Regulations regarding flight times limitations and rest calculations for airlines crew members resemble mostly a puzzle. Its application impact on a reasonable use of crew members is sometimes difficult to measure, and crew members are often torn apart between operational necessities and keeping flights into the limits defined by regulations.
Knowledge about legal texts, about their enforcements, but also about consequences of non-compliance, is sometimes partial. Complexity of some texts or of their expound adds to problems resolution difficulty.
In other respects, if it exists several tools to estimate what is an optimum crew rostering, realised data analysis - however mandatory - is much less implemented. Nevertheless only this analysis enables to check that flights realisation, not only scheduling, has been kept within the limits edicted by law.
For non regular airlines having no flights schedule build in advance, real data analysis is of prime necessity for checking use of their crew members, and is the only way to have reliable quantitative data at disposal.
For other airlines, it also enables to estimate impact of rescheduling actions.
Having this into our minds, we decided to propose airlines to base their thinkings about crew management not only on auditors or qualitative data, but mainly on quantitative data, and we launched A.C.M.E. Audit.