I often do the Dubai-Islamabad run and the turnaround is almost immidiet, the flight takes off within 90 mins.
I have often seen cleaning crews go in, my question is what do the flight crew do, do they rest (and if so where) or are they involved. I suppose it depends on the flight length.
They go to the far stall in a restroom and tap their feet under the next stall.
Drink. Heavily.
Paperwork. Lots and lots of paperwork.
The cabin crew do the pilots! Just joking, my sister was a stewardess and claims that pilots have such contempt for cabin crew that they rarely socialise. A more worthy observation is that British Airways stewardess Pat Kerr helps to run an orphanage in Dacca.
Are the flight crew involved in a large way in the turnaround, or are they granted a rest.
If your sister worked for BA then I’m not fucking surprised given the misery they’re causing everyone else in essentially the entire world.
I’ve heard this kind of thing before and I find at very disappointing. A work colleague used to fly for a BA subsidiary and tells many tales about cabin crew who don’t know their place in the crew pecking order, that is, they are in charge of the cabin but the captain is in charge of the entire aircraft, including the cabin. I asked him if problems between cabin crew and flight crew were common and he said it is rife.
As to the OP. The flight crew have to supervise the fueling, conduct a walk-around of the aircraft, prep the cockpit for the next leg including entering and checking the flight plan in the flight management system, get the latest weather and notams, check the aircraft load and trim, and brief. Domestic airlines can turn around in 30 minutes or less. If the time available is longer I’d suggest they’d take longer to do what they need to do as there is less time pressure and they’d probably have a bit of a rest.
In our company we can’t really turn around any quicker than about 45 minutes but we normally only do one flight a day as a crew so we don’t have any practice at quick turn-arounds. Also, the times we do have a quick turn-around are normally at unfamiliar airports and we take longer to get setup than if we were at a familiar port. We also operate as a self sufficient unit and don’t have any engineering or operations support so things like supervising fueling and obtaining weather updates can’t be delegated to someone else.
Heh… never heard of Southwest Airlines, have you? They generally turn flights around in something like 10-15 minutes from touchdown to takeoff. Granted, these are 1-2 hour flights, so it’s easier, but it’s impressive nonetheless.
Flight crew on those flights just hang out in the cockpit or switch with new flight crews.
Considering they’re using 737s, are they then able to take off with the remaining fuel, since the total engine run time will be about 5 hours, which is supposed to be within the flight time of the aircraft normally? Or are they topped off in that time?
I hasten to add my sister wasn’t BA, she was British Caledonian. And since they are defunct I am sure I won’t get into legal trouble by mentioning she often took coffee into the pilots on trans-atlantic flights only to find both pilots asleep. I applied to be a BA cadet pilot and later worked at ATC, which involved a lot of flights. I learned in ATC never to answer the question ‘What flight were you on?’ because I’d immediately be told how near to death I was, the ATC folk knowing more air incidents than ever make the ATC reports never mind the newspaper headlines.
Like doctors and nurses in hospitals?! Another myth shot down! I don’t get the attitude. IMO an airline pilot is basically just another kind of bus driver.
My cadet pilot interview lasted for weeks and had a series of psychological tests. A pilot told me that they were testing for ‘Someone smart enough to deal with any kind of emergency but not so smart that they bored easily with the routine of the job, like a coach driver in the sky’.
So me too, I’m kind of sad pilots and cabin crews don’t get on well. I guess, in the words of Kris Kristofferson, ‘everyones gotta have someone to look down on’ but surely in an aeroplane you can look down on everyone anyway without bitching about each other.
You’ve experienced this first hand?
Former major airline pilot …
On the topic of pilot & flight attendant working relationships.
Pilots and cabin crew don’t generally get along real well. A big reason is that the personalities the employer selects for are quite different since the jobs are quite different.
The ideal pilot is kinda smart in a technical sense, not real creative, and very confortable with absolutes & routines. He/she should also be rather unexcitable and good with trivia. Introverts who won’t stir up a union are also desired. Ultimately, a person who prefers the company of machines over people is good.
The ideal flight attendant really likes people; likes interacting with them. They’re extroverted improvisers. While they have routines in their job, a lot of the skill comes in working around the routines, not doing them to ever greater perfection. They tend to be very emotionally aware, and constantly tuning to the person they’re dealing with.
The end result is the two groups have almost nothing in common as personalities. Their jobs have a superficial similarity in that you travel on airplanes on odd schedules & sleep in hotels a lot. But what you *do * while at work is utterly different.
At many carriers, there are (were) a lot of pilot+F/A marriages since the travel & odd hours lifestyle can make it hard to build a dating relationship with somebody not in the business. In the old days it was the classic arrangement of the 30-ish male pilot with money & power and the 20-ish female F/A with looks and charm.
Then she gets old & beat to death overdosing on emotion & people, while his career is stagnated and they both get their incomes hammered as the airlines steadily destroy one of the few good-paying high quantity jobs left in this country. Meanwhile the effects of sedentary work & airport food make him a slob too. Stress builds & you can’t escape work stress at home since work becomes the sole shared topic of conversation.
So they get divorced. And each spends the next 15 years telling all the people they work with (ie. the pilots talk to pilots & the F/As talk to F/As) how awful their ex is and how typical he/she is of the breed. Lather, rinse, repeat for 10-15% of your workforce.
All in all, it does not lead to harmony in the workplace. There is, or at least can be, a lot of professional respect. The F/A who’re good deserve respect for doing a difficult job. And mostly they get it, at least at my (former) carrier. The rest are, well, cow-orkers as we say here on the 'Dope.
There is an old joke in the industry: How do pilots & flight attendants have oral sex? They shout “F*** you!” across the terminal concourse. It’s not far from the truth for many.
Full disclosure. I am happily married to my first wife of 20+ years. She’s not an airline person, much less an F/A type personality. So the above is me reporting on what I’ve seen, not what I’ve lived myself.
That makes a lot of sense, LSLGuy. (This happens in a lot of places. I worked in an office building that was half social workers and half lab technicians. The lab people loathed the social worker people with a burning passion you would never believe they were capable of, under those white coats.)
I once flew in the same plane as an off-duty crew. Who do you think sat next to the cutest stewardess chatting her up? 
Not sure how much this answers the question of the OP, but it sure is an interesting set of photos and a nice read:
English Russia - The Airport as Pilots See It
I’d be interested in hearing from the pilots how their experience differs or matches the Russian pilot experience.
Lets see how my experience is different. Part of it is because we don’t do passenger flying but I think at least one thing, the medical, is related to the country.
I don’t do a medical every time I fly. I’m wondering if this is primarily a drug test? If so then in Australia CASA conduct random drug testing but it is rare to get picked up. When they do do it, they get everyone on airside, baggage handlers, pilots, cabin crew, engineers, the lot.
Our first aid kits are used rarely and are therefore kept permanently in the aircraft. If one gets used for any reason it is taken to an engineer post flight and replaced with a new one while the old one gets restocked by St Johns.
Our First Officers do nothing different to what the Captain does. Each day the Captain decides who is flying and who is monitoring and the tasks are set based on that. We don’t have a despatcher so the PF (pilot flying) does everything to do with planning the flight and checking the weather and notams, while the PM (pilot monitoring) does everything to do with the aeroplane such as the daily inspection, supervising the fueling, retrieving the maintenance books from the ginger beers (engineers.)
Our flight bags are generally old and tatty compared to those Russian ones.
I wish we had a meteorologist on duty. All our weather information is picked up from a national weather service via a PC program or website. I’ve never actually spoken to a person about enroute weather.
We have an “operations centre” rather than a “despatcher”. Ops are more focussed on rostering than real operations stuff. We don’t tell them if we are flying but we do tell them if we have any problems that might cause a delay. Ops are based in a city several thousands of kilometers from our operating bases.
It doesn’t snow up here in the tropics :).
That’s about it I suppose.
An interesting thing about the USA is that you guys have despatchers who have some legal responsibility for the flight. It’s my understanding that the despatcher must be consulted before some decisions are made. Over here, the pilot in command has full legal responsibility for the flight. Although the Captain would take advice from various sources, the decision to change route, divert, change fuel load, fly or not fly etc, is the solely the Captain’s.
At the risk of perpetuating stereotypes, it might be alcohol that they’re primarily looking for.