Originally Posted by
Han Solo
That is AWESOME! I was going to suggest listening to the JRE episode 1109 with no other than... Matthew Walker as the guest. It's one of the very few JRE podcasts that I listened to and then saved because it was so good.
Thanks for the point out, downloaded and listening to it now.
Originally Posted by
Han Solo
IMO, unless you can get proper sleep a WB is going to take years and years off the end of your life. I was on Delta's 7er category which is split between 757 and 767s with both international and domestic routes. I felt like a zombie during my international trips and after TOE I never bid another international trip. No desire to ever go back to a WB unless it's sitting RES and rarely flying. I'll work my butt off during normal business hours before I go back to the luxurious international lifestyle of slowly killing myself with high calorie low nutritional value meals and decimated sleep cycles.
To be fair, I felt the same after my OE trips, but have since figured out what works for me, and feel 10x better. The real question is balance. On the WB, over the last 15ish months, I've averaged 8 days/month gone from home. As a line holder this month, I'll work 9 days for a full month of pay...vs a 717 guy that will work 16 days. Who has more exposure to disrupted sleep and/or high calorie meals? That's not a rhetorical question to prove one side of a conversation, I'm genuinely interested in finding out. Sleep disruptions are part of the business but as I learn more about them, limiting them has slowly become a greater concern of mine.