Narrow body drivers worked really hard or what?

[loopa]

Hey guys I have a question for you AC pilots flying on the narrow body side (Embraer/Airbus). How hard are you guys worked? The reason I ask is that within 2 months here AC has cancelled two flights on me as a passenger both due to duty time limitations.

First cancellation or more like a diversion, the pilots on the flight that was picking us up to fly back to Toronto was going to be dutied out so they flew us to YWG for a 3 hour wait as a new crew were flown from YYZ.

Second cancellation, YEG-YVR flight was cancelled. Instead the plane that was supposed to do the YEG-YVR run was deemed to have "maintenance problems" while that plane was loading passengers for a YOW flight while the YOW-YEG flight that was going to fly back to YOW took the cancelled PAX from YEG-YVR. After asking the pilots the problem wasn't maintenance, rather duty time issues if they went back to YOW. Seems kind of bizarre that on 2 consecutive A/C flights now I've had this occur to me as a passenger.

Would love to hear some feedback on how hard you guys work, because if I run into this as an irregular A/C passenger, then it must probably happen more often than not.

Cheers!

[Rockie]

We have a lot of duty days that approach the maximum permitted according to our contract which is slightly better than what CAR's stipulate. That is normal in any company trying to be efficient. Winter time is worse for exceeding the maximum due to deicing and other weather related delays cascading through the system. Crew scheduling has quite a bit of flexibility for reallocating crews at main bases like Toronto and Vancouver, but at out stations like Edmonton you occasionally hit a wall.

Sorry you got caught on flights so close together.

[vic777]

Second cancellation, YEG-YVR flight was cancelled. Instead the plane that was supposed to do the YEG-YVR run was deemed to have "maintenance problems" while that plane was loading passengers for a YOW flight while the YOW-YEG flight that was going to fly back to YOW took the cancelled PAX from YEG-YVR. After asking the pilots the problem wasn't maintenance, rather duty time issues if they went back to YOW.

It's hard to explain this given the information you relay. If you give the exact flight numbers and dates it can be determined what happened. From what you say, it seems they used the Ottawa Plane to fly the Passengers to Vancouver. Then the Pilots who were available to fly to Ottawa were going to be projected out of time before they could arrive in Ottawa on a replacement/fixed aircraft.

A maintenance delay, as any other kind of delay can result in Pilots being projected over their duty day.