Bugaboo

Your assuming you would have been hired at UPS.
Ya never will know.

AwkwardTurtle

So you think their 2-3 nap time between flights afforded them less sleep than and legacy airline transcon 6 hour red eye?

ShyGuy

There’s a large difference in reporting for a 5.5-6hr red eye, many of which leave between 830-1030pm and land by 5-7am east coast time. You have the entire day to prep for it. Versus doing PIA-RFD-BHM and then try a half ass sleep attempt for 2 hrs on a 3.5 hr sit, before flying to BHM. If I had to choose, I’d take that one continuous flight. In west coast time, you takeoff 8-30-1030pm and land 2-4am (PST) and hit the bed in the hotel. You’re headed for the hotel at the same time some of these guys are in their sleep pods during a sort before flying one more leg.

And FAR 117 rest rules, 10 hr layover with min 8 hr guarantee behind door, and ability to refuse an FDP extension. Night cargo flying is fatigue inducing and ages you more than a regular good old domestic day trip.

No offense to anyone at UPS/FDX, it’s just a type of flying I never applied to or have interest in doing. So a thread about a pax carrier or a cargo carrier career choice needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

KnockKnock

How long was it before UPS surpassed AS in pay? If when you started, the pay was almost 50% higher at AS and by the time you left it was a third lower, is it possible you broke even? Also, what were upgrade times? Maybe you weren’t that far behind where you would have been had you gone to UPS.

Packrat

Very true. But because I didn't go I will never know, therefore the hindsight regret.

Bugaboo

Yeah man....I hear you. I have some of that “hindsight regret” too. I just figure that if I took a different fork earlier in life I may have been hit by a bus in some random spot I never made it to😄👍

AwkwardTurtle

Your math doesn’t check out.

Cargo pilots report at 530pm west coast or 830pm east coast. They got 15 hours of rest before that.

Pax pilots report at 9pm West Coast, (east coast is impossible) with a minimum of 14 hours of rest, possibly more since they arrived the day before.

Cargo pilots brief 1.0, fly 2.5, nap 2.0, brief 1.0, fly 2.5 and land east coast 530am. (230PST)

Pax pilots brief 1.0, fly 6.0 land east coast 7am. (4AM PST)

Crappiest time to be awake has got to be 2am to 5am. With cargo pilots taking a nap thru the majority of it, while pax pilots fly thru it. Both types of pilots get decent rest before, if not identical.


I think you’re mixing up the day flyers that are departing the airport at 5-6am with the guys are already sleeping in their hotel rooms before the pax redeyes even started their descent. As proven in the above rough calculations.

You think cargo pilots get only 8 hours behind the door? Explain that logic. Once again, use the above calculations, arrive at 4-5am, 8 hours would be a 12-1pm departure? And passenger pilots are the only ones allowed to refuse trips?

Sounds like you’re just digging for excuses to defend your decision more than using facts.

No offense.

BKbigfish

I don’t know... I commuted East-West once on FedEx. 757 crew started on the east coast around 8-9 pm, finished after 2 (maybe 3?) legs on the west coast at 9-10 am or so. I saw the “rest” facilities and all. Whole thing was incredibly depressing and fatiguing. To each their own but it looked miserable. $$$ offsets the pain and I’m sure that was a junior schedule but let’s not discount the terrible effects of junior cargo schedules. Things can suck pax wise as well but I’ve never seen anything that horrendous. I’ll take an LAX - BWI redeye all day long over that garbage.

ShyGuy

Sounds like you’re offended. The math is skewed in your favor. Insert east coast city here, to IND or MEM or SDF with about a 950-10pm EST show (7pm PST). Fly a 1-2hr flight and then sit the 3.5 hr sort. Then takeoff IND or MEM or SDF to west coast city like LAX or OAK which is another 4-4.5 hr block flight. I’ve jumpseated this way even at a regional and we landed about 5am-6am PST which is 8am-9am eastern. That’s easily 11+ hr duty. Most pax carriers , when they do a transcon redeye it’s very typically only one leg. West to east is about 5.5-6 hr block so duty time total is just 6.5 hrs to 7 hrs.

Btw, pax carriers like JetBlue have east to west coast (reverse) red eyes that do report after 9pm eastern and fly 1 leg. Besides, we’re hung up on the night portion only. I don’t even do redeyes much and it makes up a small portion of the pax carrier’s overall operation.

Maybe you glanced over it, the schedule I originally quoted was UPS 1354 accident crew’s schedule that night. Read through the CVR and hear from their actual conversations how they felt on that flight and about nighttime cargo flying and 117 rules.

Like the guy above said, to each his own but there’s no way I’d want to do that back of the clock night flying with a hub sort. I can’t take a 2 hr nap in a pod. I like flying one and straight through the night if I have to with a 6-7 hr duty day redeye. Your mileage may vary

BoilerUP

There are a lot of pilots at UPS that can't stand sitting the night sort, either.

Yes, many hub sort trips have 8-11 hours of duty with 2 or 3 legs, and some of them, especially the one coast-SDF-other coast duty periods, don't have much of a rest opportunity in the sort.

While practically impossible to avoid sitting the sort if you're junior, once you have a little seniority you can bid day flying, international, etc. There's quite a bit of schedule variety available to someone once off their initial 18 month seat lock, and sometimes even within it on their original fleet.

Express cargo ain't for everybody...but it also isn't the utterly body-destroying, life-shortening death march some make it out to be. I've found, on average, night sort trips give me more opportunity to exercise than day trips with the same basic sleep opportunity.

Our vacation policy makes it easy to take 2 weeks of vacation and turn it into 4, 6, even 8 weeks off depending on bidding strategy. If you don't mind giving up some pay, one-week vacation slide can give you the same length of time off via conflict drops. All that is to say things are available to help pilots physically recover from the uncontested toll WOCL flying takes on the body over accumulated time.

That is not to say one employer is outright 'better' than the other, only 'better' for a given individual and their own wants/needs/desires.