Carl Sagan is attributed the quote "Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception."Even though this is quite true in nature, it shouldn't be true when it comes to our spare time. Many of us in office work can plan how we spend our time off. We may plan for a barbeque, a hike, playing tennis, helping our kids with homework, or visiting friends. We can often plan many days out in time, or even weeks. We can do so, as we are quite certain about our spare time. I know for example that I will be off from 5pm every single weekday, and I know all of Saturday and Sunday will be off as well - whichever week I look at.
For pilots and cabin crew, the situation is very different. Work hours change constantly, and crew often don't even know where in the world they will be on a given day. Once their roster is published, which is perhaps some 14 days in advance but often shorter, they will be provided a 'promise' by the organisation about where their spare time is located in time. With that promise, crew can then (but over a quite short time period) plan for their personal activities. Those plans are what we often label 'life', in work-life balance.
In the coming weeks, Jeppesen will be rolling out a new metric for our Concert customers. The metric is called Spare Time Survival Ratio (STSR) and quantifies, day by day, how many of the 'promised' minutes of spare time 'survived' when later looking back at the roster after it has been operated. Changed work content, like flying to LHR instead of CDG but staying within the published timings will not kill spare time minutes, but delays or calling out crew on a day off, will. With STSR in place, operators can not only compare the survival ratio between fleets, ranks or bases (or to other operators) but more importantly: track the development over time to quantify improvement or decay.
Roster changes that affect the private life of crew are detrimental to work-life balance and sleep and recovery often becomes the hostage - making it also one of the more important drivers of fatigue risk. Planning with the right buffers is part of the medication, but without a good metric in place, improvement is hard. STRS will be there to help. Spare time is dead, long live spare time!
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