Farnborough
Nice
How a Duty-Hours Gate Works in Jet Charter Today: Why a Quote Cannot Be Released Until the Crew Check Passes
A 1 hour 45 minute sector from Farnborough (EGLF) to Nice (LFMN) can be priced in seconds and still sit unreleased, because the only crew within reach would breach their duty limit on the way home. That is the rule inside villiersOS today: no quote leaves the system until the duty-time check passes.
The check works from three inputs: when the duty period starts, how many sectors it contains, and how much rest the crew had beforehand. Under the EASA flight time limitations in ORO.FTL, a two-pilot crew's maximum flight duty period tops out at 13 hours. It shrinks with early starts, night starts and every sector beyond two. Minimum rest is typically 12 hours at a home base and 10 hours away from it. The agent reads these limits as data, not as prose in a manual.
Take a Challenger 350 on a day return, EGLF to LFMN and back. The crew report at 06:00, spend three hours on the ground at Nice and finish around 13:30, about 7.5 hours of duty. That quote passes and goes out, typically at £13,000 to £18,000 for the outbound sector alone.
Now the client adds a stop at Geneva (LSGG). The duty day stretches past 11 hours and the same quote fails the gate. The system returns three options: a fresh crew, a night stop at Nice, or a different aircraft. A night stop costs a hotel and per diems for two pilots, a few hundred pounds a night each. A failed duty day costs far more.
The gate is a hard stop for a reason. A sales conversation cannot talk past it, and a commercial deadline does not soften it. Every pass and every failure is logged with its inputs, so the operator and the regulator can both see why a quote was released.
What MLC 2006 Actually Requires at Sea: Ten Hours in 24, 77 in Seven Days, and Where Fleets Quietly Breach Them
The 77-hour figure sounds generous until you subtract it from a week: 168 hours less 77 leaves a ceiling of 91 hours of work. The Maritime Labour Convention 2006, Standard A2.3, sets minimum rest at no less than 10 hours in any 24-hour period and 77 hours in any seven-day period. Rest may be split into no more than two periods, one of which must be at least six hours, and the gap between consecutive rest periods cannot exceed 14 hours.
Certification under the convention applies to ships of 500 gross tonnes and above. Smaller commercial yachts are typically held to broadly equivalent hours-of-rest standards through their flag administration's yacht code, so the arithmetic carries across even where the paperwork differs.
The quiet breaches come from the shape of a charter day, not from bad intent. A steward who starts breakfast preparation at 06:30 and finishes clearing after dinner at 23:30 has worked 17 hours and rested seven, which fails the 10-hour test on its own. An engineer who services a watermaker, runs the tenders and then takes an anchor alarm at 03:00 can fall short in the same way. A captain's bridge watches during arrivals and departures rarely appear in anyone's timetable.
Records are where exposure turns into liability. Hours of rest must be logged, the schedule posted, and the entries endorsed by both seafarer and master. A log that shows every crew member at exactly 10 hours of rest every day is a flag for a port state inspector, not reassurance. That gap between a tidy posted timetable and the working day is where yacht charter crew rest compliance usually fails.
Scale matters here. Industry estimates put roughly 6,000 yachts above 24 metres in the global fleet, and a 50 metre vessel typically carries 12 to 16 crew. Each of those posts has a rolling seven-day total that someone is supposed to be tracking, and on most boats that someone is the master, by hand.
Repositioning Legs and Delivery Passages: Costing Crew Hours Before the Itinerary Is Promised to a Client
A delivery passage from Antibes to Palma covers roughly 330 nautical miles, about 30 hours at 11 knots. That is 30 hours of watchkeeping before the first guest steps aboard, and the clock does not pause for a charter that starts the same afternoon.
In jet charter, a repositioning leg is costed against the crew's remaining hours before the quote exists. If a Falcon 8X must fly empty from LFMN to Zurich (LSZH) to collect a party, the system checks whether the crew can legally fly it and still operate the revenue sector. The leg is priced twice: once in fuel and fees, once in hours.
The same logic could run for a yacht. A six-on, six-off watch pattern over 30 hours is workable on paper, since it leaves two six-hour rest blocks a day. But it leaves almost no slack for meals, maintenance or a fuel stop. If the passage ends at 14:00 on the day guests embark, the rest debt is already booked before the charter begins.
A ledger approach would test the itinerary first. It would sum the passage hours, the arrival preparation and the first guest day, then check each post against the 10-hour and 77-hour floors. If the test fails, the itinerary is not promised. The alternatives are priced instead: a relief engineer flown to Palma (LEPA), two additional deckhands for the passage, or a day's delay at anchor.
The cost of those alternatives is knowable in advance, typically low-to-mid thousands of euros for a short delivery crew and their travel. Compare that with the cost of a detention after an inspection, or a charter cancelled mid-week. Keeping crew rest legal on a charter yacht becomes a line in the quote, not a discovery on the quay.
Rotation as a Scheduling Problem: Captains, Engineers and Stewards Across a Multi-Vessel Fleet
Eight yachts, three senior posts each and a 2:1 rotation of eight weeks on and four off means 24 posts need 36 people. That is 12 relief staff before anyone is sick, late or out of date on a certificate.
Each person carries constraints the roster must respect. A captain's licence limits the tonnage they may command. An engineer may know one engine family and not another. Medical certificates, safety training and visas expire on their own calendars. Guests often request a particular chef or chief steward, and language matters on an international charter.
Jet operators solve a close cousin of this daily. A pilot on a Gulfstream G650ER must hold the type rating, recent landings and a valid medical, and the scheduler matches those against each trip. A Bombardier Global 7500 crew is a different pool again. The agent treats each qualification as an attribute with an expiry date and refuses an assignment that fails any of them.
Handovers are the hidden cost. If each post has a three-day overlap on every rotation, about 6.5 rotations a year, the fleet pays for roughly 468 overlap person-days annually. At an assumed €400 a day that is around €187,000, spent on knowledge transfer that is rarely scheduled with any rigour.
A scheduling agent could shorten overlaps where the incoming and outgoing crew have worked together before. It could flag a captain whose leave falls on a booked repositioning, and it could place relief staff where the next seven-day rest forecast is thinnest. The fleet gains from every rest-hour breach avoided and every overlap day trimmed. The same engine would not need a different design for each vessel; only the rule set per post changes.
Where the Transfer Breaks: What an Agent Model Could Automate at Sea, What Still Needs a Master's Judgement, and What This Is Not Yet
The master's authority is the first limit. MLC allows rest hours to be suspended for the immediate safety of the ship, persons on board or cargo, or to assist another vessel in distress, with compensatory rest afterwards. An agent can propose, warn and record, but it cannot decide that a squall justifies an all-hands night. That call stays with the master, and the system's job is to log it and schedule the rest owed.
Data is the second limit. A rest ledger is only as good as the hours entered, and crew under pressure round their entries to look compliant. Connectivity at anchor can be patchy, and a tablet log only works if it takes under a minute a day. Any workable design would infer likely hours from watch schedules, tender movements and guest events, then ask the crew member to confirm or correct.
What an agent could automate is narrower and still valuable: a rolling seven-day ledger per post, a forecast of breaches 72 hours ahead, a hold on itineraries that would cause one, relief-crew options priced alongside the quote, and an inspection-ready record. Rest-hour compliance across a fleet becomes a standing check, not an annual scramble before a flag survey.
Now the plain disclosure. villiersOS runs private jet charter today. It has no yacht product, no yacht customers and no yacht deployment. This piece is a market analysis of how the architecture generalises, and the mechanics were shown in aviation first so you can judge the transfer yourself.
As an illustrative sizing only, not a forecast: if roughly 2,000 commercial yachts each paid £6,000 to £12,000 a year for a rest-and-rotation tool, the addressable market would be £12 million to £24 million annually. The real figure depends on how many of those vessels have a management company willing to buy.
The working method for any fleet is simple. Track every crew member's rolling seven-day rest total, flag a review when the forecast falls below 84 hours, and hold any itinerary change that would take a post under 77 hours. Price the relief option before the itinerary is promised to the client.
