We met with a training captain a few weeks back and he provided some insight into the monthly schedules. You wont ever see a day off on any of your rosters. What you will see is a "blank day" or as he refered to them, "balcony days". These are days that the company has not assigned you any duties, but in the event a standby pilot is used, they can change your blank day to a standby day. With only 3 flights leaving NRT a day, you can imagine that the above case does not happen too often.
Your "days off" can be blank days, or for example when you are in Hong Kong, you have a 27 hour overnight and that can be considered your day off too for legality reasons.
That specific captain that we talked to flew over 90 hours last month. But as previously stated, the average is a little above 70.
Being that there is not seniority here, you do not bid for your schedules. You are able to request your specific days off, and the company complies as much as possible. They attempt to be fair to everyone, so if one year you request Christmas off, then next year, you might not get it again. As the contract states, you can be taken down to 8 days off, but that captain specifically stated that he cannot recall that ever happening since he had been here. Schedules here are still done by hand and the company is small. The seem to try to make everyone happy...as much as they can...
Last edited by crj705; 2nd May 2007 at 02:10.