Originally Posted by skybolt

It is not taboo to work extra. Most all of us, except in the time of furloughs, work extra. Pilots are just a greedy as are Doctors, but a man has to have a life and the airline pilot job can prevent that if management gets its way. If allowed, management would keep a pilot on duty for sixteen hours a day, seven days a week with no days off. If you don't believe that, you should ask some of the guys stuck in 135 jobs; their employers work them to the FAR limits for months at a time. And don't forget, if you ever knew it, the FAR's were built during the time that the FAA had the joint mandate to "PROMOTE and regulate" the aviation industry, meaning that they are not specifically aimed to providing safe travel to the paying passenger. They are also aimed to help the company make a profit, a sitution that doesn't include allowing the pilots to have lives.

The regulations have decreed that a pilot must not fly more than 1000 hours a year, 30 hours in seven days, or 8 hours between required rest periods. The regs also require a 24 hour break every seven days.

Have you attempted to staff an airline? Just for grins, lets do it, OK? First lets say that your airline will fly 100000 hours every 365 days. If you can fly every pilot up to the FAR flight time limits, you will need 100 pilots. Divided equally, you will fly 274 hours per day. 274 hours per day divided by exactly 8 flying hours per day per pilot shows a requirement of 35 pilots per day, BUT you can only work pilots out of 7 days so you have to adjust these numbers to reflect that, then you need to allow one week a year per pilot off for recurrent training, and another four days a year for left seat checkrides and another two days off per year per co-pilots for their checkrides. In short order, you find that you must hire a significantly higher number of pilots than you would think you need according to the simple math. BUT, the simple math, and business related adjustments did not include any adjustments for quality of life for the pilots. If times are good, the manager says OK, we'll actually give you your weekly 24 hour break in your base, or he says we'll give you a few guaranteed days off per month. All of which increase the staffing numbers from the purely mathematical requirement.

All of which brings me to this, a properly staffed airline will appear to a bookkeeper to be fat on pilots. PERIOD. No question about it. So, when times get a little tough, they money people decide that they've got to cut the fat, and their limited view of our world leads them to believe that pilot staffing is in fact, fat. Then they want pilots to fly more, so being generally supportive of our employers, we pitch in to help out. We burn the candle at both ends so to speak. Then the managers say to themselves, hey look at how much money we can save if we reach this production level all of the time. They ask for more and more OT. etc. Jetproppilot, you just can't burn that candle from both ends for perpetuity. We know that, our union knows that and most reasonable people know that; so we attempt to maintain some sort of balance. We don't like the abuse of OT by either company of our fellow pilots, because it leads to poor quality of life for us all.

It is my belief that you would be surprised at the amount of extra flying that happens on a daily basis by the average airline pilot. We are NOT a bunch of featherbedders who demand to be overstaffed so that one of us can be asleep in the break room at all times. We are a group of workers who spend between 16 and 20 days per month away from our families and who don't like it when our fellow pilots enable managements continued perception that we'll take anything. The abuse of OT is just such an action.

Now, don't get me started on the PFT pukes who will PAY to sit in an airliner cockpit.

skybolt