Not hard to drag the average down when you have 3 days of 11-12 hour duty with short layovers to then flip the clock with a 24-30 hour layover into a red eye to end the trip and catch up on sleep during your off time. The long layover at the end and short duty day makes it actually more fatiguing, but helps your precious numbers. Numbers don’t tell the whole story as much as you like to opine about it.

2x 11 hour layover + 1x 25 hour layover = 15.67 average
3x 11 hour duty + 1x 5 hour duty = 9.5 average

That describes pretty much every trip I’ve flown in the last 3 months. DTW320. No credit at all thanks to the optimizer so you need to fit all that flying in the first 3 days 3-4 legs a day to pay the company for the privilege of doing a redeye

Thankfully my union speaks for me

this is where averages vs median debate comes into play. In the past 2 weeks my average overnight length was 13.3 hours, my median was 11.9

personally I think median is a better representation of where we are at vs average as it a more indicative of what a typical day entails.


one 30 hour overnight and three 10 hour overnights average to 15 hours, but you still are showing up for 75% of your duty days on min rest.

Hmm. Non sequitur methinks.

Gotta use median not average for bad layover and FDP info.

Give me a phone number for the company guy that created the trashboard. I doubt you will or that they will listen or do anything about it. Statistics are a wonderful thing because they can be used to show anything. Averages are just that averages, not reality.

I don't think Delta mgmt cares about morale. They are getting so much productivity out of us, and almost have to with the staffing shortage. They know pilots will not leave Delta or quit because the trips are bad. They may complain a lot but won't quit. From what I've heard, fatigue calls are not even up much, if any. Flying the regular bid packet trips on narrowbodies is terrible now. I don't see how anyone can really say..."This will be a fun 12 hour day and a nice 10 hour layover to recover." I feel sorry for junior/mid-pack guys flying these trips every week.

Love when they ask me to extend

Actually I’ve heard they are starting to go up recently as people are finally fed up with it. Again, if you need to call in, call in. Don’t fly fatigued when your ticket is one the line, not the companies.

That might be true for senior guys but young guys with CJOs from multiple airlines are watching. I’ve heard people say things like Delta is the new Southwest in terms of trips.

I’ll say our trips are bad, but I’m pretty sure talking with friends at UAL and AA that they are just as bad there.