I’ve always wondered how the crewing works for these weekend only jobs. Presumably BACF get some of the crew to ‘lodge’, but fresh crews must come in at some point?
I don’t know what the plans are for this coming Summer, but there are all sorts of weird and wonderful ways that they can roster things, and the rosters for flight and cabin crews could be different, too.
As a specific example, and from memory, when Club World London City operated to New York, flight crew actually booked-on at Gatwick, and were then taxied to City. This put them out of hours for City > Shannon > JFK, so they operated City > Shannon on Day One, night stopped then operated the following day’s Shannon > JFK. From memory also, they then had a two night stop in New York and operated one of Day Four’s direct back to London, arriving Day Five.
Cabin Crew booked on at City and operated through to New York on Day One, with one night stop there and operated one of Day Two’s Eastbounds, landing Day Three.
TUI rotate a lot of staff around for their long hauls as they tend to only operate once weekly from a given U.K. station. On occasion they’ll use BA domestics to reposition crew who have gone out, say, Newcastle > Barbados and then operated Barbados > Gatwick a few days later. Depending on hours and logistics, they may taxi them to Heathrow and fly them up to Newcastle, or they might night stop them at Gatwick and then taxi them all the way back to Newcastle.
So, it’s quite possible that BA CityFlyer could have something quite creative set up for Southampton, at least at the beginning of each weekend, whereas at Manchester, Edinburgh and Glasgow they’ll probably continue to just rotate them through existing night stop lodging facilities or dead head (fly crew as passengers) them in and out on other scheduled services.
It’s also the case that a lot of crew, on all fleets and subsidiaries, ‘commute’ from outstations anyway, so they may not even need to dead head some of them in.
