Quote:
Originally Posted by Embraer
sounds like they were out of base, and no, managers can't just work a flight. flight attendants have to be certificated. managers aren't. if they are out of base, then having somebody time-out just happens. especially this time of year with thunderstorm delays and diversions.
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While true that duty days are imposed by the FAA, delays due to duty-out are completely the fault of the airline essentially every time.
My company supports american carriers here in Canada, and I can tell you these duty-out failure to depart events have increased at least ten fold in the last few years. The truth is they plan their days to max duty time and cannot endure one delay througout the day without putting the final flight of the day in peril for duty time reasons. Proper staffing by airlines, as they used to exercise, prevented this from occuring as they had less saturated duty times, more available over run and extra staff where required. It is important to remember duty time is not as simple as hours in a day, your day, month and year of hours worked come into play. Meaning that is they say for example daily duty at 10hours, monthly at 180 and yearly at 2000, the daily can legally be extended to 14, but that impacts your monthly and yearly. If they were properly staffed, your FA duty day would have been extended and other staff would have made the shortfall in that FA's hours for other flights. They most often won't extend a crew members duty day as they have no way to compensate for it on the other end due to short staff issues.
And in the end, blame really comes back around to consumers who expect to fly for next to nothing, and then complain about the level of service on the flight.