Originally Posted by
Sunvox
Let's talk about majority. Half of all flying is back side of the clock. OK if that's how you want to put it fine. I'll dig and find it somewhere, but if back side is flying between 1 and 4 AM body clock Legacy carriers have less than 5% of their flying in this time. When I fly Tokyo I fly 14 hours and land at 3AM. That's one of the worst. You guys sit around for half your career (15 years or more) waiting to take off at midnight. Worst yet Fed Ex starts trips all over their system so you have to dead head offline every where.
Your job is a nightmare. I NEVER EVER even considered working for a cargo carrier and I would NEVER EVER recommend that job to a newbie.
It'll never happen, but I'd love to see average age of death for cargo pilots.
Sorry man, you just don't have an accurate understanding of Fx and UPS. At ups over 50% flying is international, day domestic is something like 15% leaving nite domestic around 30-35% at most. FedEx has an even greater percentage of day flying. We don't take off at midnight either. The sort runs between 2230-230am and you'll find that at those times the skies aren't filled with FX and UPS but with the 5% of pax carriers doing red eye transcons. Typical signin times for morning turns are between 2-3:30am. So bed at 1730, sleep by 1800, wake at 0100 = 7 hrs sleep; not bad at all. Doesn't take long to shift your clock ahead a little and no different than a west coast guy having a 6am dept out of LGA. Most of the guys doing the in and out of hub stuff at night prefer it for various reason and those pairings are really not much different than high speeds/momma trips you guys do, but yeah they can be rough if you can't manage solid sleep schedules. And all that DH'ing offline is on full Y fare tickets and enables many to have a stress free commute from anywhere they choose to live, keeping the miles and status privileges as well. I get it that you have a strong distaste for express cargo but for the benefit of those in the job search please try to put out unbiased and accurate info.