Originally Posted by
Murray_NN
At FR we are home everynight. We rarely fly past midnight. We are rarely called to work on our days off. It's a perfect place to be in aviation and raise a family.
Personally I'm on a floating contract and that suits us the best at the moment for our lifestyle. So my gross salary is under €145,000 per year. I work 5 days on earlies and 5 days off then 5 lates...then a repeating pattern and so on.
1. No, you are in any given Ryanair base every night. Last summer, "home" as you refer to it, was 10 nights in STN, 5 nights in MAD, 5 nights in EDI, 5 nights in LPL, 5 nights in LPA, 10 nights in OPO and 1 night in BOH. And guess what... not one of those bases has a direct flight from my base.
2. When you have to get up at 5am, have a wash and a shave, turn up at your base in your uniform, go through security, get a boarding card, board last, sit in the middle seat for 3 hours between an obese, flatulant tourist and a gobby know it all who talks to you endless about aviation (you will have to do all this TWICE unless you are lucky enough to opperating out of a base with direct flights to your home base), then get to the other end, trawl your way to an Etap, Formule 1 or other sorry excuse for a hotel, then sit there scratching your backside for the rest of the afternoon... that is not a day off.
I lost 18 days off last summer doing that. Your 5/5 roster in reality is nearer to a 6/4 or even a 7/3 depending on how difficult the base you are positioning to is and where you live.