Re: Delta Pilots Threaten Strike Over Pay Cuts (merged)
Rants - you are truly a piece of work.
I just added up my flight time for the year - 750 block (actual) hours. With time off for vacation and training I averaged over 77 hours hard time each full month I fly. Now that is low, since I've been on the 757 for the past 2 years I've endured back to back flip flop trips (all night flight to east coast, 24 hour layover, early morning departure back to west coast) that pay 15.5 hours for 10 to 11 hours of flying. 3 weeks in a row of that gives 90 hours pay for 60 hours of flying. Not bad, you say? Try doing 5 circadian changes in a week and see how you feel after 3 weeks of this. Recover for a week and do it all over again. Or I do 4 weeks of 4 day trips, east coast, west coast, east coast, 10 to 12 hour duty days, 23 hours flying. Productive but long days with 12 hour layovers doesn't give you much recovery time. We have a minimum of 5:15 pay per day and scheduling does their best to hit or beat that mark. That is good, we want to work productively, the more you work per day the more days off you get. But to say ALPA pilots are lazy and unproductive is to deny reality. Any lack of productivity is directly tied to poor scheduling practices by management or marketing restrictions that put one flight a day into markets that result in 32 hour layovers. Can't blame those lazy ALPA pilots for that.
Fatigue and poor scheduling practices go hand in hand. Regional airlines, with their practice of scheduling "stand up" overnights of less than 7 hours rest between late night arrivals and 6 am departures are contributing to a culture of management pilot pushing that will result in more system errors and will lead to more accidents. ALPA, for all of Rant's ravings, has contributed more to fighting poor scheduling practices and engendered sound scientific fatigue management than any other group out there except NASA. The fight against unsound practices by managent can only come from a union. ALPA, for all its's warts, is the largest and most experienced pilot union in the world. It has more resources than any other pilot group. All pilots, not just ALPA pilots, benefit from the work ALPA has put into the piloting profession.
Rants, if you fly corporate jets and are flying the max then you are most likely a fractional pilot. You must like working for half the wages of a comparable corporate pilot. If you are flying large jets then you may be a JetBlue pilot or Air Tran pilot. In either case you benefit by the wage standards and workrules that were set by ALPA carriers that have come before you. Don't be too smug in your beliefs until you have been around a while. These things go in cycles. Once this round of concessions is over then the natural cycle will progress and the big airlines will go back to making billion dollar profits. We will be there when that happens and we will recover our wages.