Least experienced crews on trains and planes on holidays?

Factual Questions
1

My wife and I were driving home from San Bernardino today. Coming up Cajon Pass we saw a couple of those monster freight trains making the transit through the pass.

I got to thinking. Both railroads and airlines use a crewing system in which the crews bid, or make a request, for the routes and schedule times of their choice. Who actually gets picked depends upon seniority.

Now I would expect that the most senior people, having their choice, wouldn’t bid for trips on holidays. So I would expect that on average the holiday crews flying planes and running trains would be less experienced than at other times.

Does anyone know if this is true and does it have any effect on accident rates on holidays? I haven’t noticed any, but then I haven’t been looking.

2

This doesn’t answer or even address your question literally or explicitly, but I still think it’s informative and possibly even applicable.

This link should take you to the ‘full text’ version of a very interesting (and disturbing) article that appeared in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine a few years ago. Bottom line was that mortality rates were greater on weekends than on weekdays. One explanation for this often postulated, but never before proven phenomenon, was that the most junior staff (and hence least capable and experienced) were working on the weekends.

If the full text link above doesn’t work, this one should give you at least the abstract (summary).

3

Compensating for the desirability of getting holidays off, if you can opt for that due to seniority (and hence experience), would be the custom of giving incentive pay for working a holiday. This might alleviate the effect you postulate to some, unknown degree if (as I suspect) it is the practice.

4

That link is irrelevant to the OP. That refers to hospitals. You’d need to show higher mortality of people involved in common carrier accidents.

5

Originally Posted by KarlGauss

Putting aside for a moment that I, myself, pointed out that my link was irrelevant (in a literal and/or explicit sense), it is still awfully tempting to speculate that the observation it contains may be a generic one, i.e. mortality/accident rates are highest on the weekends/holidays when the least experienced and/or least capable staff are most likely to work.

6

You’re making a couple of assumptions here, and I’m not sure that they are true.

  1. That senior people would be more likely to not work on holidays.

Many senior people are older, with their children grown and gone, celebrating the holidays with their own family. So they may have less desire to take holidays off than more junior people, with young children at home for the holidays.

And often there is a pay incentive for working on the holidays!

  1. That senior people, with more experience, are less likely to be in accidents.

In many cases, senior people, more experienced & bored with the job, are more lax about things than junior people, who may be a bit more careful about following all the procedures.

It would be interesting to see some studies about either of these, if anyon knows of some.

7

OK.

8

Airline pilot here …

In general in the airline industry there is NO premium pay for holidays, and only trivial premium pay, if any, for night/weekend/3rd shift work. At least that’s true for pilots & flight attendants. Unionized ground staff have a greater likelihood of some premium pay for some things.

Having major holidays off is, in general, very popular and you have to be fairly senior to get Christmas or Thanksgiving off. Groundhog Day or President’s Day less so.

The fallacy in the OP’s question is in the details of seniority. Speaking just to pilots:
A typical big airline flies 5 or more types of aircraft. Each aircraft has 2 crew positions. That means there are ten separate jobs at the airline, all of which are “pilot”. The distribution of jobs follows seniority, but people only change jobs every few years.

An individual pilot starts out as First Officer on the smallest, lowest paying airplane and (with luck) moves up in aircraft size & pay, then eventually over to the Captain’s position on the smallest, lowest paying airplane, then (with luck) moves up to the larger and larger aircraft until mandatory retirement cuts off his/her career. So in 30-ish years he/she may hold only 6 or 8 different jobs total.

Looking at a hypothetical airline … say you’ve got 50 very senior guys who fly, say, 777 Captain. Then you’ve got another 100 almost-as-senior guys who fly the 767 as Captain. Then 200 757 Captains, then 400 737 Captains, then you get to the First Officers (co-pilots). Again we have about the same numbers: 50 777 F/Os, 100 767 F/Os, 200 757 F/Os, and 400 737 F/Os.

That’s 1500 guys (and probably 25 gals), enough for a decent sized airline. There are a bunch of details I’m leaving out, but this is a pretty good sketch of how an airline is staffed.

Now it’s time to decide who works Christmas. About 1/2 the people are working any given day.

So the top 25 of the 50 777 captains take Xmas off, and the next 25 work. These guys are very, very senior in an absolute sense, but are junior amongst the 777 Captains. They fly the crappy trips on the crappy days.

Now we have to crew the 767 operation. Guess what, the top 50 take Xmas off, and the bottom 50 work. Those are still some damn senior guys, but they’re doing the transcon redeye (which torture ought to be against the Geneva Convention) every Saturday night / Sunday morning while the senior guys do the banker’s hours ORD-LAX & back day trip on Tue-Thu.

Even among carriers that only fly one aircraft type and therefore only have 2 jobs, not 10, you still have the effect that the juniormost Captain out there is roughly 1/2 way up the seniority list and has been doing the job for quite awhile. And even though the bottom-most, least experienced First Officer is working XMas, so is the F/O almost halfway up the F/O ladder, i.e. 1/4 way up the total career ladder.

So amongst pilots the idea that only the newbies are working XMas is definitely faulty.
Conversely, most carriers do not segregate their flight attendants by aircraft type. They may segregate between international and domestic, but that’s about it. So on Xmas you’ll definitely see fewer dinosaurs and more young’uns. Although now that the carriers are hiring a lot of mid/late-40s ex-wives as F/As, age is no longer the reliable proxy for seniority it once was. Back in the 60s it was common for F/A hiring standards to be between age 20 and 22 only.
Finally, as to accident rate … the US airline industry only wrecks a handful of airplanes a year; how would you expect to see a difference in accident rate between, say, the 5 major holidays and the rest of the year when it’d take a couple hundred years to get a decent sample size?

So, no, in my humble (but professional) opinion, there is not a difference in safety between holiday and non-holiday air travel.

If the statistics somehow proved me wrong, I’d expect the majority of the difference to be attributable to worse weather agross the Big 3 holidays, T-Day, XMas, and NY, and/or additional psychological / emotional distraction leading to reduced crew / controller performance, rather than to seniority/juniority. There are provably more divorces, deaths, and suicides during the heavy Holiday season. Crewmembers are’t immune to the same emotional pressures.

9

Yes, this is certainly possible. I think that one of the major causes of accidents is complacency. The old “Well, I did it this way last time and nothing happened.” was certainly active in NASA and probably many other situations.

Very few pilots have accidents on their very first solo flight. The accidents tend to come later after they get cocky but before their have enough experience to handle unusual occurances with competence.

10

Ah, yes. I overlooked the fact that aircrews are also segregated by aircraft type. As you say, those who fly the biggest and best planes are all experienced. So if experience did result in a “holiday effect” it would show up in the smaller, less deluixe equipment and perhaps on the short-haul, so-called feeder airlines.

11

Just to add that the situation in the railroad industry is similar to the one LSLguy describes in the airlines. At least in Australia it is, but probably also in the US too.

If you want to become an engineer, you will invariably start out as a fireman (second man) on small shunting locomotives in the freight terminals. Then you become a driver, then you progress up through the various levels of freight. After this, you can go suburban passenger trains, then intercity ones, and then finally luxury interstate name trains. Or, you can stay in freight, as many guys prefer that.

The blokes in freight have to spend a lot of time away from home, and so many older, family men choose to make the jump across to city-based passenger trains, so they can go home to their wife and kids at night. The guys driving those mega-freighters would likely be at the middle level of seniority, but nonetheless very experienced at their job (getting 4000+ tons of containers up a grade in snow is harder than driving an electric train in the subway, yet the guys doing the latter may be more senior).

Because the freight trains attract guys who tend to put their work before their families (they are likely to be single), then the premium pay for holidays (in this part of the world, at least) will lead to actual competition for those shifts.

12

LSLguy provided the most thorough counter against the argument. However, I feel that I must point one thing out. The assertion seems to be that you could get a barely qualified pilot let alone a co-pilot (First-Officer) flying during the holidays.

That is simply not true. Piloting for the commercial airlines means building up years of experience with all kinds of different aircraft during almost all of the pilot’s adult life. This can be obtained by flying some of the most complex aircraft on the world in the military or through dedicated and expensive flight schools.

Both the pilot and First-Officer (co-pilot) are fully qualified ATP’s (air transport pilots) that generally have thousands of hours flying and are both fully prepared to fly and land your plane by themselves let alone as a team.

13

Be very careful at

500 hours PIC (*:: thinks he knows what he is doing :: * )

1500 hours PIC ( *:: knows he knows what he is doing :: *)

5000 hours PIC ( *:: knows what he is doing and gets sloppy:: *)

15,000 hours PIC (:: begins the time of denial about his physical condition ::)

Or so some say…

YMMV