Not true Falcon, the company treats jumpseats as duty time even if you think they do not. The main reason why they show uop on our calendars.

 

I agree with you completely, but that's not what the company has said since back in the early '90's. As well, if the flight you're now operating gets rerouted or delayed and you don't get into base to operate your original trip outbound, they have to activate a reserve guy or dft/vlt to get it crewed. However, UPS still uses this procedure and I'd sure like it here at FedEx. It's really a great thing. Oh well.

 

Easy enough to verify if true or not. Jumpseat into a trip and then check your duty limits on the outbound FP/R.

 

The j/s will not show as part of duty time on the FP/R although I have been told by many managers that if something goes awry the j/s time will be looked at and you will be considered in violation of not showing up for a trip with proper rest. When I asked who is better rested, the guy who slept 3 hrs in the j/s or the one who drove 3 hrs to get there for show time, I was simply told "we can track the j/s".

 

Yes, while what you're saying is true, right or wrong, its NOT considered as on duty or duty time, or it would show on the release.

 

They don't want it to be duty time. If it becomes official then 2 things:

They can't call you late for a draft trip if you would have to get on the j/s to make it there.

The no harm no foul section of the CBA will have to be renegotiated.

 

I think the jumpseat is on our calendars so that the managers can look and see immediately what you were doing in the event you miss a check in. I don't think that has anything to do with starting our duty clock. The j/s showing up on the calendar is also a fairly recent development right about the time JL sent out one of his rants about captains missing show times and such.

Could be wrong.

FJ

 

If you find a place where you fly one week and have the rest of the month off lemme know I would be interested! Anyway, its not quite that nice but there are some decent schedules if you have the horse power to hold them. The pain is spread pretty evenly at UPS in other words to have a clean line with plenty of days off you may have to fly some brutal trips.

To attempt to answer your question on the UPS side of the fence, our pairings and lines look somewhat similar to our brethern at FDX. Our months are 28 days and we have 13 of them per year, one month sometimes being a 35 day month. For domestic flying roughly 30 to 40% the lines are week on/week off night flying. The daytime (if you can call it that) is typically a week on, week off, a week on, then a short 2 or 3or possibly 4 day trip in the fourth week. International varies quite a bit anywhere from one 12 to 15 day trip per month to one 9 day + one 6 day trip per month. Then we have these things called base trip lines which look fairly ugly, short 2,3 and 4 day trips that can be either day or night and vary between 4 and 5 reports per 28 day month. Its a mix of day and night flying so it messes with your clock a bit.

We also have what we call turn lines which is a line that consists of "out and back" in a single trip. You will typically do between 9 and 13 of these per month.

Reserve schedules are 15 on 13 off, we call this a long block. The short blocks are 8 on 6 off + 7 on 7 off for the month. A reserve will do 15 days of reserve per 28 day month. Reserve can be awesome or they can beat you up pretty bad. Its seems that it comes and goes in cycles. When reserve is good, you wont find a better gig anywhere, when reserve is bad hopefully you have the bidding horsepower to do something else until it gets better.

The schedules are obvious a little more varied than my simple examples but this should give you the basic gist of what a bid package looks like for the 757 ONT domicile as we do both domestic and international flying. The other fleet types/domiciles will look slightly different, but not much. However, MIA schedules look quite different due to the nature of the SA flying.

hope this helps a bit.

 

"When reserve is good, you wont find a better gig anywhere, when reserve is bad hopefully you have the bidding horsepower to do something else until it gets better"

So, how do you tell, before you bid, whether ONT reserve is going to be good or bad? I'm doing my first A reserve in ONT since I came to the domicle, next bid. It looked like the A Capts side was going to be well staffed and watching how much they have been doing the last couple of weeks, reserve looked like a better prospect than the kind of hard line I could hold.

Any tricks to working the crystal ball?