Please find below an update in regard to:
- Pilot Representatives – Management Meetings
- New CWA FTL Provisions
Pilot Representatives – Management Meetings
With this members update we would like to inform you and explain how we as Pilot Representatives see and saw the collaboration between Cargolux management and us during the current COVID-19 crisis.
There are regular meetings taking place between the Pilot Representatives and Senior Management. The priority aim of these meetings, which happened until now at least once per week, is to communicate – according to the feedback from the members – and mitigate the risks for the flight crews/staff related to COVID-19.
There are, however, secondary impacts of the crisis that impair our daily work life as pilots like freedom of movement at certain stations, nutrition and comfort at destinations, where we take our rest. These items are partially defined and taken care of in the provisions of our CWA, but unfortunately we have been faced with a number of violations of our CWA defined standards and internal policies, which almost all being related to the hotels we take our rest in.
While we as Pilot Representatives also RESPONSIBLY offer solutions to mitigate these secondary effects, we unfortunately perceive Senior Management to be overly hesitating, apparently because of cost reasons. We managed to convince management of certain measures to improve both safety and comfort, like allocation of suites during layovers in SIN and BKK for example, but the efforts necessary to convince our social partner remain unnecessarily high.
To summarize, we find Senior Management approachable in terms of health and security measures, but too reluctant when it comes to making sure that the provisions of the CWA and internal policies are respected in light of the crisis.
Unilateral decisions, particularly when short notice changing the hotels in COVID-19 or unrest hotspots, e.g. in HKG or the US, ignoring the respective policies and standards, not consulting the hotel committee turned out to be detrimental to our organization causing delays and therefore having a negative financial impact.
Despite those aggravating facts and after several discussions, the Board decided to continue the constructive approach dealing with management. Please rest assured that this does not mean that the difficult conditions down route are simply accepted from our side or your feedback is ignored.
We encourage management to be cooperative not falling for the trap of trying to perform cost cutting over a pilot community that voluntarily goes the extra mile. Strangling that momentum by turning a blind eye on our rights is something that the ALPL Board does not approve and cannot ignore.
New CWA FTL Provisions
As of 01July 2020 new CWA provisions covering flight time limitations for Standard and Augmented Crew operation came into effect. With the aforementioned management attitude to disrespect our rights on occasions, we might be faced with attempted non compliances in regard to these new FTL rules.
We have started to send out updated versions of the „Know your CWA“ series. This is done in order to support you to familiarize yourself with the new FTLs and to allow you to enforce the correct applications of the new rules.
As it was very hard to achieve the new FTLs to mitigate adverse effects of fatigue we would like to ask you to familiarize yourself with the changes and to politely but firmly insist in the application of those rules. Remember, it will depend on us as individuals being part of the Cargolux pilot community to ensure, that these new rules are followed.
Notwithstanding of the above, we would like to emphasize that neither EASA nor the CWA alone can completely avoid fatigue. Therefore we URGE EVERY pilot to file a fatigue report if fatigue was a factor on any FDP. This is the only tool to get real time fatigue data in combination with planned FDPs and to identify new hotspots!
If you have any questions regarding the new FTLs please don’t hesitate to contact your ALPL Board via mail at cvboard@alpl.lu for clarification.
As we also experienced that your voyage reports make a difference we would also like to further encourage you to thoroughly assess your ability to perform a flight duty when faced with unacceptable standards during your rest period, file the respective reports on those deficiencies and send a copy of the report to cvhotels@alpl.lu
Fly safe, stay healthy.
