Can I be contacted on a day off?
 

If my company wish to notify me of a duty day or a day off can they contact me on a day off or in-between duty days? I have not been advised of a 'contactable period.

Any thoughts?

If you pick up your phone... I don't think it is forbidden to call anyone!

Depends on jurisdiction, inhouse rules and local laws. My company can try to call me on my off days, if i dont pick up there is no problem anyway. If they call me during a legal rest time that rest-time resets and starts anew from the time of the call, which usually leads to cancellation of the duties on the following day. However, it might be quite different wherever you work and live.

Yes - generally, you can't be REQUIRED to be contactable, but anyone can call you (even those annoying telemarketers).

Phone 'OFF' until report/duty time or if you have a 'smart' phone I do enjoy the irony of 'aircraft' mode during my rest :ok: if you need the alarm ...

If in doubt ask your Base Captain or Fleet Manager.

Built4Speed: Yet another exaggeration regarding Ryanair: if your Standby starts at 05:00 then you should be ready to walk out of the door at that time, therefore you will have been awake from roughly 04:15 - 04:30 at the latest to get yourself ready, yes? Now do Ryanair call you at 02:00 or 03:00? No. They simply give you a heads up, to get into the office, at about the time you would have set the alarm clock anyway. To me that's perfectly reasonable & could be even helpful.

To answer the original question, anyone who hasn't been legally prevented from contacting you can call you at anytime, you have the right to have your phone switched off, ignore the call or take the call, whichever you so choose.

Heres the easy option, have 2 phones, one for work etc..cheap prepay, it stays off till YOU want it on, don't give them a landline and don't give them the other number, just the pre-pay and an email address..worked like a charm for me:E

Some Nokia's have a timed profile feature where by you can turn it to silent then it goes noisy at a certain time.

Although why any pilot in this day and age would give ops there personal number and not have "work" only phone I don't know.

You can get dual up to quad sim card phones these days as well if you don't want to be carrying more than one phone. Then when your off duty turn the offending sim to off line on days off.

I use a 35 euro dual sim Nokia 110. Nothing fancy but does the trick.

In response to X-centric;

I do not work for RyanAir or never have (so correct me if I am wrong), but is it definitely the case you have to be ready to leave at the beginning of your STBY or as soon as they call to walk out the door? Do you not have a minimum amount of time to report, maybe 1 hour or something? If true, is the above quote not an exaggeration in itself? Maybe some people live close to work and can get up, ready and into work within an hour?

Exactly! :ok:

Google "truecall" then reach for your credit card.

Also gets rid of telemarketers and irritating Indians offering to fix the operating system that you may not actually use.

Especially good with double glazing merchants and those :mad: who ring during dinner, call you by your first name like they are your best mate and then tell you that your non existent neck injury from the car crash you never had is worth x thousand quid. :mad:.

Not only is it immensely satisfying to have a device cut the swine off permanently without actually ringing the phone, your blood pressure will decrease by several points saving money on medical bills, food that you don't choke on and possibly the cost of divorce as you no longer rage about the house for two hours afterwards.

I have spoken.

Oh yes, also works with crewing should you wish.:D

m8rvk, not wanting to take the thread off course, but you are required to report 60 minutes after your call. Therefore, taking into consideration you need to get yourself ready, drive x distance to work, park up, wait for the staff bus or walk to the crew room/terminal, clear security etc., I don't see how, should you receive that call at say 05:00, you would be able to make it in on time for a 06:00 report if you were still in bed pumping up the Zzzzzzs at 05:00, even if you lived next door to the airport. As I say, FR don't call you in the middle of the night but sometimes just before your official standby commences & personally I don't see a problem with that, in fact it can take the pressure of a rush into work on the limit off your shoulders.

Again another thread is used to simply have a pop at Ryanair for a storm in a teacup, I'm afraid!

X-Centric, it depends - when I worked for Ryanair (thankfully I don't now) I could be from my bed to the crewroom within 35 minutes!! (Having had breakfast - all in the fridge waiting to go!). I wouldn't have dreamed of getting out of bed at 0415 "just in case" they called - time spent sleeping during standby was a huge benefit, especially when you'd probably already done 2 or 3 earlies before!

If the standby starts at 0500 then they should not be calling you before that time - this assumes you are observing the contract/ops manual which states you must report within one hour. Legally speaking if they call before that time then, as has been correctly stated previously, they are interrupting your rest period.

As regards days off if it's one of those companies that keeps calling you on a day off then get another phone etc.

There again I found it helpful if the first working day after days off was an early standby if they called you the day before to advise you rather than the phone going at 0500.

In my company, if you are disturbed during rest by a phone call from the office then the rest resets and you get another 11 hours min. If called from home standby (and not a minute before) you have 45 mins to leave then 1hr to travel to base....so 1hr.45min from the call to report.

In what other industry would people make such a fuss about being contacted by their employers? And why the faintly disguised aggression? Not exactly professional behaviour.

Yes, absolutely, calling at 1am when you're on an early standby is stupid, inconsiderate and possibly disrupts your rest thereby denying you your legal rest. But I haven't heard of that ever happening.

Calling on a day off? Big deal, if it's important I'm happy to take the call. If they want me to fly, I'm almost certainly unavailable due to previous commitments! :eek:

As for standbys, I am contractually on a 1hr report so if I'm on standby from 5am I know that I could be expected to be at the crew room for 6am. I will have my uniform ready, food in fridge, bag ready before I go to bed.

Being called out of bed at 5 for a 6 departure would be nightmare. I could make it, but I'd much rather get called at 4 or 4:30, have time for a coffee and a more leisurely drive. Seeing as in those circumstances I would have been in bed since 9pm, I'll be rested.

I could, but I don't think the answer would be the 'right' answer.

:confused:

Mikehotel152, Whilst I agree with your comments about being contacted on a day off are you suggesting that complying with the provisions of a Flight Time Limitation Scheme is unprofessional then?

The FTLs are there to prevent excessive fatigue - with many (one could argue most) companies rostering their crews to the maximum legal limits it is even more important than ever that both crews and Companies adhere to the constraints of their FTL system as well as the spirit of the law.

Like any relationship it helps if there is, at times, a little "give and take" but it rarely seems to be that the Company gives anything.

If you don't want to be disturbed leave your phone on silent or don't answer it.
As far as i'm aware there is no requirement to be contactable on a D/O or outside the the hours of a standby duty. Your D/O is supposed to be a period of rest free of duties so its entirely up to you whether you choose to speak to 'work' or not. Personally I tend not to answer the phone on a D/O but if they leave a message and its important i'll call them back as long as it doesn't compromise my personal plans.:ok:

Fireflybob,

Not at all. I respect the FTLs but I do not think being called an hour before your morning standby begins infringes those limitations.

I'm being practical. Put it this way, it is up to us to plan our lives so that we get enough sleep within the constraints of our rosters. If I am rostered to fly a 6:30am departure and I know I need to get up at 4 to achieve that without rushing, I'll be in bed by 8:30pm. If I'm instead rostered a standby starting at 6:30am I would go to bed at 8:30pm. In that situation if someone calls me at 4am to do a 6:30 departure, even though it's before my standby starts, I'll have had sufficient rest. For the avoidance of doubt, I'm not suggesting I'd get out of bed at 4 'just in case'! :)

In those circumstances FTLs are unlikely to be relevant because my previous day's flying will have been an early shift.