Which hours of the day fall under ‘early morning’ duty for departures beyond 0500 Hrs. Local Time? How many consecutive early morning duties can be assigned to a pilot?

Which hours of the day fall under ‘early morning’ duty for departures beyond 0500 Hrs. Local Time? How many consecutive early morning duties can be assigned to a pilot?

Following are the guidelines for scheduling pilots for ‘early morning’ duty: Any flight that has a reporting time up to 8:00 AM is considered as an early morning flight. A soft rule has been built in the system to avoid allocation of more than 4 early morning flights at a stretch as far as possible. This is a soft rule and in case of insufficient RESERVE margins or for the purpose of coverage of flights, the auto roster would allocate more than 4 early mornings to a pilot. On the day of operations, due to an exigency the Crew Controller can assign a pilot a 5th morning flight in addition to the earlier 4 consecutive morning departures to maintain operational reliability and punctuality. This soft rule is NOT applicable for ground training, simulator training, reserve duty, or any other duty. Hence a combination of multiple such early morning duties and early morning flight duties is possible. NOTE: For FDPs starting earlier than 0500 hrs. the guidelines on ‘consecutive night operations’ as stated in OM-A, Chapter 2 will be applicable.