Chief pilot
A chief pilot is a trained pilot who has been entrusted with technical and managerial tasks in the organization of flight operations in a civil or military aviation company in addition to his pilot activity , e.g. B. in an airline or in the air force . Most of them are very experienced flight captains or fighter pilots .
Chief pilot in an airline
In the business operations of an airline, a flight captain is usually the head of flight operations and the disciplinary and organizational superior of the flight personnel employed by the airline . However, it can be common in an airline that, in addition to the pilots (possibly also flight attendants ), the ground staff directly involved in flight operations (e.g. the airline's flight dispatcher ) are subordinate to him . In this chief pilot function, he is, among other things, an assessor of the employees who report to him. The function of a training and further education officer for the area of flight training can also be part of the duties of a chief pilot, whereby the function of a check captain requires an examiner authorization to be issued by the Federal Aviation Office . In contrast to the air force (separation of military and civilian tasks and functions), the chief pilot of a civil airline can also be assigned the role of fleet manager. Depending on whether it is an airline with only one aircraft type or an airline with different aircraft types, it may be common in an airline to delegate the role of fleet manager to several pilots, whereby these employees are only responsible for certain aircraft types of the respective airline and are usually assigned to the chief pilot as the superordinate fleet chief. The chief pilot is required to report to the airline's management. In some airlines, the chief pilot is on the board .
Different understandings of the term chief pilot
Colloquially , the term chief pilot is often confused with the unprotected job title “ flight captain ” or factually inappropriately equated. This misunderstanding stems from the fact that a flight captain on duty on board a passenger aircraft as the holder of on-board authority during the flight is temporarily the specialist superior of both the other members of the flight crew ( co-pilots , flight engineers ) and any flight attendants .
Duties of a fleet chief
A fleet manager is responsible for the technically and legally flawless condition of an aircraft fleet or a part of it related to certain aircraft types . The technical improvement and further development of the fleet is usually one of the tasks of a fleet manager. His other tasks include the acceptance of newly purchased or leased aircraft. In the legal sense, this acceptance means that the aircraft handed over to the airline was accepted as free of complaints, so that there are no more claims to performance against the aircraft manufacturer or the leasing company , but only guarantee and warranty claims in the event of a subsequent defect. In addition, the fleet manager is usually the airline's first point of contact for the Federal Aviation Office or the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) .
Chief pilots known to a wider public
Individual evidence
- ↑ Internet information from the Federal Employment Agency
- ↑ cf. Article in the online edition of the specialist magazine "aero" on February 2, 2016: Lufthansa is redistributing management tasks in the Group