Producing crew schedules, pairings and rosters, is all about finding that ideal compromise. The result should be robust, efficient, safe, inexpensive and also provide 'quality of life' for the crew. None of these perspectives can be ignored, but neither can they be pushed to optimality in isolation - that would take too much of a toll on the others.
There are also built-in conflicts within each of these perspectives. For example, take positioning flights, so called 'deadheads'. Surely it seems that deadheading crew should be bad for overall efficiency. Deadheads consume duty time as no productive work is done sitting as a passenger and revenue seats are made unavailable. So why not task the crew planning function to minimise deadheads, as one step towards creating overall efficiency? A 'zero-deadhead'-vision perhaps? Those deeply involved with crew management know that this is not a good idea. It will generate more layovers, more duty days and actually lead to lower overall crew efficiency, compared to addressing the right thing; overall crew efficiency.
Similarly, there are conflicts within the perspective of flight safety, here represented by fatigue risk. If you task your planning function to focus on improving your worst flights, it is not unlikely that the overall fatigue risk increases. An often-used example to understand this, is the rule of maximum duty time for night duties. Assume for a moment that you change this rule from a maximum of eight hours, to a maximum of six hours. The result will be many more night duties for your crew and thus a need of more often scheduling consecutive ones. Each night duty may have significant commute time before and after, cutting into the natural sleep opportunity. With that, more sleep debt will hit duties that already suffering from 'poor time of day' and long wakefulness. The result may well be overall higher risk - even though a duty day in isolation looks better.
Often it is better to take your medicine. Approach the problem in a data-driven way, set your targets and KPIs to measure what really matters - your full operation, and accept what may look like small imperfections 'at lower altitude'. Find comfort in knowing you are doing the right thing given the flight schedule presented to the market and handed over to you for being crewed. Your business model will dictate a best solution, stay with it.
Setting overall KPI targets starts with good quantification of overall solution properties. Please find herethe proposed best practice for quantifying fatigue risk. In this document you can then read how to use such metrics, and other clever principles, managing your fatigue risk throughout the crew management process.
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