Airline Pilot Central Forums - July A320 Rotations

Quote:

Originally Posted by artlight (Post 4041924)

Just when I think they can't get any worse. I'm stunned at how bad the July trips are on ATL 320. And by bad I mean fatiguing, high duty day, short layovers, but mostly the lack of commutability. Pick 4 day trips for any given day. Start times after 10:30am, duty off before 10:30pm. 10 rotations on a given day, only *2* of them duty out before 10:00pm. That means in order to make the trip commutable on both ends, you have to have everything go right and better hope you're not delayed 20 minutes. Or you're spending the night in ATL. So many trips are 3-2-2-3. Layovers are 14:30, 12:15, 10:40. I'm so tired at work now I can't go do anything on a layover. That's not enough time to get food, exercise, anything. Just buzz like a drone bee back and forth and collapse in your hotel room so you can wake up and do it all over the next day. The optimizer has wrung every ounce of joy out of this job. And for the newer guys it was NOT always like this.

I absolutely loathe coming to work now.

You are absolutely right. The problem is that a lot of pilots say this exact same thing but then the metal keeps moving. I can't even count the number of times a pilot has told me about a trip that was "absolute bs that it was built that way" and how tired they were and then when I ask "so when did you make the fatigue call?" the response is "...well, I didn't...but I should have..."

Here's the reality...Delta doesn't care about your FCR, your survey responses, your complaints on the facebook groups, etc. They don't care. We can complain until the cows come home about how fatiguing the trips are (and believe me, I do), but at the end of the day, the company sees that the metal is moving, "so it must be fine."

Too many pilots at this airline are afraid to make that call. Instead they power through hour 12-13 of duty fighting to stay awake and then complain about it later. There are things that we as a pilot group can improve that don't cost ANY bargaining power. It simply requires us to have the courage to make that call when you need to. If everyone that's ever said "I should have called in fatigued on that trip" actually called in fatigued on that trip, I guarantee you things would start to improve. The company is not going to continue building a rotation or pattern that's getting fatigued out off even 30% of the time.

Make the call