OhSnapAF

CBA 2015 had a 76% pass vote if I remember correctly? Was that a great contract for the pilot group?

The flight pay is good for you guys but there’s still no incentive imposed on the company to not screw with your duty day. You can be used and abused on duty all day every day if they please with really no benefit to you. If you touch an airplane for more than 12.1 then you get some extra cash which is good.

germanaviator

In Europe all commercial flying falls under the same rules for duty and rest times. Air taxi rules are coming but we don't have them yet in NJE.

Basically the law says you can do 60 hours of duty in seven days. However, we normally work a 6/5 roster and the company has a legal derogation to exceed 60 hours on the last day but only to get you home. We have a CBA that says the crew member has to agree to that and will get overtime pay. Either half a day if less than five hours or a full day if between five and ten.

60 hours in six days seems to be the target for scheduling. We frequently get some standby at hotel before a flight duty period. Standby counts 25% towards duty time. Hot spare counts 100% so is not used all the time. Max duty time per day depends on how early the show is and how many sectors are flown. But 12 hours duty followed by 12 hours rest is not uncommon. The average duty day must be close to 10 hours as we often hit or approach 60 hrs in six days and sometimes exceed that number. We can't do 14/10 though.

In terms of block hours most guys on small and mid fleets seem to do around 400 a year. But that's not a good measure of QOL of course.

Any more questions just ask away

AntiPeter

Interesting. How are your overnights? Nice, FR and Santorini must be nicer than say, Detroit and Buffalo?

germanaviator

Mostly short 😜

Never staid in Santorini. Most Greek islands have very limited parking so mostly it's in and out.

Nice is a nice and regular destination. We stay at a Holiday Inn on the coast, which is nice.

Other places it's often airport hotels. Not so nice. Hotel standard is typically ok. Mostly Hilton, including their lower brands, Marriotts or Courtyards, Holiday Inns etc.

Lot's of changes which gets tiring. Some demanding alpine airports.

Very varying standards of ATC and FBO support which doesn't help.

GeeWizDriver

Hold up. A limit of 60 hours of duty in 7 days?

Even by my admittedly bad math, the 83 hours of duty I did in 7 days last tour would be...what’s the word....MORE. As in a CRAPLOAD more.

The simple fact is, regulatory change will be the ONLY thing that motivates CMH to schedule differently.

germanaviator

Yeah, but remember that we typically do those 60 hours in only six days followed by only 5 days off. We do almost three tours a month, not two. So montly duty should be similar for us, even if you guys can work longer days/need less minimum rest. I know that doesn't exactly help your your QOL on the road, though

OhSnapAF

NJA does 6 on 3 off 🤣🤣🤣🤣

germanaviator

Who in NJA does that? We are not talking 6/3/6/3/6/3 etc., right?

I guess with certain schedules and/or additional days you could end up doing 6/3 sometimes (basically by choice), but the vast majority at NJA are on the 7/7, correct?

7/7 (NJA) equates to around 15 days worked per calendar month or 182 days per year worked (minus vacation) while 6/5 (NJE) equates to around 17 days worked/month (in fact our contract says 200 days/year minus vacation).

Since NJE is effectively limited to an average, not maximum) duty day of ten hours, due to the 60 hours per tour limit, and you guys aren't, it's quite possible that you guys do work more duty hours overall than we do. But not by as much as suggested by GeeWizz, when looked at over a longer period.

We also make significantly less money, though. Most CPTs are on 120 to 130k Euros/year while most FOs make around 80k. That's after ten to 15 years in the Company.

Some of us are on 28 days vacation but most aren't, even though almost everyone has been here for more than 10 years. The median seniority is around 13 years.

However, when we take six or seven days vacation we only get two days off at either end of the vacation. Basically vacation disrupts our roster pattern (schedule), and not in our favor. Your system is much better, I think.

You guys have more schedule choices than we do.

We are unionized but membership is not nearly as high as on your side. Non-members don't pay a service fee and pilots are cheap... Also the union is a volunteer-run, low cost, online, in-house union with no paid staff or offices. But we have the basic protections of a CBA and have recently been able to get upgrades and fleeting w(no by seniority) into the CBA. We also now have a seniority based redundancy policy although sadly the furlough system basically doesn't exist in Europe.

It's interesting that in many ways the EU arm of NJ has lower social and contractual standards than the US based operation. And Europe is supposed to be pro-worker etc. It's not really. At least not in the UK where our contracts are based. But that's a whole different story.

Sorry for the slight thread drift to include NJE. Happy to start a new topic if people want me to.

Marko

6/3/6/3/6/3-5 is not uncommon on the 72/76 day schedules. I think approximately half of the pilots are on 7&7.

MWilliams

[QUOTE=germanaviator;2772633}Sorry for the slight thread drift to include NJE. Happy to start a new topic if people want me to.[/QUOTE]

Either way please keep the sharing of information flowing. I like knowing what is going on at NJE.