How many real flying hours per month at EK

[Capt. Flamingo]

JammedStab,

It all depends on how many days in the month, bidding preferences, fleet, seat, rostering team's mercy, etc.

Rosters will be produced in order to achieve maximum productivity but without exceeding it, because they don't want to pay overtime. Productivity thresholds are as follows:

-Months with 31 days: 92 block hours.
-Months with 30 days: 89 block hours.
-Months with 29 days: 86 block hours.
-Months with 28 days: 83 block hours.

So based on the above a January roster will be aimed to have 91:55 block hours (being the case for most Capts and some FOs), a February roster will be aimed to have 82:55 block hours, and so on.

For now the scheduled block equals "credit", credit is what you are getting paid per block hour, so if your trip has 20 hours block time then you are getting 20 hours credit (flight pay). At the same time if you are doing an ULR you get paid for the whole block time of the trip (regardless if augmenting or not), also if you are deadheading you get credit for the whole planned block time of the flight you are deadheading on (that being in EK or any other airline). If you are called for sim support you get 5:30 credit hours; so the governing factor while rostering is the credit hours, because again, they don't want to pay overtime. Important to say also that ground duties, PPC recurrent, leave, etc don't incur in any credit (i.e. you don't get paid for those) so you might have a 92 hours roster plus some kind of training.

To answer your question. If you like bidding for freighters then you might end up with a very low "stick time" but with lots of credit hours from all the deadheading involved, you will still be paid the whole block hours of your trips but since you deadheaded in half of them then only stick time goes in your logbook and only stick time goes towards the 100 per month/ 900 per year limit.

Same thing happens with ULR flying. Let's say in Feb you end up with 2 ULRs of 30 hours block each, and the rest of the roster is two pilots flights all of them adding 22:55 therefore making up the productivity threshold of 83 hours for a 28 days month. In this example you will get paid 82:55 hours but the company will only take 52:55 hours as stick time "factoring"(82:55-30 hours of augmenting from the ULR trips), so even though you are required to be all this time in the airplane your monthly and yearly stick time hours will be low allowing the company to use you more. I must add that all the ULR block hours are considered for the upgrade experience requirements, so doing many ULRs wont hurt you in that aspect.

Whatever the case you will be in an airplane for a long time each month, if you are looking for less stick time then bid for freighters because all the deadheading chews up into the productivity thresholds.

Hope this helps