Flight and Duty

[100ft]

I need some help from Australian heli community. Im looking for CASA flight and duty times that apply to the average helicopter pilot. Want to use it for a detailed comparison purposes with Canada, USA, and Europe.


I found Part XI tactical fire fighting, part X agriculture, part VIII emergency services, part V single pilot charter.

Are there any exemptions to these rules under a subpart somewhere? What rules do majority of heli operators fall under and use? Im not really interested in Airline or scheduled flight ops, or IFR ops... More the pilot doing heli-tours, fires, sling operations. General charter work, day VFR..

If someone has an spreadsheet, i could peek at that would very helpful.


Thanks in advance!

[BennyG]

flight times - 8 hours a day (can be extended), 30 hours in 7 days, 100 hours in 30 days, 900 hours in 365 days

duty times - 10 hours a day (can be extended), 90 hours in 14 days, can only be on duty 6 days in any 7.

Pretty sure that's right, i'm sure someone will correct me if not.

You asked about fires - almost anyone that operates on fires would have the tactical fire-fighting exemption that you have found.

Cheers.

[FatBoy1971]

100ft,

The standard flight and duty times can be found at CAO48.1.

http://www.casa.gov.au/download/orders/cao48/4801.pdf

As BennyG pointed out, you have uncovered the "standard industry exemptions" to CAO 48.1.

http://www.casa.gov.au/scripts/nc.dll?W ... c=PC_90317

But the rules are changing. Here is some information on why and what the changes are.

http://www.casa.gov.au/wcmswr/_assets/m ... atigue.pdf

Hope this helps,

FatBoy

[100ft]

I skimmed through the rules changes. On first glance it would seem, the inmates will be running the asylum soon.

[dusty dog]

Please spare a thought for your engineer when you are flying your immaculately serviced and airworthy a/c. He doesn't have the luxury of duty time. Buy him a coffee and say "thanks mate!"

[Capt Hollywood]

Point of interest regarding the new Flight & Duty times, after speaking to a CASA rep yesterday he advised that there will be NO exemptions to the new rules. Apparently there are 1700 exemptions currently in place and it defeats the purpose of having regs if everyone gets exemptions from them!

[Friendly Black Dog]

Hey Dusty,
Doesn't part 145 change things for the gingers? I was lead to believe you folks were heading down the road of compulsory SMS which included fatigue management?
FBD

[Yakking]

Point of interest regarding the new Flight & Duty times, after speaking to a CASA rep yesterday he advised that there will be NO exemptions to the new rules. Apparently there are 1700 exemptions currently in place and it defeats the purpose of having regs if everyone gets exemptions from them!

That is interesting. In my limited experience, operators seem to just assume that they can get exemptions whenever it suits them.

Flight and Duty limitations are there for a reason. What's the point in having Reg's if we can get dispensations for them?

[wheatbix]

Without exemptions, the current limit of 30 hours per week for awk would be extremely restricting for a lot of commercial & utility operators. If there are no exemptions to come, hopefully the new regs have a little bit more sense and leeway.

[Friendly Black Dog]

Does that not just mean that if you want to do more than the AWK allows (option 2 I believe) then the operator will have to operate under an FRMS with all the fatigue mitigation processes in place?

FBD

[Ian Batton]

I had a meeting with CASA 6 months ago and was also told that there would be no more exemptions as well.
We were looking into one for emergency relief work, ie: when we are doing flood work, we had operators doing 12 days with no day off because they had that exemption, and we could only do 6 days, CASA told us that this would no longer happen ?
So if companies use the Tier 1, Basic F & D model from CASA, there just might be a few more casual jobs going over fire and flood seasons in the near future! This will also change rates of pay for contract pilots I think, as you can only fly 5 days a week.
There are other Tiers like Tier 2 which are much less restrictive but need lots of attention on your F & D training and monitoring and so on. CASA told me they will try to push most of us away from that Tier 2 because they believe small companies under 40 people I think they said, will not have the man power to carry it out.
So that’s what I have been told let’s see if that is what happens

[dusty dog]

FBD
There is talk about it happening at some time, but for GA its not mandatory yet. Some bigger companies are introducing this themselves under SMS, which is great. Hard for the smaller maintenance orgs tho. Cheers DD