longhaul pilots

[Kamil]

Hi

This can be a stupid question but I want to know.. .I posted this up on the Questions forum, but no one obviously dint bother to reply.... .I am kinda new to aviation and was wondering.

What is the usual schedule for longhaul airline pilots? How much time does he spend outside each month? Can he choose he's schedule?

Many Thanx in advance

[scroggs]

As you got no reply in Questions, I'll answer your query here. But then this topic is going straight back to Questions - it doesn't belong in Wannabes.. .I fly Boeing 747-200s for Virgin Atlantic. Although this aircraft is about to be retired, the life of the crews that fly it is fairly typical of the longhaul setup.. .Before the events of September 11th, the B742 covered the following destinations for Virgin: Antigua, Barbados, Boston, Chicago, Delhi, Lagos, Las Vegas, Miami, New York (Newark), Orlando, San Francisco, Toronto, and Washington. Most of these flights are a daily schedule, so would only involve one night at the destination, but a few schedules were less frequent and gave the crew in some cases up to a week away.. .A typical roster would involve four, five, or sometimes six of these schedules in a month; say a Newark (1 night), a Boston (1 night), a Delhi (5 nights), a Las Vegas (2 nights) and a Barbados (2 nights). All flights include an overnight sector, usually outbound if going east or south, and homebound if going to the USA, so a 1 night trip would get you home 48 hours after leaving UK. One or more of these rostered trips could be substituted by a period of Standby (available for any flying duty for three or four days), or perhaps by periodic ground training of some kind. A five-trip month would amount to about 80 flying hours.. .While this doesn't sound a lot of work (the roster above would be 16 working days), the disruption to home life is considerable. Each time you return home you are unavailable to the rest of the world - including your family - for 24 hours at least thanks to jetlag, and you do tend to find that the constant timezone changes have a cumulative effect. The worst combination is a US West Coast trip immediately followed by a trip to Asia. Of course, there are strict rules to try to prevent excessive fatigue.. .Some months can be less busy, and of course your annual leave will feature from time to time.. .I hope this begins to answer your question.