Originally Posted by
Gilligan13
How often does reserve sit at the airport?
Originally Posted by
eagleatr
There's no real answer to that other than: it depends. It depends on how many people are available that day, how many open trips there are that day, how many FSB/SC the scheduler creates that day, and then how many the scheduler then creates later in the day if there are still people available.
From what I've seen and been told by people that I've flown with, maybe a couple a month per person, but it all depends on factors that are mostly out of your control.
It depends on the fleet/base a little bit also. the 737/320 fleets obviously have a lot of flying each day that transits hubs and are far more exposed to the potential for delays/enroute sick/crew timeouts which results in having to re-crew. So on those fleets if the schedulers have enough reserves to cover the already known open flying and enough to put on short calls and can still build field standbys then they will. For the 756 and widebody SC/FSB seems to be more of a tool for covering the FRMS stuff (ultra long range where any delay can lead to it cancelling if it can’t be re-crewed or a big international bank where hiccups create issues. SC are a fact of life across all bases and fleets while the FSB seems to be more prevalent in bases/fleets with the issues above. Just my unscientific observations. I’ll close with I saw more FSB as west coast 737 reserve and I haven’t seen any FSB so far west coast 756. Of course SC appear out of thin air on both.