I will address the two questions. First, the flight and duty time regulations will have a very significant impact on us in terms of the limitations they impose on flight time. It's very much predicated on some larger operations. Our operations typically begin and end early in the morning or late in the evening, when people travel into our hubs and then we take them out, and likewise when we bring people in early to catch flights. During the middle portion of the day, we have good infrastructure in place to allow for rest. We recognize those limitations. We've invested heavily in facilities and accommodation to ensure our crews receive rest while they're out on the road. That doesn't seem to be recognized.
On the other implications of days versus nights, in terms of responses, again, we have very good facilities in place to provide for and mitigate fatigue. We've actually structured our schedules around the cycles of the individuals. We think we've very heavily addressed those, but our efforts have not been recognized in the regulations because they are atypical given our areas of operation.
In terms of the infrastructure and the safety implications, I would argue that it's the biggest thing that causes me grief at night. The facilities we see in the north are very much what we saw back in about 1960 or 1970. They haven't changed very much since then.
Ironically, we've had comments about lack of familiarity with hand flying the aircraft. Because of the infrastructure we have, we can't use autopilot very heavily for approaches and landings simply because the approaches don't allow us to fly down that close to the ground. Our crews are actually quite proficient at hand flying the aircraft.
We have very limited weather services and very limited approaches, with the result that quite frequently, with very limited infrastructure, we're not able to land. We spend a great deal of time travelling for three hours only to turn around and come back again because the approaches didn't let us land where they would have down south. It ends up generating lots of back-and-forth, which further adds more flying for us, eroding time and adding to our fatigue issues as well.