It may be 18 months away but for Euro­pean oper­a­tors the Euro­pean Avi­a­tion Safe­ty Agency (EASA) dead­line of 18 Feb­ru­ary 2016 for new EU-wide flight time lim­i­ta­tion (FTL) rules already looms large.

Readi­ness for EASA’s har­monised fatigue risk man­age­ment reg­u­la­tions rep­re­sents a chal­lenge for air­lines. Euro­pean Teams with respon­si­bil­i­ty for safe­ty man­age­ment sys­tems (SMS), risk and reg­u­la­to­ry com­pli­ance, crew ros­ter­ing and man­age­ment, and sched­ul­ing and day-of-flight oper­a­tions each must have a crit­i­cal plan to a suc­cess­ful transition.

The right tech­nol­o­gy can play a piv­otal role in mak­ing the tran­si­tion from exist­ing FTL stan­dards to the new EASA rules easier.

APM’s Michael O’Sullivan says: “Even today, your crew ros­ter­ing and man­age­ment soft­ware – plus inte­gra­tions with flight­watch and live pro­duc­tion sched­ul­ing appli­ca­tions – should include EASA-ready features.”

“For some time now, our team of design­ers and devel­op­ers have been work­ing hard to embed EASA-ready fea­tures into our software.”

Michael says there are three key fea­tures that oper­a­tors should already expect from their soft­ware to aid tran­si­tion to the new EASA standards.

1. A total­ly con­fig­urable rules set

Oper­a­tors must have the abil­i­ty to gen­er­ate bespoke crew rule sets to auto­mat­i­cal­ly gen­er­ate opti­mal crew pair­ings, estab­lish­ments and ros­ters that com­ply with pre­vail­ing nation­al and inter­na­tion­al reg­u­la­tions and include the airline’s own rules. The enhanced crew rules engine includ­ed with Crew­Log­ic in APM‑6 fea­tures ful­ly con­fig­urable rules sets.

2. Real-time FTL risk alerts

If some­thing changes in your live pro­duc­tion sched­ule or flight­watch soft­ware that could adverse­ly affect your FTL com­pli­ance, you need to know – and know right away. Because APM‑6’s suite is inte­grat­ed with your core sched­ul­ing and day of oper­a­tions dataset, the moment a change is made in your live pro­duc­tion sched­ule in Sched­ule­Plan­ner or APM’s Smar­tOps flight­watch tool, users of Crew­Log­ic will know thanks to alerts.

3. Run crew­ing sce­nar­ios and analy­ses and export to live production

Your soft­ware should already offer you a suite of analy­sis and report­ing tools that let you test mul­ti­ple crew pair­ings, estab­lish­ments and ros­ters in sce­nar­ios – which are auto­mat­i­cal­ly air­line and avi­a­tion rules-com­pli­ant – and export your cho­sen sce­nario back into live pro­duc­tion. You have been able to do this since APM‑5 and, with enhanced crew rules con­fig­ura­bil­i­ty, APM‑6 pro­vides an even more pow­er­ful tool that means your airline’s well on it way to EASA-compliance.

EASA FTL: The head­line require­ments for compliance

– Night flight duty reduced from 11 hours and 45 min­utes to 11 hours
– More flights will be con­sid­ered night flights and sub­ject to short­er duty periods
– Flight time in 12 con­sec­u­tive months will be lim­it­ed to 1,000 rather than 1,300 hours
– Week­ly rest will be increased by 12 hours twice a month
– The com­bi­na­tion of stand­by at the air­port with flight duty will be capped at 16 hours. (It is cur­rent­ly 20 hours or 26 hours, or even with­out lim­it at – all in some EU mem­ber states.)

Source: UK Civ­il Avi­a­tion Author­i­ty, Jan­u­ary 2014 (PDF link)