Flight crews tired?

Press, 1 March 1982, Page 1

Flight crews tired?

From

BRUCE ROSCOE,

in Tokyo

The flight crews of Japan Air Lines which flys DCB flights between New Zealand and Tokyo twice a week, are being forced to work long hours without sufficient rest between flights, according to the airline's labour union.

The tight crew scheduling had remained unchanged in spite of the February 9 crash of the airliner's DCB in Tokyo Bay in which 24 people were killed.

In extensive checks of pilots' work schedules for February, the labour union has said that 46 flights, including the one that ended in the bay, were “manned by pilots unable physically to rest sufficiently” because the interval between their flights was less than 10 hours.

According to Kyodo, the national Japanese news agency, the airline’s manage-

ment-labour agreement sets the length of rest at a minimum of 12 hours. The labour union was quoted by Kyodo as having said there were “many exceptions" to this rule.

Forty-one flights in March would also breach the ruling, the union said.

Mr Seiji Katagiri, who was at the controls of the DCB that crashed, had flown a Tokyo-Fukuoka flight the night before, arriving at Fukuoka, Southern Japan, at 9.40 p.m. His ill-fated return flight to Tokyo had left Fukuoka Airport at 7.25 a.m. the next day.