Wino: yep, and as you, Airbubba and many others know, now and then even our narrowbody crews spend two or so hours at one of our two large hubs, but just as often, many times we are doing a very quick turnaround at a smaller spoke airport, then back at a hub, very busy pulling our bags through a large terminal, no time to eat, in order to check the six feet of flight papers at the next gate (for the laymen here, we scan the flight release/flight plan info and then catch, buried in a very big, mostly disorganized JUMBLE of information: NOTAMs about shortened runways, inop ILS glideslopes, runway braking action 'problems' , see if the planned fuel.... and on certain days, if we bust our butt on four or five legs, we might get paid for five-six intense hours of work.
And this is MUCH more intense, fast-paced work (with very limited minimum fuel on the dispatch release) than what widebody crews experience, except during the descent in a two-man cockpit into Europe with visibility quickly decreasing. But, I would rather be a hard-working narrowbody pilot: I feel more like a pilot...
There seems to always be some irony in an airline's stated goal nowadays to have flightcrews become much more p r o d u c t i v e, when it is ALSO committed to the hub-and-spoke networks, as it stated years ago; is this not an inherent contradiction, especially when most of this fleet's crews (and passengers) must often change airplanes at hubs with very little time built in for this, and so many planes on the same taxiways at times? Southwest certainly did not quickly develop its network-it has been creating it, very carefully, for about twenty five years or so.
