Today, EASA’s controversial proposals for standby provisions – where air crew are ‘on call’ to receive a call for a flight – will be at the center of a Workshop in Cologne. This workshop follows criticism by several EU Member States that consider EASA’s proposals insufficient to adequately ensure flight safety.

While the airline representatives at that meeting are expected to defend EASA’s proposals on the basis of operational and commercial needs, ECA will submit proposals to make EASA’s proposals safe. Together with ETF, ECA will submit concrete solutions on how to prevent excessively long times on duty (standby + flight duty), how to make long-call ‘Reserve’ standby more predictable and less disruptive of sleep patterns, and how to prevent ‘delayed reporting’ to become an open-ended form of standby that could jeopardize flight safety.