June 10th - Crew fatigue on flights has hit the headlines
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 10 June 2022
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Aviation, especially in Britain, is incredibly safe. When the boss of Wizz Air appeared to suggest too many of his people were staying away because of fatigue, there was an immediate outcry.
I've been talking to the leader of the British Airline Pilots’ Association (BALPA) who says pilots and cabin crew who are fatigued should be supported.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the Independent Daily Travel Podcast with me, Simon Calder, |
| 0:06.2 | trying to keep you informed about what is happening in the world of travel. |
| 0:11.5 | You may have seen a story which we ran yesterday in The Independent about the furious reaction from pilots' unions after the boss of Whizair told |
| 0:24.4 | the flight crew too many of them are reporting fatigue. This all came from a video message that |
| 0:33.0 | Joseph Veradi, who is the CEO of Whizair, which is the third big European budget airline behind Ryanair and EasyJet. |
| 0:45.0 | What he said was, and you can find this obviously very easily online, now that everyone is getting back into work, |
| 0:50.4 | I understand that fatigue is a potential outcome of the issues presumably |
| 0:57.0 | the issues of everyone getting back into work but once we are stabilising the |
| 1:03.0 | rosters we also need to take down the fatigue rate now that means we don't want so |
| 1:10.0 | many people phoning in and saying, I am too tired to work. |
| 1:14.5 | I'm inferring from this. He continues, I mean, we cannot run this business when every fifth |
| 1:19.7 | person of a base reports sickness because the person is fatigued. He goes on to say, |
| 1:25.4 | we are all fatigued, but sometimes it is required to go the extra |
| 1:30.7 | mile. Then he talks about the harm caused by canceling a flight. He says the damage is huge |
| 1:38.2 | when we're canceling a flight. It's huge. It's reputational damage of the brand and it is the other |
| 1:43.4 | financial damage, the transactional damage, |
| 1:45.9 | because we have to pay compensation for that. Yes, absolutely. So on a round trip, on an Airbus A321, |
| 1:53.6 | which has got 235 seats, so talking about 470 people who, if they all claim what was entitled to them for a long flight well that would be |
| 2:04.9 | a startling amount of money just in compensation alone 164,500 pounds so an expensive business |
| 2:17.1 | cancelling flights and that's one reason of course why airlines |
| 2:21.0 | in normal times have plenty of people on standby. These compensation payments are designed to be |
| 2:27.7 | punitive to airlines to encourage them to do the right way. Now, he, his remarks were immediately picked up, obviously somebody recording them and put them |
... |
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