Originally Posted by skybolt

It is not taboo to work extra. Most all of us, except in the time of furloughs, work extra. Pilots are just a greedy as are Doctors, but a man has to have a life and the airline pilot job can prevent that if management gets its way. If allowed, management would keep a pilot on duty for sixteen hours a day, seven days a week with no days off. If you don't believe that, you should ask some of the guys stuck in 135 jobs; their employers work them to the FAR limits for months at a time. And don't forget, if you ever knew it, the FAR's were built during the time that the FAA had the joint mandate to "PROMOTE and regulate" the aviation industry, meaning that they are not specifically aimed to providing safe travel to the paying passenger. They are also aimed to help the company make a profit, a sitution that doesn't include allowing the pilots to have lives.

The regulations have decreed that a pilot must not fly more than 1000 hours a year, 30 hours in seven days, or 8 hours between required rest periods. The regs also require a 24 hour break every seven days.

Have you attempted to staff an airline? Just for grins, lets do it, OK? First lets say that your airline will fly 100000 hours every 365 days. If you can fly every pilot up to the FAR flight time limits, you will need 100 pilots. Divided equally, you will fly 274 hours per day. 274 hours per day divided by exactly 8 flying hours per day per pilot shows a requirement of 35 pilots per day, BUT you can only work pilots out of 7 days so you have to adjust these numbers to reflect that, then you need to allow one week a year per pilot off for recurrent training, and another four days a year for left seat checkrides and another two days off per year per co-pilots for their checkrides. In short order, you find that you must hire a significantly higher number of pilots than you would think you need according to the simple math. BUT, the simple math, and business related adjustments did not include any adjustments for quality of life for the pilots. If times are good, the manager says OK, we'll actually give you your weekly 24 hour break in your base, or he says we'll give you a few guaranteed days off per month. All of which increase the staffing numbers from the purely mathematical requirement.

All of which brings me to this, a properly staffed airline will appear to a bookkeeper to be fat on pilots. PERIOD. No question about it. So, when times get a little tough, they money people decide that they've got to cut the fat, and their limited view of our world leads them to believe that pilot staffing is in fact, fat. Then they want pilots to fly more, so being generally supportive of our employers, we pitch in to help out. We burn the candle at both ends so to speak. Then the managers say to themselves, hey look at how much money we can save if we reach this production level all of the time. They ask for more and more OT. etc. Jetproppilot, you just can't burn that candle from both ends for perpetuity. We know that, our union knows that and most reasonable people know that; so we attempt to maintain some sort of balance. We don't like the abuse of OT by either company of our fellow pilots, because it leads to poor quality of life for us all.

It is my belief that you would be surprised at the amount of extra flying that happens on a daily basis by the average airline pilot. We are NOT a bunch of featherbedders who demand to be overstaffed so that one of us can be asleep in the break room at all times. We are a group of workers who spend between 16 and 20 days per month away from our families and who don't like it when our fellow pilots enable managements continued perception that we'll take anything. The abuse of OT is just such an action.

Now, don't get me started on the PFT pukes who will PAY to sit in an airliner cockpit.

skybolt

Originally Posted by jetproppilot

Thank you for your informative post.

and its been OKed for them to work eighty hours a week.

If you are a heart surgery fellow (a "fellow" is a dude subspecializing...heart surgery is 2 additional years after a general surgery), its OK to do heart surgery eighty hours a week.

So why can an airline pilot fly an airliner only 30 hours a week?

Originally Posted by jetproppilot

IN OTHER WORDS,

30 hours of flying a week, as a set maximum, seems intuitively low.

Originally Posted by skybolt

I could easily fly 60 hours a week if all I did was fly. I usually work a twelve hour duty day just to fly five hours. As it is, I usually spend 250 or so hours away from base/on duty per month. If you subtract the 5 hours of sleep for the numerous reduced rest nights and 8 hours for normal nights, I still spend over forty hours a week doing my job. So while 30 hours of flying might seem intuitively low, forty to fifty hours a week of work doesn't seem so.

The reason the rules exist is simple, an accident happened sometime in the past and the cause was determined to be fatigue. AFTER the fact (as were the vast majority of the FAR's), a reg was written to prevent further loss of life. The old adage is "the FAR's are written in blood". The reason that you are not limited in duty time by the government and I am is that I can kill 198 paying passengers plus myself and five other crew members at a time. You can only kill one. That and the fact that the television news can't make any money by showing a medical mistake. If a doctor leaves a sponge inside a patient, the patient may die days later. That doesn't fit very well into the "if if bleeds, it leads" catagory. If I run out of brains and let a CFIT happen, it leaves a half mile long path of blood, guts, smoke, kerosine fumes and twisted metal for CNN to televise at a profit.

Originally Posted by Mach8Forest

There is an association of pilots that cannot stand the word SCAB. However, they are what they fear the Most, SCABS!
ASK A MEMBER OF THE APA? My best friend was an AA pilot and stated many times "We Stuffed the RENO guys to the bottom because they were all SCABS that stole AA jobs"
APA then stole the Jobs of TWA pilots in the name of so called unionism!
These pilots are in my opionion worse than a man that walks of the street and crosses a picket line for selfish and maybe personal financial reasons. The APA pilot instead hides behind a weak group of avaitors and crutches to slogans of unionism. The APA used thier Company's Corporate buying power to Exploit the TWA pilots. They did not use pilot Safety record, Geograhphic history, Date of hire, or culture to integrate pilots in a fair and equitable merger. They stole the jobs of an Elite 75 year + pilot group because they could. They are the true SCABS of the Airline industry.
Mach8Forest

Originally Posted by Roll Inverted and Pull

I did the airline pilot thing for thirty years. I know a little bit about how the pay system works. A pilot`s pay starts when the aircraft is pushed away from the gate, the pay stops when the plane comes to a stop at the gate. All of the other stuff that a pilot may do, such as planning, weather,eating crappy meals at some slop chute on the road, laying over at the old motel 6, whatever, isn`t pay time. It would be like, in the doctor example, when you are actually cutting open a patient, you are working, when the operation stops, the pay stops.

Originally Posted by jetproppilot

So now the 30 hour a week thing is making more sense.

Sounds like pilots are taking it in the beee hind, though, since it seems if you add up all the pre-flight, layover, post-flight, and delay stuff,


if you were getting paid from arrival-at-airport to leaving-airport,

you'd be getting more justifiable pay.

Uhhhhhhh,

SOMEONE NEEDS TO TELL THE CEOs/FAA THAT PILOTS ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT F UKKING PIECE OF THIS PIE.

Again,

what am I missing here?

Without doctors, there ARE no patients....no patients for the hospitals to provide rooms/lab work/xrays/CAT scans for

Without pilots, there are no passengers to fly around the country.

Of course, patients (medicine)/passengers (airlines) are the most important. And their safety is paramount.

But again, no pilot, no takeoff.

Why this position isn't reveled is making me wanna beat somebody up.