I'm flying Ethiopian airlines out of Rome soon and while looking at the schedule noticed they keep planes in most, if not all, of their European destinations for a long time during the day. The flights are red-eyes in both directions and the planes sit idle in what seemingly could be very productive hours. I initially suspected it may be for maintenance but I highly doubt they split their maintenance around so many different destinations every day.

I would hope crew arent expected to operate back to back red-eyes and rest during the day however I suspect that may be the case?

It's mainly to do with connecting at ADD. Arriving early am allows full onward connection possibilities, as does a late evening departure from ADD. Same with other African airlines operating into Europe, like KQ or when SA did.

TC957 wrote:

It's mainly to do with connecting at ADD. Arriving early am allows full onward connection possibilities, as does a late evening departure from ADD. Same with other African airlines operating into Europe, like KQ or when SA did.

Thanks. The connections make sense. I didn’t realize they only had one bank of connections.

pbody wrote:

I would hope crew arent expected to operate back to back red-eyes and rest during the day however I suspect that may be the case?

That’s absolutely the case. But it’s not as bad as it sounds. It’s a relatively short flight to/from ADD, the crew just eat/sleep and then operate the return. Done it many times at my airline, very doable.

pbody wrote:

I would hope crew aren't expected to operate back to back red-eyes and rest during the day however I suspect that may be the case?

SA had a similar long day on the ground in Europe as was already mentioned, many years ago the layover in London or Frankfurt was 4-5 days but more recently it was a one night stop for the crew.

EK770 wrote:

pbody wrote:

I would hope crew arent expected to operate back to back red-eyes and rest during the day however I suspect that may be the case?

That’s absolutely the case. But it’s not as bad as it sounds. It’s a relatively short flight to/from ADD, the crew just eat/sleep and then operate the return. Done it many times at my airline, very doable.

If you don't mind me asking, are you sure of this specifically for ET? (genuine question)
I'm asking because they sometimes operate 1-stops within Europe (as an example ADD-FCO-MXP and they layover in MXP - Maybe this is not up to date but they have many routes in Europe operating under this model), which leaves a ground time around 9-11hrs at best.
How long would the aircraft need to lay-over in Europe to allow a crew to operate a 2 leg segment back to ADD?

As far as I know and as stated above their European schedule was mostly driven by the connectivity at ADD, and curious if the crew is a lucky coincidence or if the original bank structure was built with this in mind.

Despite what you see in terms of aircraft sitting idle at European airports, ET has a very high utilization rate of its aircraft. While that flight to Rome may see the airplane on the ground on Monday, on Monday night it flies to ADD, then Tuesday it will do a flight to an African destination as far as Cape Town, return to ADD that same evening, and then go back to Europe. If you are to look at daily utilization, then maybe it's not the case.

As others alluded, the rest at European destinations is meant to allow for the inbound connections from Europe to be timed well with outbound flights to Africa at the ADD base. In some cases where ET has had double daily flights to Europe, with LHR as an example, we have seen that overnight flight to LHR do a daytime flight back to ADD, while the daytime flight to LHR does a night time flight back to ADD. I would expect that in future years where ET grows its frequency to Europe, we will see such utilization elsewhere. Rome had seen this type of utilization alongside LHR.

With respect to crew rest, I understand these to be complicated and country/jurisdiction specific, and it also includes home base, time differences, overnight vs daytime flights, rest between an overnight duty and a subsequent daytime duty etc. But googling quickly, I see minimum 10-hour rest periods in US rules as well as European rules, with the latter guaranteeing 8 hour sleep time. US rules talk about from end of last duty period to beginning of next duty period. I suspect Ethiopian rule also align to these to an extent. Looking at flights to Europe, I see at least 12 hours of time between duties for cabin crew, with perhaps LHR pushing the limits for the possibility of flying in in the morning and flying out at night.

For those 2 destinations-in-one operations, I can give you an example of what I have seen on Ethiopian. Where you fly ADD-FCO-ARN (old schedule,) you would see a complete crew change at FCO, with a second crew doing a short hop FCO-ARN, resting in ARN, then turning around to stop at FCO for another crew change. The fact that the duty is low may have provisions for less rest time at ARN. Another example was ADD-BKK-HKG, where you would even have a the crew resting in lounges (and not hotels) on the BKK-HKG-BKK turnaround. At some point I think that anything greater than 4 hours ground time at ET warranted a hotel room.