Expires in hours

How Much Duty the Crew Has Left

The third perishable answer, and the only one that cannot be solved with money. A crew that has run out of legal duty time is finished for the day, and the trip either waits or finds another crew.

What the answer is: How much of the crew's working day remains when the trip is due to start, and whether the whole trip fits inside it.
How long it stays true: Hours, and it only ever shrinks. A crew that flew this morning has less left this afternoon.
What happens when it stops being true: The trip no longer fits. Either it starts earlier, or it waits for a rest period, or it goes to a different crew and a different aircraft.

Why this one is different

Every other constraint in charter can be traded against money. A better aircraft costs more. A longer positioning flight costs more. A short notice trip costs more.

Duty time cannot. It is a limit on people, it is not the operator's to waive, and an operator that offered to would be telling you something alarming about how it runs.

A plain analogue wall clock with unnumbered marks on a bare pale wall beside a small unmarked steel box — A clock with no numbers on it, which is roughly how a duty limit feels from outside: running, and not negotiable.

How it moves through the day

A crew's day starts when they report, not when they fly. Time spent waiting counts. A delay at the first stop eats the same clock that the last leg needs.

So a trip that fitted comfortably at nine in the morning can stop fitting by two in the afternoon, without the trip itself having changed at all.

What it means for a late change

This is why a change made on the day is different in kind from a change made the evening before. The evening before, an operator can look at tomorrow's clock and reorganize. On the day, the clock is already running and there is less of it than there was.

The desk passes a change on the moment it hears one, and what comes back about duty is the operator's answer.

What this desk will not do

Guess. Duty rules and how an operator applies them to its own people are that operator's business, and a broker calculating somebody else's crew limits would be doing arithmetic it has no standing to do.

What the desk does is ask, and report the answer in the operator's terms.

Answers that expire in hours, one of three shelf lives in what a quote rests on