Yeah. In all honesty if 30 years ago I understood what it meant to be a pilot in terms of years spent working night hours and holidays I would have picked a different career. I'm glad I made it to where I am and today I wouldn't trade my job for any other, but those intervening years were a hard price to pay. If it hadn't been for my wife being employed and being able to drop trips for many years I don't think I would have survived. Everybody who is junior and doing red-eyes and holidays has my utmost of sympathy. Being junior stinks!

I will say - I lived on the west coast for a while and was SFO based doing JFK red-eyes where the all night flight was the flight out followed by a late return the next day. If I had to chose then that would most definitely be my preferred red-eye. I know it's not fair to the west coast guys, but I wish they would push all that stuff to LAX and SFO.

 

You might want to take a gander at west coast flying.

 

Look at LAX/SFO 737 and 756 flying... tell me what most of the trips start with. There was a point a few years ago something like 60-70% of guppy flying started with a redeye.

 

I take back what I said . . . that's harsh

 

I have friends who say a lot of fake parts that do not conform to specs and a lot of pencil whipping goes on in developing countries.

An engineer friend who worked on Chernobyl came to the US and took citizenship. He said one thing he absolutely loves about this country is people work to conform to specs and standards. When he worked in the Ukraine (as part of the USSR) he was expected to ignore testing and pencil whip most things other than the bare minimum to sort of get it to work.

 

And to pile on...

I was talking to one of our FA's years ago. Her brother had gone to Dubai to work on some construction projects. He told her that they cut corners like mad and that many of their high rises were fire traps.



And not just once!

 

Harder to sue in other countries that's why. I guess lawyers, unpleasant as they may be, do actually serve a purpose

 

The consolation prize is hawaii flying, but it usually ends with, or has a redeye in there somewhere.

 

Doing redeyes even when you are senior for ever... respect to the freightdogs out there..

 

Because EWR 756 guys will do the day time departures back to the mainland. LAX and SFO flow more “naturally” on the all nighter segments. 😜