Back in BOS. Same hotel, same floor, same side of same hall, even same handed-ness of room. The only difference vs. last night is the pattern of carpet stains.
Had a nice workday; good weather, smooth air, nice flight attendants, and no delays. Easy peasy. One leg home tomorrow then some days off.
Thanks. There are advantages to working here. I think at some point the passenger fleet will be replaced (most likely Embraer E190s) while the freight fleet stays as is. When that happens we will have to decide what we want to fly and I should be senior enough to be able to get what I want.
On the subject of flight preferences. I guess if you get paid per flight hour it makes sense to have maximum flight time for minimum ground time which would be one long flight per day. We don’t get paid per hour until we get over 70 hours per month though, and we average around 50 hours a month, so there is normally no advantage to us maximizing flight time, hence my preference for several short busy flights over one long flight.
Is there a 1,000 hours a year ceiling limit on domestic-route flying time?
I believe the FAA just overhauled your flight and duty limits, LSLGuy will have to supply the details.
Report on the last day of the trip: Up at 0515, hotel had decent free breakfast available before we left at 0630. One leg from BOS-MIA. Weather nice, arrived early, done for the day at 1115. Even made a nice landing. Felt good. Now 4 or more days off. This day was much more civilized than the first day was.
As **Richard Pearse **said, effective a couple years ago the FAA revamped all the rest & duty regs affecting US airlines. They’re now contained in 14 CFR 117, commonly called “Part 117”. eCFR :: 14 CFR Part 117 -- Flight and Duty Limitations and Rest Requirements: Flightcrew Members (FAR Part 117) is the official word for anyone really curious. Warning, it reads about like the tax code.
117 regulates two different aspects of our workday. First is the so-called “block time”, or “flight time”, which is the time the aircraft is in motion. This interval begins when the airplane leaves the gate or parking space and ends when the aircraft arrives at the destination gate or parking space. The second area regulated is so-called “duty time”, which is all the time as an employee you’re working. For a typical pilot work day that starts when you’re required to be at the airport before the first flight, and runs continuously until shortly after you park the last flight just before you leave to go home or to the hotel to sleep.
So for example on that first workday of mine, with three flights from MIA-MCO-MIA-BOS, the “block time” for the three flights totaled 5 hours and 11 minutes. But my on-duty time, from when I clocked in at MIA until I clocked out at BOS was 10 hours, 35 minutes. Notice the on-duty time was about double the block time. By contrast, on the last day with just one flight, block time was 3:13 and on-duty time was 4:25. IOW, on-duty time was about 130% of block time on day 3 vice 200% of block time on day 1. That difference is what pilots mean by varying “efficiency” between work days.
The rules get real complex for long-range flying where we carry extra crewmembers and take turns napping while enroute. I’ll ignore that complexity going forward and just talk about the basic 2-pilot operations that are 100% of US domestic and a sizeable fraction of US international operations to near-overseas destinations.
Block time is limited to 8 or 9 hours per shift AKA “duty period”. The 8 hour reduced limit applies to graveyard shift work and the normal 9 hour limit applies to early morning through late night work. We also can’t exceed 100 block hours in a rolling 28 day period, nor 1000 block hours in a rolling 365 day period. So the answer to Velocity’s question about 1000 hours a year is “Yes, but …”. It’s 1000 hours from Jan 1 to Dec 31, but also 1000 from, say, May 11 2014 to May 10, 2015. And 1000 for all the other 365-day intervals.
So far, so simple. Fasten your seatbelts, here comes the turbulence. …
Duty time is limited to 14 hours in one shift, for work starting in the early morning and running to roughly bedtime. If you need to start earlier, or need to work later, or even worse, work overnight, the maximum duty time shrinks on a sliding scale to as little as 9 hours for an all-graveyard shift. *And *the sliding scale also depends on how many flights you’ll be making in that shift. So there’s a recognition that flying lots of short flights is more tiring than one or two long ones. We’re also limited to 60 hours total duty time in a rolling 7 day period and 190 hours total duty time in a rolling 28 day period.
Last of all, there’s rest. Rest is all the remaining time that’s not on-duty time. We need 10 hours rest between on-duty shifts, and once every 7 days we need 30 hours continuous rest.
There’s more, but that’s 90% of it. And just to forestall any nitpickers, yes, I did simplify a few things I said above.
Pilots are personally legally responsible for perfect compliance with all the rules, on pain of hefty fine and/or suspension or even permanent loss of license. Which means loss of income and maybe even job.
As you might imagine all this is a right bugger to keep track of by hand. Airlines’ IT departments keep everything nice and legal, in addition to complying with any union-derived additional restrictions. (Don’t ask.) For small companies and for individuals who need to monitor it themselves, well, … there are apps for that.