Life in the airlines: behind the scenes

[Cessna157]

Haven't checked in for a while. Had an interesting week last week.

Wednesday I made the commute back up to New York City. All that was on my schedule was to be on call Thursday, then on Friday go to Buffalo and back, then on call again saturday, then another trip out of Cincinnati on Sunday. That would have been interesting...trying to work in New York one day, and Cincinnati the next. Luckily, that all changed!

Quick definition here: Reserve vs ready reserve. There are 2 primary types of pilot schedules: Line pilots and reserves.
Line - If you hold a line, you know exactly what flights you'll be flying, what times you leave, return, etc., and are pay protected for everything.
Reserve - A reserve pilot only has work days and off days, and on those work days, there are times that you're on call. For 14 hours a day, scheduling can call me and give me an assignment. And that call out can be as short as 90 minutes.

I am a reserve pilot, as I do not have enough seniority to hold a line. I get 11 days off, of which is a block of 3 together and block of 4 together. On my reserve days, I have a specific "window" of when I'm on call. I usually try to get the 8am-10pm window, as it is the most useful and I'll get more trips that way.

As a reserve pilot, a few times a month (up to 6) I may be required to go to the airport and sit "ready reserve." When I sit ready, it is for a 6 hour block where I can be called out to fly a flight at the very last minute. An example happened on Thursday.

Thursday morning scheduling called me and said I was going to sit "ready reserve" from 3pm-9pm. So I showed up to the airport in full uniform, and took a seat in our pilot's lounge and started listening to Magical Mouse Radio on my laptop while I dozed off for a bit. At about 6:45, crew scheduling called my phone and said I was to ferry an airplane (fly it empty to reposition it) to Cincinnati, and they would overnight me in Cincy and fly me back to New York on Friday. The nice benefit of this was I was going to get to sleep in my own bed, and not a stinky hotel room!

The captain I was sitting ready with and I brought the plane to Cincy. When we arrived, there was another crew there waiting to take a load of passengers to Omaha, they really did need that plane! Once I got my stuff off, I looked at my schedule and saw that instead of going back to New York in the morning, I didn't have to come in until the afternoon....more time at home...while on the clock!

The trip that I eventually got was a fairly good one. Friday I flew CVG-SDF-ATL-MYR. We arrived in Myrtle Beach, SC at about 11pm Friday, and didn't leave until Sunday. That made for a nice time! Sunday was a nice easy one: MYR-ATL-LEX, and we were done by 11am. My mom and dad drove down from Cincinnati to Lexington (only about a 90 minute drive), picked me up, and we went to the Cincinnati Bengals training camp which was just 10 minutes away. See, this job ain't so bad!

Monday really kicked my butt though. We started at 6am, flew Lexington to Washington-National, then to New York-JFK, then to Washington-Dulles, then to Detroit, then finally to Cincinnati. It was over 7 hours of flying, packed all into a 10 hour day. We didn't get one break at all, other than 30-45 mins between flights (not really enough time to go inside to get a bite). So when I got home Monday afternoon, I was famished and fatigued.

Tuesday was day 6, which is the most we can work without a day off. Unfortunately this meant that I to do an out/back (not able to overnight somewhere), so I was just on call all day with no flights.

But now I am no longer based in New York, I am back at my home airport CVG, which is only a 10 minute drive from my house. Tomorrow I am back on for the weekend, starting off sitting ready reserve at 10:30am. Hopefully I get something fun like last week!


Here's a couple pics I took along the way:
A busy day in ATL at sunset



The plane we had Monday had a strong airconditioning pack for the flight deck, and it was so humid that the entire cockpit was fogging up. It actually was funny because we were taxiing around, having to fan the fog out of our faces. Here you can see the 2 air ducts that blow in our faces/bodies: