UPS doesn’t release operational info like this to anyone so only clues are in the bid packages which have been showing more and more day flying (at least on 75 domestic-all I’ve paid attention to). I’m still on Z so can’t give more specifics. Next bid period is when all the remaining postal volume comes onboard and then it will take a few bids for optimizer to fully ruin it so probably won’t have a good answer to that for about 6 months or so.

Day flying is nice for the circadian rhythms but that are often long days, with flow, 1 million frequency changes, reroutes, etc. Nite flying is a lot easier in some of these aspects!!

 

Correct.......if you have an all day flying line........u will be literally flying "all day." They r long duty periods.

 

Far too early to say, as mentioned above we don't see the full weight of Postal until October 1st. Then we get into the four-week November bid which is followed by Peak, so we really won't have a normalized idea until the bids for February-March come out.

Postal has and will result in much more 2nd Day Air flying (some of which is "pure day", some of which has been integrated into additional morning & afternoon turn trips) but bottom line without rose-colored lenses is one will fly nights here, regardless. Amount of day flying one will see at a given juniority will depend entirely on their bidding considerations for a commute.

18 month newhire transition freeze between equipment; can change domiciles on same airplane (ie. ONT 757 to SDFZ 757, ANC 747 to SDF 747) during that transition freeze.

 

Thank you for all this great info! Im just trying to figure out which fleet to select depending on the drop next month. Looking forward to getting started there, planning on moving in domicile.

 

I don't know how it will work for you guys over at Brown, but personally, at the other color, I'm not an enormous fan of day flying if I have to hub turn.

For us, you could be arriving at the hub fairly early from one of the close cities, say around 9 or 9:30 in the morning and then you could potentially sit there until 4pm-ish or so. Some of the west coast flights get in later and leave earlier, but you could have some really long sits in the hub during the day, compared to just a 2-3 hours at night (when the potential is there to sleep).

I live in base, so I don't mind day flights here and there, but I'll pass on a week of hub turns of them.

Plus, like others have mentioned before, there's weather, much more traffic, delays, more guys b**tching about rides constantly, more frequency congestion and WAY more meowing on Guard.

I actually don't mind nights. And the junior guys at my company that complain that they hate it because the day flying is gone...well, I'm also quite junior and I knew going into my company that our primary operation is night and has been for 51 years.

 

And at any time, you could be rotated to a night or two to fill some operational need and then switched back to your original day flying schedule again. Gotta love circadian swaps with 12 hours of rest in the middle of a day trip, not fatiguing at all...

 

Saturday I went to my kids football game at St X. I saw 7 MD-11s land in about 90 minutes between 11AM and 12:30. In addition to the MD-11s. I witnessed 3 Airbi and 1 76. Bid the MD-11 if you want to see the sun on a weekend.

 

It's not the 12-hour layovers that kill you. It's the 24-hour ones.

 

This is a fact above. Thankfully our outfit switched to 32-hour layovers which does create superb rest and other opportunities. Granted if there are trip delays and it might affect my schedule negatively having a 32 sitting in between, I sometimes entertain a 24 to keep things desirable. On the flip side if the loss of the next leg is a plus, then let the chips fall where they may. Trip strategy over time is a thing at our outfit. I do appreciate the 32s...

 

our day flying schedule is just like yours. Fly into SDF around 9:30 am and sit till 4 or 5 pm and head west. I prefer night flying myself as the days are shorter.