Originally Posted by
ia1166
so, in summary then, you want a 2 week holiday every 6 weeks, and 10 days off a month, and 14 days sick leave a year.
thats around 200 days off in a 360 day year. And on the 160 days left you want to fly enought to get overtime?
is that about it?
Mate good luck with that!
I am at Atlas Air, and our contract is quite sub-standard compared to UAL/AA/Delta/Southwest/UPS/FedEx/Alaskan/Hawaiian/Spirit, etc.
We get off close to 200 days a year, and it is easy to get overtime, if you want it.
If you fly for one of the "better" US carriers, then you can have more days off.
Senior pilots at all the above, can work as little as 6-8 days/month, AND have a lot of vacation.
At Atlas, if you have scheduled two weeks of vacation in a month, and you want more, you can automatically get the whole month off. A number of pilots I know of have set their schedules up to get two months off in a row, including over the summer. The best I ever heard anyone do was be off from 1Jun-27Aug. That pilot got the min pay of 62 hours/month during that time off.
If you are fatigued at Atlas, for ANY reason, you just call scheduling, tell them you are fatigued, and you're done. They will give you 12 hours min rest, or any amount more than that if you request it.
We recently had a terrible time getting airlined (always in biz/1st class on intntl itineraries) from HKG-XIY. It took us all day. When we finally got to the hotel, our standard min rest is 8 hours of sleep opportunity in our hotel room. I didn't even call fatigued...just told them that because of our situation, we needed 12 hours until the wakeup call, which would delay the trip about four hours. Scheduling said no problem, and set our wakeup call for 12 hours away.
Many foreign contracts, including Emirates and others, are VERY sub-standard vs US terms and conditions.
Fatigue kills. We need decent rest, and vacation. If you don't have that, you aren't providing your customers with a reasonable level of safety.