When I tell someone what I do for a living I usually get the same two or three questions:
“Do you fly international or domestic?” Both but mostly domestic.
“Do you want to fly passengers someday?” No, I couldn't handle the pay-cut.
“What route do you fly?" It’s…….um…….complicated.
Actually it’s downright Byzantine in its complexity. I’ll try to explain it in case anyone is interested.
In the airline business, seniority is everything. What plane you fly, what routes you fly, when you get vacation all are based on date of hire.
About once a year, the company will put a “system bid”, usually to fill seats vacated by people who’ve retired or because we’ve increased the size of our fleet.
There’s an old joke that when a Captain has a heart attack in the terminal the first thing everybody does is check his seniority number.
So let’s suppose the company needs 20 new Captains on the 757 because some of those greedy old bastards finally retired. If I’m in the top 20 seniority numbers who listed 757 Captain as a preference, I’ll get it.
Now our system is fortunately more flexible than that. We’re allowed to bid by percentage. I can say “I want to be a 757 Captain, but only if I will be in the top XX percentage of pilots in that seat.” That’s actually important, because upgrading at a low seniority level can have unpleasant side effects.
Here’s where it gets tricky. In this business, you can either chase the money or you can have quality of life. It’s tough to have both. That’s a good problem to have, mind you. A lot of people don’t have either so don’t think I’m not grateful.
When I got hired they told us “You’ll all be Captains in 3 years”. I’d say that was wildly optimistic. Between the recession and raising the retirement age to 65 it was around 10 years before I could even think about upgrading to Captain.
The Copilot
I am the copilot. I sit on the right.
It's up to me to be quick and bright;
I never talk back for I have regrets,
But I have to remember what the Captain forgets.
I make out the Flight Plan and study the weather,
Pull up the gear, stand by to feather;
Make out the mail forms and do the reporting,
And fly the old crate while the Captain is courting.
I take the readings, adjust the power,
Put on the heaters when we're in a shower;
Tell him where we are on the darkest night,
And do all the bookwork without any light.
I call for my Captain and buy him cokes;
I always laugh at his corny jokes,
And once in awhile when his landings are rusty
I always come through with, "By gosh it's gusty!"
All in all I'm a general stooge,
As I sit on the right of the man I call "Scrooge";
I guess you think that is past understanding,
But maybe some day he will give me a landing.
— Keith Murray
Now in my 13th year at Packages R’ Us we’re experiencing 150-200 retirements a year. I now have options.
I could be a fairly junior 757 Captain and fly the crappy trips that nobody wants but I’d make about 20 percent more money. Or, I could stay senior in the right seat of the 767 and make less money but have much better quality of life.
Never fly with a doctor and never take financial advice from a pilot.
- Anonymous
To me, it’s a no-brainer. I live so far within my means it’s not funny. We’re empty nesters, my spouse has a pension and I’m still living in my starter-home. I drive a 13-year-old car. A nice 13-year-old car mind you but still. The joke in the industry is that I have the ultimate 401K — my first wife and my first house.
You see, I possess one thing that people like the Kochs, Mercers and Waltons will never have — the knowledge that I have enough.
This job is hard enough on your body as it is. I don’t want to put myself in an early grave for a few extra bucks. OK, a lot of extra bucks, but I’d like to be around to enjoy them.
Let's take a look at how sausage, or in this case my schedule gets made.
Every month the company and the union work together to put out a list of schedules for the following month. When this list is published I get about a week to study it and put in a bid.
On the 767, we’ll have anywhere from 200-250 possible schedules to pick from. Each one of those is called a “line”. About 200 of these will have actual trips and the rest will be reserve days.
That’s a lot of information to process and you have to look carefully because there may be some bad stuff hiding in the middle of a trip that looks good otherwise. When you find yourself flying some crappy trip the answer is usually “I must have flunked bidding this month”.
Back in the day this was all done on paper. Occasionally I will fly with an older Captain who still prints out the entire bid pack. I’ll usually tease them with “Is that how you did it back in the DC-3 days?”
Fortunately someone with better programming skills than myself has written a spreadsheet style program that helps with this process. It’s well worth the small subscription price.
The first part is easy. I don’t want to sit reserve so those go straight to the bottom. For a commuter like myself, reserve means sitting in a “crash pad” while waiting for crew scheduling to call.
I hated the crash pad. They were slobs and they ate my food.
One guy would sit there watching Fox News all day and yelling at the television. Fun times. I think that’s when I decided never to sit reserve again if I could help it.
In the airline business, a commuter is someone who doesn’t live in the city that they are based in. That city is called your “domicile”. I'd guess that roughly half of all airline pilots commute.
At my airline we have six domiciles.
Memphis: Great BBQ! And….....um….....well the BBQ is really good.
Los Angeles: Nice place, can’t afford to live there.
Anchorage: Expensive with the added benefit of six months of darkness.
Indianapolis: Maybe but it’s a very small base right now. Not many trips to choose from.
Hong Kong: Very pricey.
Cologne: Thinking about that one.
For now I live in Columbus Ohio and commute to work. I spend a lot of time sleeping in the jumpseat. When I retire I’m going to remodel my bedroom to look like this so I can sleep.
The next thing I avoid like kryptonite is out-and-backs. An out-and-back is a trip that goes somewhere and comes back on the same day (or night). There’s no hotel because there’s no layover. These are great for people that live in domicile but toxic to commuters.
The next thing I weed out is what we call "trash" lines. A trash line is where you have 2-3 days on followed by 1-2 days off and so on. It looks like someone threw a bunch of trips against the wall and they stuck there. These also are bad for commuters because I would spend half my life just getting back and forth to work. Sometimes it’s just not worth the trouble just to get home for 24 hours and head right back out.
I’m having trouble sizing my pictures, but here’s a screen shot of a trash line if you can read it. Basically two days on, with one day off in between. I’d either have to get a hotel room on my dime between trips or take the jumpseat home in the morning just to go back the same night. TLC is Toluca Mexico, by the way. I've never been there. For some reason nobody likes that trip so I avoid it. Not sure why. BQN is in Puerto Rico. I haven’t been back there since the hurricane.
Once I’m done weeding out all the trash, I’m probably left with 50-100 lines that I would consider “workable”. Now you see why I stay senior. I rank order those from “Gimmee!” to “That doesn’t look too bad” to “Well, if that’s the best I can get.”
This is where I have to start looking at each line with a microscope to see if it's something I want. As a commuter, I normally look for week-on/week-off trips. That minimizes how much of my own time gets spent just traveling back and forth to work.
Even better is when I can get a “deadhead”. No, not those deadheads! A deadhead is where the trip starts in some other city and the company buys me an airline ticket to get there. I’m getting paid for the time spent getting to work.
The best trip for commuting is the coveted “double deadhead”. Probably a joke in there somewhere but I can't think of one. This is an airline ticket at each end of the trip. I get paid for getting to work and for getting home.
This is what I would consider a choice trip. Deadhead to Phoenix, layovers in Oakland and Kansas City then deadhead home from Chicago. A nice, week-on/week-off trip. No muss, no fuss.
The holy grail of commuting is a double deadhead to your home town. Then you get an extra day’s pay at each end of the trip because you’re already there!
Those are almost impossible to get. When someone becomes senior enough to hold that line they will camp out on it until the day they die, or retire, whichever comes first. So if you happen to live in the same city as someone who is very senior to you, better find some other trip you like.
Because of how the package delivery business works, we don’t fly much on the weekends. Most of our fleet sits somewhere from Saturday morning until Monday evening.
Sometimes it’s cheaper for them to stick us in a hotel over the weekend to operate out Monday night rather than deadhead us back. I’m sure one of the management bean-counters has that on a spreadsheet somewhere.
Weekend layovers can be good or bad depending on the circumstances. San Francisco in the summer — woo hoo! Winnipeg in January - oh what fresh hell is this? Note that I have done both of those. I held Winnipeg and Grand Forks, for one very long winter on the 757. Sooooooo cold!
Here’s another choice trip. Layover in San Francisco from Saturday morning until Monday evening. SGF is Springfield Missouri. Nothing to write home about but you’re not there long. We tend to pair short flights with long flights because of duty day limitations. If I fly from San Francisco to Memphis, by the time the freight gets “sorted” I probably don’t have enough crew duty left to fly back to San Francisco. That’s why they pair it with someplace close like Springfield.
Once I’ve gone through all of those trips with a fine-tooth comb and rank ordered them I still have one more task.
The Captain schedules come out a day before the First Officers. I go through my bid once again, looking for anyone that’s on my “no fly” list. That list is fortunately very small. I try pretty hard to get along with everybody.
Most of the ones with “personality disorders” have been weeded out or found their way to the 777 (so I’m told). I’ve heard the 777 called the “tool box” for that reason. Fortunately I never had to fly with the “puppet lady”. Go ahead, ask me about the puppet lady.
Still, there is a small handful of Captains that I would rather not spend a whole month flying with for one reason or another. I might change the ranking of my trips if I don’t want to spend an entire night arguing politics and/or religion. I’ve had enough nights like that to last me a while. One guy wouldn’t shut up the entire way from Atlanta to Newark, and then he picked up where he left off from Newark back to Atlanta!
Once it’s all said and done I put my bid in. The whole process probably takes me about 3 days. I usually throw one in early just to make sure I have one in the system. Then I tweak it from there.
What happens if you forget to put a bid in? You’ll probably be hating life for the next month.
The way the schedules are awarded is quite simple. The most senior person gets their first choice. The second most senior person gets their first choice of what’s left over. And so on. If you’re down in the bottom 25-30% you’ll probably be sitting reserve or enjoying Winnipeg this January. Remember to bring your parka.
Having clawed my way to a respectable 16% seniority on the 767 I’m ranked somewhere around number 46 or 47. That means I have to be really careful what I put at the top of my list because I might just get it. In practice I usually get one of my top 5 picks on any given month.
Basically seniority is everything in this business. I had a deadhead to Paris a few years back. When I met up with the Captain over there I noticed he had the lowest employee number I had ever seen.
“Dude, what’s your seniority number? Two?”
“Yes, actually it is.”
“Doh!”
I’m guessing it didn’t take very long for him to do his bid every month.