Gunfighter

Something for everybody is a good thing. We all benefit from someone senior preferring a different BES.

The talk of NB vs WB seems to cherry pick a few desirable NB trips and compare them to the entirety of WB flying. As BV and others have pointed out, there is a range across WB flying as well.

This is how I'd segment the WB flying:
-3 pilot late departure including SA and European cities with multiple arrivals. It's the low tier stuff worth only 5:15/day.
-3 pilot early departure which is barely a WOCL disruption for West to East commuters. This is the middle of the pack 7ER/330 worth 6hrs/day.
-4 pilot non-FRMS is like a 3 pilot Europe except the post arrival nap ends up being 3 hours in the bunk with pay.
-4 pilot FRMS is the king of WB res life. One RES GS = 100+ hours in the month and 4-9 PB days worth 12-17 each.
-4 pilot daytime flying is the Caribbean turn equivalent. It is a 3 day trip with a morning departure to Asia and an evening arrival to US. 28 hour three day trip with 2 legs and normal sleep cycles.

Trip7

Seniority is a pilot's best tool for leverage. Senior WB is better than Senior NB(assuming same seat) It's much easier for pilot to attain senior NB than it is to grab senior WB so naturally pilots discuss the pros and cons. Moreover, the scale tips more towards WB when commuting is a thrown into the mix. Overall WB is better than NB, but there are melting pot of reasons a pilot may choose one or the other. That being said, some are being alittle overzealous with their reactions when someone brings up the negatives of WB flying. Kilo pretty much insinuated the 765 is not real WB flying as a rebutall to why a 765A went to 717A, and that all NB flying is a "Salt Mine"

marcal

Whats a typical month credit wise for a normal WB-A out of NYC. I’ve heard it’s a lot more difficult to WS bc of pu limits, etc. Are GS avail at all levels of seniority?

As a NB CA living in base, GSs are plentiful if desired and I’d say I average 100hrs per month or so without breaking a sweat.

Just wondering the best ways to get credit hours up when I go to a WB one day, living in base.

Gunfighter

Pull up the trip coverage for the categories you are interested in and start clicking "Back". I've seen GS #2 a few days on NYC330A meaning even the plug had a shot at GS1. Min WB GS is 15:45, some are 30+ hours x2.

Do you really need 100 hours at WB rates?

Living in base, your best bet is bid reserve and fish for banked PB days. If you don't have the seniority to get early month reserve and late month banked PB, next best is 4 day res blocks with limited utilization and GS when you can.



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PilotWombat

Thread drift, but I keep seeing comments like this and the stats the company keeps putting in their emails about things getting handled in a matter of hours. I've had two issues submitted through the app. One has been sitting for well over a month now with no response whatsoever. The other is for an entire 6 day trip the company just unpaid me for. As in, I had already been paid for it, but they just removed the credit retroactively and took it out of my last paycheck. That's been sitting for over a week now, and it's the weekend so I have to wait even longer to get paid correctly. According to my CP it's been sitting with payroll for four days now, and they're just...not paying me.

I have more to submit, the but app literally won't let me put in more than one at a time. Crew Assist had to do that last one for me.

Maybe I'm the exception, but I am NOT impressed.

crewdawg

Dang I hate to hear that. Maybe I'm the lucky one here. However a few buddies had the same results as mine within the last few weeks. One was fixed the next morning and other was same day.

Hotel Kilo

There is no way senior NB compares Trip. If you're talking about even a 5K - 3k SN on a NB, their schedules are not that great. Because, well, the NB trips just are not that great in general. I spent a layover (it was cold and snowing outside) looking at NYC and ATL NB bid packs on all the NB fleets. Unless you are XXX seniority or less, the trips are all baout the same. Even the XXX folks got some pretty crappy rotations. (I'm going to assume they bid for those trips). SN XXX on a WB is getting one leg, nice layover, then one leg back. No reroute. No 6 days (unless they want one) and able to commute on both ends (assuming they commute). In the slow months they can bid reserve and grow a beard.

No way, the vast majority of the NB rotations that I looked at sub 5K-3K on the NB stuff were mostly no different than the person at 13K. ATL seemed to have the worse though compared to the NYC folks.

Hotel Kilo

Took them 9 months and 17 days to fix a pay issue I had from a buggered rotation. We are not winning.

FangsF15

What you aren’t accounting for are the pilots who drop all/most of their schedules, and pick up super easy broken trips. Like DH out, one leg back for 10:30 of pay kind of stuff. Still one leg days…

It’s more effort to make that magic happen, but it can be a very easy life if you are willing to be flexible.

saturn

When I was at a regional, stand-ups went senior for a reason. Same kinda thing at play with our WBs. Those who hated them (like myself), did so because they hated being shorted sleep by design.

For me, I think flying is generally pretty easy. The metrics being used here to weigh duty period difficulty seem to be things like: legs per day, block, duty length. For me, how much sleep I get, what part of my rythem I'm alloted said sleep, and if I wake up naturally vs alarm, are much bigger factors in what makes my job "hard". You may ask how many duty periods I have 3 legs, 4 legs... I'm more concerned with how many nights per month I can go to bed when I want, then wakeup when I want. If you think WB flying is great, be thankful that there's my type senior to you somewhere!