the most challenging quests we have ever taken on. Here comes chapter 1: A bold idea. Enjoy.
This work is pursued in collaboration with SWISS, one more prominent international airline operator, a large space agency, and the British Airline Pilots Association (BALPA) with the intent of openly publishing the findings. However, this article series, explaining the idea, the platform, the metrics, and elaborating on a few selected results, is entirely authored by Jeppesen.