Originally Posted by
Paul Rice
While a 11 hour working day is a long duty period its not exceptional and 12 1/2 hours is a regular typical flying duty in the civilian sector. If your only flying 140 hours per annum you have it easy. 100 flying hours per 28 days is the summer target for the airlines and these hours are spread through deep nights, very early starts, late starts with time zone disturbances thrown in..
Paul..I'll join the pile in...
Like others here I've had a foot in both camps..airline flying for several decades before Covid precipitated retirement, before that amongst other things QFI'ing (JPs) both at an FTS and at CFS and having lived both the military and the civilian dream
IMHO you simply cannot compare the two roles as it seem you are attempting to do, simply by using flying hours.
On the QFIing side I vividly recall the sequence of rushing to early "met" every day, then brief/sortie/ de-brief/write up sortie to go in students file... then repeat, 3 in a day , sandwich grabbed on the turn, and then at the end of this "three flying hour" day if you had the secondary duty of scheduler another hour or two writing the next days programme. For others there was usually some other form of squadron or station duties that had to be fitted in.
Even a two sortie ("two flying hour") day often meant half a day in the Tower as Duty Instructor or behind the squadron ops desk running the programme
in addition to the flying...
When I moved on to the civilian world I suddenly discovered there was no mandatory "met brief",at 0715/0800, no sitting in operations keeping the plan running, no mandatory Friday afternoon ground training, no none-flying related secondary duties. No going into work everyday, even if not rostered just in case the programme changed.....and you sure as heck, at least where I was in the civilian world, didn't expect the default lunch to be a bag of crisps eaten whilst walking from the desk where you'd been writing a report to the briefing room to start briefing your third student of the day..
.....Oh heck, I've gone all Four Yorkshiremen.....
I do however certainly also recognise that working to a limit of 900 block hours a year in the civilian world, and the disruption on the body due to switching day/night/lates/earlies is ******* fatiguing..
In short flying hours is a pretty lousy metric for measuring aircrew work, ..we all know MOL likes to claim the 900 hours limit means civilian pilots "only" work a handful of weeks a year, and we know (don't we?) that's highly misleading, well you're (perhaps naively) doing similar with your 140 hours comment...