Originally Posted by
FrontSeat
Here is what you can do. Starting at 6pm sit in your hallway closet with a vacuum cleaner running in there with you. You can wear earplugs and bring a TV dinner. Stay in there for 3 hours. Then at 9 pm you can turn off the vacuum cleaner and have your wife drive you around the neighborhood for 20 minutes. Have her stop every few minutes to blow the horn and open and shut a door hard each time.
Then return home and sit in a lazy boy chair in your garage for 4 hours. Then at 2am sit at your kitchen table and plan a flight to the west coast while having a radio loud in the background to simulate chatter of a hundred other pilots doing the same. Then have your wife drive you again around the neighborhood and repeat blowing horn and door slamming etc.
At 4 am get right back in that closet for another 3 hours with the vacuum on and another TV dinner. Then at 7 am leave the closet and walk around the outside of your house for about 30 minutes. Watch the sunrise and then go to sleep with the tv on to simulate the noise from other hotel guests and maids. Wake up at 11am and do this 4 nights in a row. Take 2 nights off and do it again.
If you really want to be like the majority sit in the closet about 3 hours before you start on day one to simulate a commute and again after day 4.
If you seriously can't or do not want to do this even as an experiment then don't apply.
Also don't forget to drag a couple of bags and wear a jacket and tie.
That does sound awful.
Here's my perspective. I sleep from 8 pm until 2 am at home. I wake up, shower, and am out the door to the airport in Louisville by 2:30 for my 3:30 am show time. I live 30 miles away and I like to get there a few minutes early. Anyway, I depart at 4:30 for a 2 hour leg to IAH, land, take a 1 minute walk to the sleep room, and nap for 2 hours. Then it's 1 leg home and I'm in my pool by noon.
All night lines will have 2,3,4 legs. On the Airbus the norm is 3. Start in ICT and do SGF, SDF and sit the sort followed by a leg to TYS. The night domestic flying doesn't necessarily sound bad when you consider it's usually only 3 legs but they are ball bursters for sure.
757 domestic worst turn is SDF-ABQ-PHX-SDF, which leaves at 0'dark thirty and returns after 1 pm. It's brutal. Worst line I've done was BIL-DEN-ONT-DEN. Not sure why the new hires are all going to he Bus since I think 757 domestic is harder.
Domestic night flying is tough. You need to take extraordinary measures to ensure your sleep at home. Day sleeping at home during the day is tough with kids. They may not understand that they can't wake dad up when they get home from school or why you got to bed at 8 pm. Day sleeping at hotels is much harder than you'd think as well. The hotel maids will start banging the #%^* vacuum cleaner against the hallway doors and walls at around 10 am. Some places are worse than others. Many guys carry duct tape in order to get a good seal on the curtains to keep the light out. I always get the air conditioner fan on high and use an IPhone white noise app to drown out the hotel sounds. Do what you've got to do.
UPS takes the stance that they pay us to be ready to fly to contractual limits when we show for duty. Of course that is often absurd due to the nature of sleep cycles etc. I've called in fatigued three times in 9 years and all were paid. If they deem it that the fatigue call was your fault they will debit your sick bank. 60% of our fatigue calls are approved with no sick bank debit. All are non-punitive supposedly. I think we have a bigger problem with guys flying fatigued than we do with not getting fatigue calls paid. UPS 1354 should be a game changed though.
And since Jetjok brought it up. UPS guys fly the same schedules, with the same airplane as the FDX guys, and make $40K/year more. The single pay scale here is such a great thing. I'd argue that 757 domestic is harder flying than the 747-400 international. Certainly no reason to do it at a discount.