What are the regionals like?
08-13-2015 | 04:12 PM
#31
Gets Weekends Off
Joined: Aug 2015
Posts: 2,635
Likes: 582
From: Guppy Gear Slinger
I'll take a stab at a serious answer.
Like any job, there are good days and there are bad days. I'll give you two real-life examples. I'll start with the good.
A good day on the line
It's early evening. You show up at the airport, park in the employee lot, and presto! The shuttle bus is right there. A few minutes later, you breeze through KCM (Known Crewmember) and are in the crew lounge less than an hour after leaving your front door. You meet your captain and FAs, all of whom are friendly folks with whom you've previously flown. The weather is perfect, the flight release indicates nothing's known to be broken on your airplane, and you're scheduled to depart on time.
And lo and behold, you do. The passengers board quickly, you close the door a few minutes early, and are wheels up just a couple minutes after scheduled departure time. You've got a nice tailwind and a delightfully smooth ride as you cruise towards northern Canada at 480 knots true. Night falls, and you're rewarded with an absolutely stunning view of the Northern Lights from high altitude. Snug in your pressurized cocoon at FL390, you turn the cockpit lights to their dimmest setting, just drinking in the incredible view. "Wow, they're paying me for this?!?" you think to yourself. You think about another life, one spent in fluorescently-lit grey cubicles grinding away at meaningless busywork, and you silently thank your stars that you chose a different path.
You grease the landing, receiving a few compliments from the passengers as they deplane. You roll up to your spacious hotel room, watch a little TV, and fall asleep. It's been a very easy night. One of those nights when you're reminded just why you love aviation. Tomorrow morning, you'll fly home again, and enjoy a leisurely weekend day at home.
A bad day on the line
It's 4 am on Sunday morning. And it's raining. You roll out of bed and groan inwardly at the task that stretches before you. Your reserve shift at your regional airline begins tomorrow at 0400. The only problem is, your house is 1,800 miles from your base. And it's the holidays. You head to the airport, silently praying that you're heading out early enough to beat the hordes of mainline pilots who want to jumpseat to the same hub as you. Your morning commute flight will be a hub-to-hub run, meaning there's a good chance you'll get bumped by commuting mainliners.
Arriving at the gate, your heart in your throat, you check in for the jumpseat, relieved to see nobody else in uniform near the gate. With 20 minutes to go, you relax...but your heart stops as you see a mainline captain trundle up to the gate and slap his credentials down. This 737 only has one jumpseat, and it looks like it isn't going to be yours.
Four hours and three missed flights later, you're beginning to sweat. You've only got 2 more opportunities, and if you miss those, you're going to be far from your base when your airline calls you to go fly. Fortunately, by a stroke of luck, you manage to make it on the last direct flight out. You arrive late at night, and scramble to find an $80 hotel room – or, worse, you hop an Uber ride to your jam-packed crashpad, full of snoring, farting, burping fellow aviators.
The next morning arrives. "Well, at least I'll get to fly today", you think. "That's why they hired me, after all." But you'd be wrong. You see, the airline somehow seems to know you want to fly, which means that under no circumstances will they oblige by assigning you a trip. You're required to within 2 hours of the airport at all times, and you don't have a car, so...you hang out at the crashpad. You haunt the local Starbucks. After days of this monotony, you begin to go slightly stir-crazy from boredom.
But then, on your last day, the phone rings. "We've got a turn for you." Great, you think. But you check the schedule...and your heart skips yet again. That quick turn, which will put you in the air for all of 45 minutes, lands back at your base a few minutes after your last commute flight home. Another night spent a couple thousand miles from your loved ones. Another 'day off' lost to jumpseating.
You make it to the airplane. Everyone's in a foul mood. The FA snaps at you. The captain grumbles into his coffee. The rampers are nowhere to be found, and neither is the fuel truck. And this CRJ-200's APU is deferred, meaning that you're miserably cold. Then the word comes down: a gate hold. Which means you're not going anywhere for a while.
90 minutes later, you finally push back and join the conga line. The weather is wreaking havoc across your usual departure path. One of the de-ice trucks is broken. And everybody and their grandma wants your runway. Finally, two and a half hours after scheduled departure time, you roar into the skies...for a seventeen-minute flight. Back on the ground, the usual chaos of a Midwestern ramp in the dead of winter ensues.
Finally, four hours after your scheduled return, and long after your last commute flight home has left, you straggle into your base's terminal. It'll be another sleepless night at the crashpad. Or another expensive night at a hotel that you simply can't afford. Or perhaps you'll just try to grab a few hours of shut-eye in a noisy, smelly, dirty 'quiet room', whose chairs are stained with substances you don't even want to begin to guess at.
The next day, you manage to commute home, stuck in seat 47B, wedged between an extremely large man and an extremely colicky baby on its mother's lap. You return to your house, having logged a total of thirty-four minutes in the cockpit over the past five days. And you wonder just what the h*ll you got yourself into.
That, my friend, is regional flying. It's also airline flying in general. You will have days you love, and you will have days – and weeks and months – that you hate.
My advice? As others on this forum have said, live in base. No matter what, live in base. Commuting is h*ll, and commuting to reserve is a special kind of torture. Living in base makes this job dramatically easier.
Even then, though, life won't be all unicorns and butterflies. You will spend more time away from home than at home, much of it in anonymous hotels in small cities with nothing much to do. You will miss important family events. You will realize that the 'glamor' of being an airline pilot vanished long ago, and that the flying public views you as nothing more than a glorified bus driver. From hotel to hotel, from crew lounge to crew lounge, from overpriced buffet to godawful convenience-store food gulped down at 0500 because your hotel doesn't offer breakfast.
But you will also see things that most people never see.
You will get to guide an 85,000-lb turbine aircraft over thousands of miles, through some of the worst weather on the planet. And you will become very good at it. So good, in fact, that the biggest danger you'll face will not be hail, or microbursts, or engine fires. It will be complacency, because you will come to see the job as astonishingly routine and easy. Which it is....until the moment your EICAS screen comes alive with a red warning message, at a most inopportune time. And that is when you will earn your pay (such as it is.)
Is it worth the tradeoff? There's only one way to find out.
Like any job, there are good days and there are bad days. I'll give you two real-life examples. I'll start with the good.
A good day on the line
It's early evening. You show up at the airport, park in the employee lot, and presto! The shuttle bus is right there. A few minutes later, you breeze through KCM (Known Crewmember) and are in the crew lounge less than an hour after leaving your front door. You meet your captain and FAs, all of whom are friendly folks with whom you've previously flown. The weather is perfect, the flight release indicates nothing's known to be broken on your airplane, and you're scheduled to depart on time.
And lo and behold, you do. The passengers board quickly, you close the door a few minutes early, and are wheels up just a couple minutes after scheduled departure time. You've got a nice tailwind and a delightfully smooth ride as you cruise towards northern Canada at 480 knots true. Night falls, and you're rewarded with an absolutely stunning view of the Northern Lights from high altitude. Snug in your pressurized cocoon at FL390, you turn the cockpit lights to their dimmest setting, just drinking in the incredible view. "Wow, they're paying me for this?!?" you think to yourself. You think about another life, one spent in fluorescently-lit grey cubicles grinding away at meaningless busywork, and you silently thank your stars that you chose a different path.
You grease the landing, receiving a few compliments from the passengers as they deplane. You roll up to your spacious hotel room, watch a little TV, and fall asleep. It's been a very easy night. One of those nights when you're reminded just why you love aviation. Tomorrow morning, you'll fly home again, and enjoy a leisurely weekend day at home.
A bad day on the line
It's 4 am on Sunday morning. And it's raining. You roll out of bed and groan inwardly at the task that stretches before you. Your reserve shift at your regional airline begins tomorrow at 0400. The only problem is, your house is 1,800 miles from your base. And it's the holidays. You head to the airport, silently praying that you're heading out early enough to beat the hordes of mainline pilots who want to jumpseat to the same hub as you. Your morning commute flight will be a hub-to-hub run, meaning there's a good chance you'll get bumped by commuting mainliners.
Arriving at the gate, your heart in your throat, you check in for the jumpseat, relieved to see nobody else in uniform near the gate. With 20 minutes to go, you relax...but your heart stops as you see a mainline captain trundle up to the gate and slap his credentials down. This 737 only has one jumpseat, and it looks like it isn't going to be yours.
Four hours and three missed flights later, you're beginning to sweat. You've only got 2 more opportunities, and if you miss those, you're going to be far from your base when your airline calls you to go fly. Fortunately, by a stroke of luck, you manage to make it on the last direct flight out. You arrive late at night, and scramble to find an $80 hotel room – or, worse, you hop an Uber ride to your jam-packed crashpad, full of snoring, farting, burping fellow aviators.
The next morning arrives. "Well, at least I'll get to fly today", you think. "That's why they hired me, after all." But you'd be wrong. You see, the airline somehow seems to know you want to fly, which means that under no circumstances will they oblige by assigning you a trip. You're required to within 2 hours of the airport at all times, and you don't have a car, so...you hang out at the crashpad. You haunt the local Starbucks. After days of this monotony, you begin to go slightly stir-crazy from boredom.
But then, on your last day, the phone rings. "We've got a turn for you." Great, you think. But you check the schedule...and your heart skips yet again. That quick turn, which will put you in the air for all of 45 minutes, lands back at your base a few minutes after your last commute flight home. Another night spent a couple thousand miles from your loved ones. Another 'day off' lost to jumpseating.
You make it to the airplane. Everyone's in a foul mood. The FA snaps at you. The captain grumbles into his coffee. The rampers are nowhere to be found, and neither is the fuel truck. And this CRJ-200's APU is deferred, meaning that you're miserably cold. Then the word comes down: a gate hold. Which means you're not going anywhere for a while.
90 minutes later, you finally push back and join the conga line. The weather is wreaking havoc across your usual departure path. One of the de-ice trucks is broken. And everybody and their grandma wants your runway. Finally, two and a half hours after scheduled departure time, you roar into the skies...for a seventeen-minute flight. Back on the ground, the usual chaos of a Midwestern ramp in the dead of winter ensues.
Finally, four hours after your scheduled return, and long after your last commute flight home has left, you straggle into your base's terminal. It'll be another sleepless night at the crashpad. Or another expensive night at a hotel that you simply can't afford. Or perhaps you'll just try to grab a few hours of shut-eye in a noisy, smelly, dirty 'quiet room', whose chairs are stained with substances you don't even want to begin to guess at.
The next day, you manage to commute home, stuck in seat 47B, wedged between an extremely large man and an extremely colicky baby on its mother's lap. You return to your house, having logged a total of thirty-four minutes in the cockpit over the past five days. And you wonder just what the h*ll you got yourself into.
That, my friend, is regional flying. It's also airline flying in general. You will have days you love, and you will have days – and weeks and months – that you hate.
My advice? As others on this forum have said, live in base. No matter what, live in base. Commuting is h*ll, and commuting to reserve is a special kind of torture. Living in base makes this job dramatically easier.
Even then, though, life won't be all unicorns and butterflies. You will spend more time away from home than at home, much of it in anonymous hotels in small cities with nothing much to do. You will miss important family events. You will realize that the 'glamor' of being an airline pilot vanished long ago, and that the flying public views you as nothing more than a glorified bus driver. From hotel to hotel, from crew lounge to crew lounge, from overpriced buffet to godawful convenience-store food gulped down at 0500 because your hotel doesn't offer breakfast.
But you will also see things that most people never see.
You will get to guide an 85,000-lb turbine aircraft over thousands of miles, through some of the worst weather on the planet. And you will become very good at it. So good, in fact, that the biggest danger you'll face will not be hail, or microbursts, or engine fires. It will be complacency, because you will come to see the job as astonishingly routine and easy. Which it is....until the moment your EICAS screen comes alive with a red warning message, at a most inopportune time. And that is when you will earn your pay (such as it is.)
Is it worth the tradeoff? There's only one way to find out.
Last edited by Turbosina; 08-13-2015 at 04:34 PM.
08-13-2015 | 05:03 PM
#32
Line Holder
Joined: Oct 2013
Posts: 478
Likes: 0
From: Big foot
I'll take a stab at a serious answer.
Like any job, there are good days and there are bad days. I'll give you two real-life examples. I'll start with the good.
A good day on the line
It's early evening. You show up at the airport, park in the employee lot, and presto! The shuttle bus is right there. A few minutes later, you breeze through KCM (Known Crewmember) and are in the crew lounge less than an hour after leaving your front door. You meet your captain and FAs, all of whom are friendly folks with whom you've previously flown. The weather is perfect, the flight release indicates nothing's known to be broken on your airplane, and you're scheduled to depart on time.
And lo and behold, you do. The passengers board quickly, you close the door a few minutes early, and are wheels up just a couple minutes after scheduled departure time. You've got a nice tailwind and a delightfully smooth ride as you cruise towards northern Canada at 480 knots true. Night falls, and you're rewarded with an absolutely stunning view of the Northern Lights from high altitude. Snug in your pressurized cocoon at FL390, you turn the cockpit lights to their dimmest setting, just drinking in the incredible view. "Wow, they're paying me for this?!?" you think to yourself. You think about another life, one spent in fluorescently-lit grey cubicles grinding away at meaningless busywork, and you silently thank your stars that you chose a different path.
You grease the landing, receiving a few compliments from the passengers as they deplane. You roll up to your spacious hotel room, watch a little TV, and fall asleep. It's been a very easy night. One of those nights when you're reminded just why you love aviation. Tomorrow morning, you'll fly home again, and enjoy a leisurely weekend day at home.
A bad day on the line
It's 4 am on Sunday morning. And it's raining. You roll out of bed and groan inwardly at the task that stretches before you. Your reserve shift at your regional airline begins tomorrow at 0400. The only problem is, your house is 1,800 miles from your base. And it's the holidays. You head to the airport, silently praying that you're heading out early enough to beat the hordes of mainline pilots who want to jumpseat to the same hub as you. Your morning commute flight will be a hub-to-hub run, meaning there's a good chance you'll get bumped by commuting mainliners.
Arriving at the gate, your heart in your throat, you check in for the jumpseat, relieved to see nobody else in uniform near the gate. With 20 minutes to go, you relax...but your heart stops as you see a mainline captain trundle up to the gate and slap his credentials down. This 737 only has one jumpseat, and it looks like it isn't going to be yours.
Four hours and three missed flights later, you're beginning to sweat. You've only got 2 more opportunities, and if you miss those, you're going to be far from your base when your airline calls you to go fly. Fortunately, by a stroke of luck, you manage to make it on the last direct flight out. You arrive late at night, and scramble to find an $80 hotel room – or, worse, you hop an Uber ride to your jam-packed crashpad, full of snoring, farting, burping fellow aviators.
The next morning arrives. "Well, at least I'll get to fly today", you think. "That's why they hired me, after all." But you'd be wrong. You see, the airline somehow seems to know you want to fly, which means that under no circumstances will they oblige by assigning you a trip. You're required to within 2 hours of the airport at all times, and you don't have a car, so...you hang out at the crashpad. You haunt the local Starbucks. After days of this monotony, you begin to go slightly stir-crazy from boredom.
But then, on your last day, the phone rings. "We've got a turn for you." Great, you think. But you check the schedule...and your heart skips yet again. That quick turn, which will put you in the air for all of 45 minutes, lands back at your base a few minutes after your last commute flight home. Another night spent a couple thousand miles from your loved ones. Another 'day off' lost to jumpseating.
You make it to the airplane. Everyone's in a foul mood. The FA snaps at you. The captain grumbles into his coffee. The rampers are nowhere to be found, and neither is the fuel truck. And this CRJ-200's APU is deferred, meaning that you're miserably cold. Then the word comes down: a gate hold. Which means you're not going anywhere for a while.
90 minutes later, you finally push back and join the conga line. The weather is wreaking havoc across your usual departure path. One of the de-ice trucks is broken. And everybody and their grandma wants your runway. Finally, two and a half hours after scheduled departure time, you roar into the skies...for a seventeen-minute flight. Back on the ground, the usual chaos of a Midwestern ramp in the dead of winter ensues.
Finally, four hours after your scheduled return, and long after your last commute flight home has left, you straggle into your base's terminal. It'll be another sleepless night at the crashpad. Or another expensive night at a hotel that you simply can't afford. Or perhaps you'll just try to grab a few hours of shut-eye in a noisy, smelly, dirty 'quiet room', whose chairs are stained with substances you don't even want to begin to guess at.
The next day, you manage to commute home, stuck in seat 47B, wedged between an extremely large man and an extremely colicky baby on its mother's lap. You return to your house, having logged a total of thirty-four minutes in the cockpit over the past five days. And you wonder just what the h*ll you got yourself into.
That, my friend, is regional flying. It's also airline flying in general. You will have days you love, and you will have days – and weeks and months – that you hate.
My advice? As others on this forum have said, live in base. No matter what, live in base. Commuting is h*ll, and commuting to reserve is a special kind of torture. Living in base makes this job dramatically easier.
Even then, though, life won't be all unicorns and butterflies. You will spend more time away from home than at home, much of it in anonymous hotels in small cities with nothing much to do. You will miss important family events. You will realize that the 'glamor' of being an airline pilot vanished long ago, and that the flying public views you as nothing more than a glorified bus driver. From hotel to hotel, from crew lounge to crew lounge, from overpriced buffet to godawful convenience-store food gulped down at 0500 because your hotel doesn't offer breakfast.
But you will also see things that most people never see.
You will get to guide an 85,000-lb turbine aircraft over thousands of miles, through some of the worst weather on the planet. And you will become very good at it. So good, in fact, that the biggest danger you'll face will not be hail, or microbursts, or engine fires. It will be complacency, because you will come to see the job as astonishingly routine and easy. Which it is....until the moment your EICAS screen comes alive with a red warning message, at a most inopportune time. And that is when you will earn your pay (such as it is.)
Is it worth the tradeoff? There's only one way to find out.
Like any job, there are good days and there are bad days. I'll give you two real-life examples. I'll start with the good.
A good day on the line
It's early evening. You show up at the airport, park in the employee lot, and presto! The shuttle bus is right there. A few minutes later, you breeze through KCM (Known Crewmember) and are in the crew lounge less than an hour after leaving your front door. You meet your captain and FAs, all of whom are friendly folks with whom you've previously flown. The weather is perfect, the flight release indicates nothing's known to be broken on your airplane, and you're scheduled to depart on time.
And lo and behold, you do. The passengers board quickly, you close the door a few minutes early, and are wheels up just a couple minutes after scheduled departure time. You've got a nice tailwind and a delightfully smooth ride as you cruise towards northern Canada at 480 knots true. Night falls, and you're rewarded with an absolutely stunning view of the Northern Lights from high altitude. Snug in your pressurized cocoon at FL390, you turn the cockpit lights to their dimmest setting, just drinking in the incredible view. "Wow, they're paying me for this?!?" you think to yourself. You think about another life, one spent in fluorescently-lit grey cubicles grinding away at meaningless busywork, and you silently thank your stars that you chose a different path.
You grease the landing, receiving a few compliments from the passengers as they deplane. You roll up to your spacious hotel room, watch a little TV, and fall asleep. It's been a very easy night. One of those nights when you're reminded just why you love aviation. Tomorrow morning, you'll fly home again, and enjoy a leisurely weekend day at home.
A bad day on the line
It's 4 am on Sunday morning. And it's raining. You roll out of bed and groan inwardly at the task that stretches before you. Your reserve shift at your regional airline begins tomorrow at 0400. The only problem is, your house is 1,800 miles from your base. And it's the holidays. You head to the airport, silently praying that you're heading out early enough to beat the hordes of mainline pilots who want to jumpseat to the same hub as you. Your morning commute flight will be a hub-to-hub run, meaning there's a good chance you'll get bumped by commuting mainliners.
Arriving at the gate, your heart in your throat, you check in for the jumpseat, relieved to see nobody else in uniform near the gate. With 20 minutes to go, you relax...but your heart stops as you see a mainline captain trundle up to the gate and slap his credentials down. This 737 only has one jumpseat, and it looks like it isn't going to be yours.
Four hours and three missed flights later, you're beginning to sweat. You've only got 2 more opportunities, and if you miss those, you're going to be far from your base when your airline calls you to go fly. Fortunately, by a stroke of luck, you manage to make it on the last direct flight out. You arrive late at night, and scramble to find an $80 hotel room – or, worse, you hop an Uber ride to your jam-packed crashpad, full of snoring, farting, burping fellow aviators.
The next morning arrives. "Well, at least I'll get to fly today", you think. "That's why they hired me, after all." But you'd be wrong. You see, the airline somehow seems to know you want to fly, which means that under no circumstances will they oblige by assigning you a trip. You're required to within 2 hours of the airport at all times, and you don't have a car, so...you hang out at the crashpad. You haunt the local Starbucks. After days of this monotony, you begin to go slightly stir-crazy from boredom.
But then, on your last day, the phone rings. "We've got a turn for you." Great, you think. But you check the schedule...and your heart skips yet again. That quick turn, which will put you in the air for all of 45 minutes, lands back at your base a few minutes after your last commute flight home. Another night spent a couple thousand miles from your loved ones. Another 'day off' lost to jumpseating.
You make it to the airplane. Everyone's in a foul mood. The FA snaps at you. The captain grumbles into his coffee. The rampers are nowhere to be found, and neither is the fuel truck. And this CRJ-200's APU is deferred, meaning that you're miserably cold. Then the word comes down: a gate hold. Which means you're not going anywhere for a while.
90 minutes later, you finally push back and join the conga line. The weather is wreaking havoc across your usual departure path. One of the de-ice trucks is broken. And everybody and their grandma wants your runway. Finally, two and a half hours after scheduled departure time, you roar into the skies...for a seventeen-minute flight. Back on the ground, the usual chaos of a Midwestern ramp in the dead of winter ensues.
Finally, four hours after your scheduled return, and long after your last commute flight home has left, you straggle into your base's terminal. It'll be another sleepless night at the crashpad. Or another expensive night at a hotel that you simply can't afford. Or perhaps you'll just try to grab a few hours of shut-eye in a noisy, smelly, dirty 'quiet room', whose chairs are stained with substances you don't even want to begin to guess at.
The next day, you manage to commute home, stuck in seat 47B, wedged between an extremely large man and an extremely colicky baby on its mother's lap. You return to your house, having logged a total of thirty-four minutes in the cockpit over the past five days. And you wonder just what the h*ll you got yourself into.
That, my friend, is regional flying. It's also airline flying in general. You will have days you love, and you will have days – and weeks and months – that you hate.
My advice? As others on this forum have said, live in base. No matter what, live in base. Commuting is h*ll, and commuting to reserve is a special kind of torture. Living in base makes this job dramatically easier.
Even then, though, life won't be all unicorns and butterflies. You will spend more time away from home than at home, much of it in anonymous hotels in small cities with nothing much to do. You will miss important family events. You will realize that the 'glamor' of being an airline pilot vanished long ago, and that the flying public views you as nothing more than a glorified bus driver. From hotel to hotel, from crew lounge to crew lounge, from overpriced buffet to godawful convenience-store food gulped down at 0500 because your hotel doesn't offer breakfast.
But you will also see things that most people never see.
You will get to guide an 85,000-lb turbine aircraft over thousands of miles, through some of the worst weather on the planet. And you will become very good at it. So good, in fact, that the biggest danger you'll face will not be hail, or microbursts, or engine fires. It will be complacency, because you will come to see the job as astonishingly routine and easy. Which it is....until the moment your EICAS screen comes alive with a red warning message, at a most inopportune time. And that is when you will earn your pay (such as it is.)
Is it worth the tradeoff? There's only one way to find out.
08-13-2015 | 05:07 PM
#33
Gets Weekends Off
Joined: Nov 2014
Posts: 233
Likes: 0
I'll take a stab at a serious answer.
Like any job, there are good days and there are bad days. I'll give you two real-life examples. I'll start with the good.
A good day on the line
It's early evening. You show up at the airport, park in the employee lot, and presto! The shuttle bus is right there. A few minutes later, you breeze through KCM (Known Crewmember) and are in the crew lounge less than an hour after leaving your front door. You meet your captain and FAs, all of whom are friendly folks with whom you've previously flown. The weather is perfect, the flight release indicates nothing's known to be broken on your airplane, and you're scheduled to depart on time.
And lo and behold, you do. The passengers board quickly, you close the door a few minutes early, and are wheels up just a couple minutes after scheduled departure time. You've got a nice tailwind and a delightfully smooth ride as you cruise towards northern Canada at 480 knots true. Night falls, and you're rewarded with an absolutely stunning view of the Northern Lights from high altitude. Snug in your pressurized cocoon at FL390, you turn the cockpit lights to their dimmest setting, just drinking in the incredible view. "Wow, they're paying me for this?!?" you think to yourself. You think about another life, one spent in fluorescently-lit grey cubicles grinding away at meaningless busywork, and you silently thank your stars that you chose a different path.
You grease the landing, receiving a few compliments from the passengers as they deplane. You roll up to your spacious hotel room, watch a little TV, and fall asleep. It's been a very easy night. One of those nights when you're reminded just why you love aviation. Tomorrow morning, you'll fly home again, and enjoy a leisurely weekend day at home.
A bad day on the line
It's 4 am on Sunday morning. And it's raining. You roll out of bed and groan inwardly at the task that stretches before you. Your reserve shift at your regional airline begins tomorrow at 0400. The only problem is, your house is 1,800 miles from your base. And it's the holidays. You head to the airport, silently praying that you're heading out early enough to beat the hordes of mainline pilots who want to jumpseat to the same hub as you. Your morning commute flight will be a hub-to-hub run, meaning there's a good chance you'll get bumped by commuting mainliners.
Arriving at the gate, your heart in your throat, you check in for the jumpseat, relieved to see nobody else in uniform near the gate. With 20 minutes to go, you relax...but your heart stops as you see a mainline captain trundle up to the gate and slap his credentials down. This 737 only has one jumpseat, and it looks like it isn't going to be yours.
Four hours and three missed flights later, you're beginning to sweat. You've only got 2 more opportunities, and if you miss those, you're going to be far from your base when your airline calls you to go fly. Fortunately, by a stroke of luck, you manage to make it on the last direct flight out. You arrive late at night, and scramble to find an $80 hotel room – or, worse, you hop an Uber ride to your jam-packed crashpad, full of snoring, farting, burping fellow aviators.
The next morning arrives. "Well, at least I'll get to fly today", you think. "That's why they hired me, after all." But you'd be wrong. You see, the airline somehow seems to know you want to fly, which means that under no circumstances will they oblige by assigning you a trip. You're required to within 2 hours of the airport at all times, and you don't have a car, so...you hang out at the crashpad. You haunt the local Starbucks. After days of this monotony, you begin to go slightly stir-crazy from boredom.
But then, on your last day, the phone rings. "We've got a turn for you." Great, you think. But you check the schedule...and your heart skips yet again. That quick turn, which will put you in the air for all of 45 minutes, lands back at your base a few minutes after your last commute flight home. Another night spent a couple thousand miles from your loved ones. Another 'day off' lost to jumpseating.
You make it to the airplane. Everyone's in a foul mood. The FA snaps at you. The captain grumbles into his coffee. The rampers are nowhere to be found, and neither is the fuel truck. And this CRJ-200's APU is deferred, meaning that you're miserably cold. Then the word comes down: a gate hold. Which means you're not going anywhere for a while.
90 minutes later, you finally push back and join the conga line. The weather is wreaking havoc across your usual departure path. One of the de-ice trucks is broken. And everybody and their grandma wants your runway. Finally, two and a half hours after scheduled departure time, you roar into the skies...for a seventeen-minute flight. Back on the ground, the usual chaos of a Midwestern ramp in the dead of winter ensues.
Finally, four hours after your scheduled return, and long after your last commute flight home has left, you straggle into your base's terminal. It'll be another sleepless night at the crashpad. Or another expensive night at a hotel that you simply can't afford. Or perhaps you'll just try to grab a few hours of shut-eye in a noisy, smelly, dirty 'quiet room', whose chairs are stained with substances you don't even want to begin to guess at.
The next day, you manage to commute home, stuck in seat 47B, wedged between an extremely large man and an extremely colicky baby on its mother's lap. You return to your house, having logged a total of thirty-four minutes in the cockpit over the past five days. And you wonder just what the h*ll you got yourself into.
That, my friend, is regional flying. It's also airline flying in general. You will have days you love, and you will have days – and weeks and months – that you hate.
My advice? As others on this forum have said, live in base. No matter what, live in base. Commuting is h*ll, and commuting to reserve is a special kind of torture. Living in base makes this job dramatically easier.
Even then, though, life won't be all unicorns and butterflies. You will spend more time away from home than at home, much of it in anonymous hotels in small cities with nothing much to do. You will miss important family events. You will realize that the 'glamor' of being an airline pilot vanished long ago, and that the flying public views you as nothing more than a glorified bus driver. From hotel to hotel, from crew lounge to crew lounge, from overpriced buffet to godawful convenience-store food gulped down at 0500 because your hotel doesn't offer breakfast.
But you will also see things that most people never see.
You will get to guide an 85,000-lb turbine aircraft over thousands of miles, through some of the worst weather on the planet. And you will become very good at it. So good, in fact, that the biggest danger you'll face will not be hail, or microbursts, or engine fires. It will be complacency, because you will come to see the job as astonishingly routine and easy. Which it is....until the moment your EICAS screen comes alive with a red warning message, at a most inopportune time. And that is when you will earn your pay (such as it is.)
Is it worth the tradeoff? There's only one way to find out.
Like any job, there are good days and there are bad days. I'll give you two real-life examples. I'll start with the good.
A good day on the line
It's early evening. You show up at the airport, park in the employee lot, and presto! The shuttle bus is right there. A few minutes later, you breeze through KCM (Known Crewmember) and are in the crew lounge less than an hour after leaving your front door. You meet your captain and FAs, all of whom are friendly folks with whom you've previously flown. The weather is perfect, the flight release indicates nothing's known to be broken on your airplane, and you're scheduled to depart on time.
And lo and behold, you do. The passengers board quickly, you close the door a few minutes early, and are wheels up just a couple minutes after scheduled departure time. You've got a nice tailwind and a delightfully smooth ride as you cruise towards northern Canada at 480 knots true. Night falls, and you're rewarded with an absolutely stunning view of the Northern Lights from high altitude. Snug in your pressurized cocoon at FL390, you turn the cockpit lights to their dimmest setting, just drinking in the incredible view. "Wow, they're paying me for this?!?" you think to yourself. You think about another life, one spent in fluorescently-lit grey cubicles grinding away at meaningless busywork, and you silently thank your stars that you chose a different path.
You grease the landing, receiving a few compliments from the passengers as they deplane. You roll up to your spacious hotel room, watch a little TV, and fall asleep. It's been a very easy night. One of those nights when you're reminded just why you love aviation. Tomorrow morning, you'll fly home again, and enjoy a leisurely weekend day at home.
A bad day on the line
It's 4 am on Sunday morning. And it's raining. You roll out of bed and groan inwardly at the task that stretches before you. Your reserve shift at your regional airline begins tomorrow at 0400. The only problem is, your house is 1,800 miles from your base. And it's the holidays. You head to the airport, silently praying that you're heading out early enough to beat the hordes of mainline pilots who want to jumpseat to the same hub as you. Your morning commute flight will be a hub-to-hub run, meaning there's a good chance you'll get bumped by commuting mainliners.
Arriving at the gate, your heart in your throat, you check in for the jumpseat, relieved to see nobody else in uniform near the gate. With 20 minutes to go, you relax...but your heart stops as you see a mainline captain trundle up to the gate and slap his credentials down. This 737 only has one jumpseat, and it looks like it isn't going to be yours.
Four hours and three missed flights later, you're beginning to sweat. You've only got 2 more opportunities, and if you miss those, you're going to be far from your base when your airline calls you to go fly. Fortunately, by a stroke of luck, you manage to make it on the last direct flight out. You arrive late at night, and scramble to find an $80 hotel room – or, worse, you hop an Uber ride to your jam-packed crashpad, full of snoring, farting, burping fellow aviators.
The next morning arrives. "Well, at least I'll get to fly today", you think. "That's why they hired me, after all." But you'd be wrong. You see, the airline somehow seems to know you want to fly, which means that under no circumstances will they oblige by assigning you a trip. You're required to within 2 hours of the airport at all times, and you don't have a car, so...you hang out at the crashpad. You haunt the local Starbucks. After days of this monotony, you begin to go slightly stir-crazy from boredom.
But then, on your last day, the phone rings. "We've got a turn for you." Great, you think. But you check the schedule...and your heart skips yet again. That quick turn, which will put you in the air for all of 45 minutes, lands back at your base a few minutes after your last commute flight home. Another night spent a couple thousand miles from your loved ones. Another 'day off' lost to jumpseating.
You make it to the airplane. Everyone's in a foul mood. The FA snaps at you. The captain grumbles into his coffee. The rampers are nowhere to be found, and neither is the fuel truck. And this CRJ-200's APU is deferred, meaning that you're miserably cold. Then the word comes down: a gate hold. Which means you're not going anywhere for a while.
90 minutes later, you finally push back and join the conga line. The weather is wreaking havoc across your usual departure path. One of the de-ice trucks is broken. And everybody and their grandma wants your runway. Finally, two and a half hours after scheduled departure time, you roar into the skies...for a seventeen-minute flight. Back on the ground, the usual chaos of a Midwestern ramp in the dead of winter ensues.
Finally, four hours after your scheduled return, and long after your last commute flight home has left, you straggle into your base's terminal. It'll be another sleepless night at the crashpad. Or another expensive night at a hotel that you simply can't afford. Or perhaps you'll just try to grab a few hours of shut-eye in a noisy, smelly, dirty 'quiet room', whose chairs are stained with substances you don't even want to begin to guess at.
The next day, you manage to commute home, stuck in seat 47B, wedged between an extremely large man and an extremely colicky baby on its mother's lap. You return to your house, having logged a total of thirty-four minutes in the cockpit over the past five days. And you wonder just what the h*ll you got yourself into.
That, my friend, is regional flying. It's also airline flying in general. You will have days you love, and you will have days – and weeks and months – that you hate.
My advice? As others on this forum have said, live in base. No matter what, live in base. Commuting is h*ll, and commuting to reserve is a special kind of torture. Living in base makes this job dramatically easier.
Even then, though, life won't be all unicorns and butterflies. You will spend more time away from home than at home, much of it in anonymous hotels in small cities with nothing much to do. You will miss important family events. You will realize that the 'glamor' of being an airline pilot vanished long ago, and that the flying public views you as nothing more than a glorified bus driver. From hotel to hotel, from crew lounge to crew lounge, from overpriced buffet to godawful convenience-store food gulped down at 0500 because your hotel doesn't offer breakfast.
But you will also see things that most people never see.
You will get to guide an 85,000-lb turbine aircraft over thousands of miles, through some of the worst weather on the planet. And you will become very good at it. So good, in fact, that the biggest danger you'll face will not be hail, or microbursts, or engine fires. It will be complacency, because you will come to see the job as astonishingly routine and easy. Which it is....until the moment your EICAS screen comes alive with a red warning message, at a most inopportune time. And that is when you will earn your pay (such as it is.)
Is it worth the tradeoff? There's only one way to find out.
08-13-2015 | 05:13 PM
#34
Line Holder
Joined: Nov 2014
Posts: 57
Likes: 0
From: CRJ-200 Right Seat
I'll take a stab at a serious answer.
Like any job, there are good days and there are bad days. I'll give you two real-life examples. I'll start with the good.
A good day on the line
It's early evening. You show up at the airport, park in the employee lot, and presto! The shuttle bus is right there. A few minutes later, you breeze through KCM (Known Crewmember) and are in the crew lounge less than an hour after leaving your front door. You meet your captain and FAs, all of whom are friendly folks with whom you've previously flown. The weather is perfect, the flight release indicates nothing's known to be broken on your airplane, and you're scheduled to depart on time.
And lo and behold, you do. The passengers board quickly, you close the door a few minutes early, and are wheels up just a couple minutes after scheduled departure time. You've got a nice tailwind and a delightfully smooth ride as you cruise towards northern Canada at 480 knots true. Night falls, and you're rewarded with an absolutely stunning view of the Northern Lights from high altitude. Snug in your pressurized cocoon at FL390, you turn the cockpit lights to their dimmest setting, just drinking in the incredible view. "Wow, they're paying me for this?!?" you think to yourself. You think about another life, one spent in fluorescently-lit grey cubicles grinding away at meaningless busywork, and you silently thank your stars that you chose a different path.
You grease the landing, receiving a few compliments from the passengers as they deplane. You roll up to your spacious hotel room, watch a little TV, and fall asleep. It's been a very easy night. One of those nights when you're reminded just why you love aviation. Tomorrow morning, you'll fly home again, and enjoy a leisurely weekend day at home.
A bad day on the line
It's 4 am on Sunday morning. And it's raining. You roll out of bed and groan inwardly at the task that stretches before you. Your reserve shift at your regional airline begins tomorrow at 0400. The only problem is, your house is 1,800 miles from your base. And it's the holidays. You head to the airport, silently praying that you're heading out early enough to beat the hordes of mainline pilots who want to jumpseat to the same hub as you. Your morning commute flight will be a hub-to-hub run, meaning there's a good chance you'll get bumped by commuting mainliners.
Arriving at the gate, your heart in your throat, you check in for the jumpseat, relieved to see nobody else in uniform near the gate. With 20 minutes to go, you relax...but your heart stops as you see a mainline captain trundle up to the gate and slap his credentials down. This 737 only has one jumpseat, and it looks like it isn't going to be yours.
Four hours and three missed flights later, you're beginning to sweat. You've only got 2 more opportunities, and if you miss those, you're going to be far from your base when your airline calls you to go fly. Fortunately, by a stroke of luck, you manage to make it on the last direct flight out. You arrive late at night, and scramble to find an $80 hotel room – or, worse, you hop an Uber ride to your jam-packed crashpad, full of snoring, farting, burping fellow aviators.
The next morning arrives. "Well, at least I'll get to fly today", you think. "That's why they hired me, after all." But you'd be wrong. You see, the airline somehow seems to know you want to fly, which means that under no circumstances will they oblige by assigning you a trip. You're required to within 2 hours of the airport at all times, and you don't have a car, so...you hang out at the crashpad. You haunt the local Starbucks. After days of this monotony, you begin to go slightly stir-crazy from boredom.
But then, on your last day, the phone rings. "We've got a turn for you." Great, you think. But you check the schedule...and your heart skips yet again. That quick turn, which will put you in the air for all of 45 minutes, lands back at your base a few minutes after your last commute flight home. Another night spent a couple thousand miles from your loved ones. Another 'day off' lost to jumpseating.
You make it to the airplane. Everyone's in a foul mood. The FA snaps at you. The captain grumbles into his coffee. The rampers are nowhere to be found, and neither is the fuel truck. And this CRJ-200's APU is deferred, meaning that you're miserably cold. Then the word comes down: a gate hold. Which means you're not going anywhere for a while.
90 minutes later, you finally push back and join the conga line. The weather is wreaking havoc across your usual departure path. One of the de-ice trucks is broken. And everybody and their grandma wants your runway. Finally, two and a half hours after scheduled departure time, you roar into the skies...for a seventeen-minute flight. Back on the ground, the usual chaos of a Midwestern ramp in the dead of winter ensues.
Finally, four hours after your scheduled return, and long after your last commute flight home has left, you straggle into your base's terminal. It'll be another sleepless night at the crashpad. Or another expensive night at a hotel that you simply can't afford. Or perhaps you'll just try to grab a few hours of shut-eye in a noisy, smelly, dirty 'quiet room', whose chairs are stained with substances you don't even want to begin to guess at.
The next day, you manage to commute home, stuck in seat 47B, wedged between an extremely large man and an extremely colicky baby on its mother's lap. You return to your house, having logged a total of thirty-four minutes in the cockpit over the past five days. And you wonder just what the h*ll you got yourself into.
That, my friend, is regional flying. It's also airline flying in general. You will have days you love, and you will have days – and weeks and months – that you hate.
My advice? As others on this forum have said, live in base. No matter what, live in base. Commuting is h*ll, and commuting to reserve is a special kind of torture. Living in base makes this job dramatically easier.
Even then, though, life won't be all unicorns and butterflies. You will spend more time away from home than at home, much of it in anonymous hotels in small cities with nothing much to do. You will miss important family events. You will realize that the 'glamor' of being an airline pilot vanished long ago, and that the flying public views you as nothing more than a glorified bus driver. From hotel to hotel, from crew lounge to crew lounge, from overpriced buffet to godawful convenience-store food gulped down at 0500 because your hotel doesn't offer breakfast.
But you will also see things that most people never see.
You will get to guide an 85,000-lb turbine aircraft over thousands of miles, through some of the worst weather on the planet. And you will become very good at it. So good, in fact, that the biggest danger you'll face will not be hail, or microbursts, or engine fires. It will be complacency, because you will come to see the job as astonishingly routine and easy. Which it is....until the moment your EICAS screen comes alive with a red warning message, at a most inopportune time. And that is when you will earn your pay (such as it is.)
Is it worth the tradeoff? There's only one way to find out.
Like any job, there are good days and there are bad days. I'll give you two real-life examples. I'll start with the good.
A good day on the line
It's early evening. You show up at the airport, park in the employee lot, and presto! The shuttle bus is right there. A few minutes later, you breeze through KCM (Known Crewmember) and are in the crew lounge less than an hour after leaving your front door. You meet your captain and FAs, all of whom are friendly folks with whom you've previously flown. The weather is perfect, the flight release indicates nothing's known to be broken on your airplane, and you're scheduled to depart on time.
And lo and behold, you do. The passengers board quickly, you close the door a few minutes early, and are wheels up just a couple minutes after scheduled departure time. You've got a nice tailwind and a delightfully smooth ride as you cruise towards northern Canada at 480 knots true. Night falls, and you're rewarded with an absolutely stunning view of the Northern Lights from high altitude. Snug in your pressurized cocoon at FL390, you turn the cockpit lights to their dimmest setting, just drinking in the incredible view. "Wow, they're paying me for this?!?" you think to yourself. You think about another life, one spent in fluorescently-lit grey cubicles grinding away at meaningless busywork, and you silently thank your stars that you chose a different path.
You grease the landing, receiving a few compliments from the passengers as they deplane. You roll up to your spacious hotel room, watch a little TV, and fall asleep. It's been a very easy night. One of those nights when you're reminded just why you love aviation. Tomorrow morning, you'll fly home again, and enjoy a leisurely weekend day at home.
A bad day on the line
It's 4 am on Sunday morning. And it's raining. You roll out of bed and groan inwardly at the task that stretches before you. Your reserve shift at your regional airline begins tomorrow at 0400. The only problem is, your house is 1,800 miles from your base. And it's the holidays. You head to the airport, silently praying that you're heading out early enough to beat the hordes of mainline pilots who want to jumpseat to the same hub as you. Your morning commute flight will be a hub-to-hub run, meaning there's a good chance you'll get bumped by commuting mainliners.
Arriving at the gate, your heart in your throat, you check in for the jumpseat, relieved to see nobody else in uniform near the gate. With 20 minutes to go, you relax...but your heart stops as you see a mainline captain trundle up to the gate and slap his credentials down. This 737 only has one jumpseat, and it looks like it isn't going to be yours.
Four hours and three missed flights later, you're beginning to sweat. You've only got 2 more opportunities, and if you miss those, you're going to be far from your base when your airline calls you to go fly. Fortunately, by a stroke of luck, you manage to make it on the last direct flight out. You arrive late at night, and scramble to find an $80 hotel room – or, worse, you hop an Uber ride to your jam-packed crashpad, full of snoring, farting, burping fellow aviators.
The next morning arrives. "Well, at least I'll get to fly today", you think. "That's why they hired me, after all." But you'd be wrong. You see, the airline somehow seems to know you want to fly, which means that under no circumstances will they oblige by assigning you a trip. You're required to within 2 hours of the airport at all times, and you don't have a car, so...you hang out at the crashpad. You haunt the local Starbucks. After days of this monotony, you begin to go slightly stir-crazy from boredom.
But then, on your last day, the phone rings. "We've got a turn for you." Great, you think. But you check the schedule...and your heart skips yet again. That quick turn, which will put you in the air for all of 45 minutes, lands back at your base a few minutes after your last commute flight home. Another night spent a couple thousand miles from your loved ones. Another 'day off' lost to jumpseating.
You make it to the airplane. Everyone's in a foul mood. The FA snaps at you. The captain grumbles into his coffee. The rampers are nowhere to be found, and neither is the fuel truck. And this CRJ-200's APU is deferred, meaning that you're miserably cold. Then the word comes down: a gate hold. Which means you're not going anywhere for a while.
90 minutes later, you finally push back and join the conga line. The weather is wreaking havoc across your usual departure path. One of the de-ice trucks is broken. And everybody and their grandma wants your runway. Finally, two and a half hours after scheduled departure time, you roar into the skies...for a seventeen-minute flight. Back on the ground, the usual chaos of a Midwestern ramp in the dead of winter ensues.
Finally, four hours after your scheduled return, and long after your last commute flight home has left, you straggle into your base's terminal. It'll be another sleepless night at the crashpad. Or another expensive night at a hotel that you simply can't afford. Or perhaps you'll just try to grab a few hours of shut-eye in a noisy, smelly, dirty 'quiet room', whose chairs are stained with substances you don't even want to begin to guess at.
The next day, you manage to commute home, stuck in seat 47B, wedged between an extremely large man and an extremely colicky baby on its mother's lap. You return to your house, having logged a total of thirty-four minutes in the cockpit over the past five days. And you wonder just what the h*ll you got yourself into.
That, my friend, is regional flying. It's also airline flying in general. You will have days you love, and you will have days – and weeks and months – that you hate.
My advice? As others on this forum have said, live in base. No matter what, live in base. Commuting is h*ll, and commuting to reserve is a special kind of torture. Living in base makes this job dramatically easier.
Even then, though, life won't be all unicorns and butterflies. You will spend more time away from home than at home, much of it in anonymous hotels in small cities with nothing much to do. You will miss important family events. You will realize that the 'glamor' of being an airline pilot vanished long ago, and that the flying public views you as nothing more than a glorified bus driver. From hotel to hotel, from crew lounge to crew lounge, from overpriced buffet to godawful convenience-store food gulped down at 0500 because your hotel doesn't offer breakfast.
But you will also see things that most people never see.
You will get to guide an 85,000-lb turbine aircraft over thousands of miles, through some of the worst weather on the planet. And you will become very good at it. So good, in fact, that the biggest danger you'll face will not be hail, or microbursts, or engine fires. It will be complacency, because you will come to see the job as astonishingly routine and easy. Which it is....until the moment your EICAS screen comes alive with a red warning message, at a most inopportune time. And that is when you will earn your pay (such as it is.)
Is it worth the tradeoff? There's only one way to find out.
08-13-2015 | 05:33 PM
#35
With the Rebel Forces.
Joined: Jun 2015
Posts: 289
Likes: 0
From: Observing
.........
Don't leave out the icing on the cake. Here, I'll finish it for you.
You finally make it back home after all that and you see the garbage men collecting the trash from each house. You're saddened when you realize they are making twice what you are making, the kicker is that they are home every night.
08-13-2015 | 05:38 PM
#36
Gets Weekends Off
Joined: Nov 2014
Posts: 233
Likes: 0
Don't leave out the icing on the cake. Here, I'll finish it for you.
You finally make it back home after all that and you see the garbage men collecting the trash from each house. You're saddened when you realize they are making twice what you are making, the kicker is that they are home every night.
You finally make it back home after all that and you see the garbage men collecting the trash from each house. You're saddened when you realize they are making twice what you are making, the kicker is that they are home every night.
08-13-2015 | 05:50 PM
#37
With the Rebel Forces.
Joined: Jun 2015
Posts: 289
Likes: 0
From: Observing
........
God bless you buddy, I have been there.
But I prevailed and you will too. Good things happen to good people.
08-13-2015 | 06:10 PM
#39
With the Rebel Forces.
Joined: Jun 2015
Posts: 289
Likes: 0
From: Observing
08-13-2015 | 06:17 PM
#40
Gets Weekends Off
Joined: Jul 2008
Posts: 1,035
Likes: 0
From: Gear Handle supervisor
What are the regionals like?
Dont forget about scheduling looking for you on your last day to make you work a flight into your day off so you don't get home till late on your day off or the next day off. Then have to battle to get paid for it because your payroll personnel are inept at best. Good times.....
Thread
Thread Starter
Forum
Replies
Last Post
