Below the report by your BeCA Vice-President of the main events that happened in TUIFly Belgium since the last edition of our Cockpit Flash.

Mixed Company Flying (MCF) with TUI NL, a great opportunity?

As from April 2018, our management plans to have Belgian crews flying on Dutch planes and Dutch crews on Belgian aircraft. The plan is to start this on all aircraft except the E-jet.

For the moment, there are no plans to mix Belgian and Dutch crews. Both AOCs will remain in place, our management prefers to keep all options open and can benefit from slot allocations on both AOCs. A Belgian aircraft will for example fly into Cancun, where a complete Dutch crew will pick up the aircraft for a return flight to Amsterdam.

Planning these operations will be a challenge for our management, a lot of issues will have to be tackled, on a legal and operational point of view.

MCF represents an advantage for the company regarding:

• Increased flexibility in operational planning, which allows to expand on the long haul sector
• Increased productivity of crews
• Possibility to expand LH network (each company has production for half capacity of the B787)

But what will be the impact on crews? For the moment this is still unclear. A lot of questions arise:

• Will we do shorter layovers?
• Will these operations be more fatiguing?
• Will we have more LH rotations?
• Will we do more positioning?
• What about reporting to the Dutch CAA? FDM analysis?
• Will MCF expand to the B737?
• Will an OCC be planned? Which procedures are different?

These issues will have to be discussed with our management in the next months and should be resolved before the start of the operations. The constructive dialogue of the last months makes us confident that solutions can be found to accommodate for this new way of working.

A good cooperation with the Dutch pilot representatives is important. A benchmark is necessary to clarify the differences between both companies. TUI NL has agreements to protect their pilots and their production, which cannot be used in detriment of Belgian crews.

For example: we won’t accept that flights that are refused in the Dutch FSAG (Fatigue Safety Group) are flown by Belgian crews and vice versa.

We’ll keep you updated on the evolution of the project.

MPL (Multi Pilot Licence)

Our management has started the recruitment. There are a lot of candidates and the program looks like a great opportunity. The candidates will be paid from day one to work in a ground function and will have part of their training paid by the company. They will also have the possibility to fly at TUIfly BE after completing the pilot training.  However we are worried about its actual implementation as the programme seems quite packed with a 4/5th cumulated ground-base responsibility and a full training in 3.3 years.

Delphine Saive, Vice-President TUIFly Belgium