When you pilot a FedEx plane, you don’t have to worry about rowdy passengers, passengers who bitch and moan, passengers who show up late, passengers with serious health issues and above all, no potential hijackers. It seems that flying cargo planes must be the preferable thing to do for a living.
Or are there downsides? Do pilots of passenger planes make more money?
Cargo planes seem to be a bit more a risk, as the varying cargo can be quite large, and its attachment not well tested…
Passenber aircraft are often pushed into freight service when they are too worn out to refurbish for passengers, but not completely ready for scrapping. So the planes are older.
This is a very old thread but it’s from a pilot who switched from passenger to cargo planes. It answers a lot of the op’s questions from the perspective of a pilot.
Tell that to these guys.
My experience is that flying freight is considered to be a lesser job than flying passengers. However most pilots doing the considering don’t fly freight and haven’t flown freight so what is considered to be a better job and what is actually a better job might not be the same.
I fly for a charter company that has passenger and freight contracts so probably have a better perspective than most on the pros and cons. For me the differences between the types of flying has less to do with what/who we are flying and more to do with the scheduling.
Our passenger flights are all scheduled for day time with longer turn around times on the ground than the freighters get (45 minutes compared to 30 minutes). For our passenger flights I have to get up at 5:30 in the morning and I’ll be home just before 7 pm so I get a normal sleep and can generally exist in sync with the rest of the world. By contrast the freighter flying is all at night with our two regular runs scheduled to land back home at 3:10 am and 4:55 am. They also run notoriously late as we have to wait around at outports for high priority mail from connecting flights. It is not unusual to see the sun rise on the later of our two runs.
Everyone is different but I find it very difficult sleeping during the day and will be lucky to get 4 hours sleep in the morning and a short 30 minute nap in the afternoon before doing the next night. I find the freighter flying to be very fatiguing for that reason.
The flying differs in other ways as well. The freighter flying is all to major airports with air traffic control, radar, and instrument landing systems (ILS). Because it’s at night and the early hours of the morning there’s normally no other air traffic aside from other freighters. The weather can play a big factor. We fly in to Sydney which has a strict curfew and only has one runway available for take-off and landing at night. That runway is often shortened due to runway works and the ILS is often not available at night. If the tail wind for landing is too strong then we need to look at going somewhere else, and a lot of the time there aren’t many suitable places. We have a dispensation to allow us to land with up to 20 knots of tail wind which can be challenging as well. Other ports are notorious for fog and thunderstorms. Basically on a freighter flight there is always at least one place that has a marginal weather forecast. We can’t just take as much fuel as we like because carrying more fuel means carrying less freight. We are always checking forecasts and deciding whether we can safely carry a bit less fuel.
The passenger flying is to small airports in uncontrolled airspace with no ATC help and minimal instrument landing procedures. On the other hand the weather is generally more benign and there is less to think about operationally.
None of this has anything directly to do with whether we have passengers or freight in the back of the aeroplane.
To look more at the differences purely due to passengers vs freight. I don’t have to give PAs to freight, I don’t have to find smooth flight levels for freight, and I don’t have to worry about whether the cabin is too hot or cold for freight.
So which do I prefer? I don’t have a firm preference. I find the freighter flying more challenging and therefore more rewarding but also more fatiguing and much more disrupting to leading a normal life. The passenger flying is easy non-challenging fluff that I get bored with after a week but I can more easily lead a normal life around it. As it is I’m quite happy with what I get which is a mixture of passenger and freighter flying throughout the month.
BTW I get paid an extra $50 a night for freight flying but that isn’t enough to make a difference to me and is a function of flying late at night rather than from flying freight per se.