king10pin02

nothing in our contract prevents it. so LAS crews overnight in FLL and do jungle turns, and east coast crews overnight in LAX and LAS and do redeyes back east, they are brutal for sleep cycle, takes me 2-3 days to get my body clock stable after redeyes, granted i have kids at home....

BKbigfish

I’m not aware of any airline that has contract language that would prevent these jungle turns. If that language exists somewhere I’d be interested in hearing about it.

HulkaBurger

I'm not talking about preventing the turns. I'm talking about mixing them in on a 4- day trip with multiple circadian swaps. And plenty of contracts prevent that.

king10pin02

you mean you dont like long west coast overnights followed by redeye east to a 11hr overnight(with housekeeping and hotel guests keeping you awake) and one leg back to base? lol the trips with redeyes in the middle should be far illegal

ASAPsafetyGUY

I love the jungle-turn redeye trips. Sign me up.

BKbigfish

And I’m interested in the contract language that prevents it. A brief summary of the language and which airlines have it would be awesome if you’ve got a minute. I guess I wasn’t aware of the existence of circadian swap prevention language (other than maybe SWA who doesn’t operate red eyes anyways). If you’re talking about red eye + 1 prevention we have that. It’s just based on LDT which is why the west coast guys get the all night jungle turns out of FLL. First leg isn’t technically a red eye which is why the LAS crews operate many of them.

RemoveB4flght

Honestly seeking feedback to get a better idea here:

What is the departure time of the first leg out of LAS on one of these typical 4 day red eye jungle turn pairings?

Im not questioning the fatigue or desirability of them, but say you have a down south red eye with a 2100 local report, 21:45 departure. 3 hours each way, one hour on the ground, take the full 30 minutes post flight for customs and shuttle pickup, so hotel bound by 0515. (Yes there are many variances but the profile is for for the sake of discussion).

9pm to 5am sucks, but for a west coast crew that should be more like 6pm to 3am. Still crossing that late night no-zone but take away all the other variables and I would much prefer 6-3 over 9-5.

Now this doesn’t happen in a vacuum, so the timing of the first leg to Florida, van/hotel quality, and customs issues are key.

What are the biggest snags in these pairings?

BeechedJet

Out of ORD we’ve had some pairing that’ll start at 9pm or around that that goes ORD-DEN-FLL into 12-13 hours of rest to do a red eye jungle turn getting back to the hotel on day three at 6-7AM. Then you rest until 5am or some shiit and fly three legs or something ridiculously long to end the trip. My body is toast at the end of those. Just because I had 20 hours of layover doesn’t mean I can just swap my internal clock for that day 4 push.

gringo

File a fatigue report. The only way we’ll get the company to stop this nonsense.

BKbigfish

The 4 day FLL jungle turn pairings out of LAS typically start off with a LAS-FLL redeye (~2200 LDT departure). The two red eye jungle turns (day 2 and 3) typically depart FLL between 2100 and 2200 eastern and get back to FLL between 0500 and 0600 eastern so yeah 1800-0300 LDT is pretty accurate. Last day is an evening departure FLL-LAS arriving at ~2300 LDT. They still suck but it’s all night flying (no circadian swap) which makes them tolerable as long as everything goes smoothly. You get delayed at all on that first leg of the evening and it gets not fun in a hurry. They actually aren’t half bad in the winter (dry season down south).