Crew Training, Qualification and Flight/Duty Time Limits
Qualification chain
A crew member's authority to act rests on a chain: licence (licença) with the correct ratings, type rating where required, valid medical certificate, company training and checking, and recent experience. RBAC 135 Subpart E sets training programme requirements; RBAC 61 sets licensing. Questions often test whether a pilot may act as PIC on a given flight given a combination of expired items. The trap is that a valid licence does not imply validity of the medical, the proficiency check, or the recency requirement - all must be current simultaneously.
Duty and rest limits
RBAC 135 Subpart F establishes flight time, duty period, and rest requirements. Understand the definitions: flight time (block to block or wheels-off to wheels-on depending on the rule), duty period (from report to release), rest period, and cumulative limits over 7, 14, 30, and 90 days. Traps include counting deadhead or positioning time incorrectly, confusing local time with the duty period, and forgetting that extensions require documented justification and rest compensation.
Worked example
A pilot reports at 06:00, flies 4.5 hours, has a 1.5-hour ground stop, flies 3.0 hours, and is released at 17:00. Flight time is 7.5 hours; duty period is 11.0 hours. A candidate who reports duty as 7.5 hours has confused flight time with duty. Check both the flight-time limit and the duty-period limit for the crew complement and the time of day.
Rule of thumb
Always compute both numbers separately: total flight time and total duty period. Then check cumulative limits across the rolling window.