I dont believe some people needs less sleep. I think some people just handle it better shrot term..
Long term we all suffer the same effects

And you would be incorrect.

The regional I came from had them, off and on. I never had any interest in working them but I liked it when we had them. Variety is almost always a good thing. When we had them, they were bid as a line schedule for the month and those schedules went senior which meant other schedules that I wanted went more junior.

Why did they go senior? They allowed those that got them significantly more time at home and fly a schedule of 30ish hours and getting paid about 75ish ours for the month.

Why were they good to have even if you didn’t want them? As said above, variety is a good thing. But also their existence removed undesirably flying from the build of other sequences making other sequences more efficient and pay better and have longer layovers… so we all benefited from it.

Why did they go away? Their existence activated or allowed pilots to exploit holes in the contract. The union would beg pilots to not “x, y, or z” because there was nothing stopping the company from not offering the stand ups. The pilots abused the situation anyway.


My take, with the right rules in place it’s good for everyone.

Some people day sleep very well. For those people it’s not automatically less sleep.


I am not one of those people.

thats true. I was more commenting on less sleep period, not time of day sleep.

I can handle it short-term, but yes I certainly will need to catch up within a week or I get grumpy.

But some folks definitely thrive on four hours, or even less, of sleep long-term, apparently it's genetic. Many of your CEOs, national politicians, O10 military officers, etc fall into that category. It's how they work 100 weeks, get ahead, and still feel they have a life.

How many of us would feel they have a life though? How happy are they really?

Most of us would not, so we don't.

But the ones who actually thrive generally seem to be loving life... success, money, respect and still enough time to do some normal life things. And they genetically don't need the sleep.

If I could buy that gene, I would. If for no other reason than so I could have time for hours of video games each night.

I did nothing but standups at OO for almost ten years. It allowed me to have a completely different career at the same time outside of aviation. I'd usually do Thurs, Fri, and Sat stand-ups. I'd work Mon-Fri in the office , drive to the airport on Thursdays, do a stand-up, drive back to the office, then back to the airport Friday night, then home on Saturdays. There's absolutely no way I could have done my other job if stand-ups hadn't existed.

Some of them were easy. The soft time was amazing. I'd fly ~300 block and credit 1000/yr. Some of the trips gave you almost legal rest. Like SFO-STS, you'd be wheels up at 1930 and in the hotel by 2015. Then back out again at 0530 for an 0615 departure, and back in my car by 0715. Some of them were terrible, like SFO-MRY which only gave us 4 hours of sleep opportunity.

The crews were great. You'd get to know everyone because you flew with the same people all the time. We called ourselves vampires and it was rare that we flew in daylight hours.

Standups weren't for everyone, but I loved them. Well, most of them. One time I accidentally bid Edmonton standups from SFO. Those were a complete nightmare. But overall? I'd do them again in a heartbeat.