Northwest Pilots Restricted to 90 Hours per Month
Tony in Maine
interesting. It said that Northwest often has to cancel flights at
the end of the month due to lack of pilots.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070820/BUSINESS/108200055/1001
Do other airlines have this 90 hour restriction like Northwest has? It
is kind of funny, because I've always seemed to have had good luck
with Northwest. USAir has been the nightmare airline for me and I've
quit flying with them.
Parvaz
You are a smart guy and you are going to dig a little deeper. By
federal regulations your airline pilot is limited to flying a maximum
of 1,000 hours a year. Divide that by the 12 months in a year and you
come up with about 83 hours a month of flight time. Airlines also
have contractual restrictions. All airlines have some limits imposed
on the number of hours a pilot can fly. The most restrictive limits
are either contractually negotiated with the pilots or they are the
federal regulations themselves.
Do not confuse "working" with flight time. Flight time is only that
time between when the jet pushes back from the departure gate to that
time when it arrives at the arrival gate and the parking brake is set.
All the time the pilot spends processing the necessary information
prior to your flight; the time spent running the checklists and the
time spent delayed at the gate because of air traffic control does not
count against the 85 hours +/- a month. Neither does the time spent
waiting at an airport prior to your jet arriving.
Most of the time I am scheduled for 10 ½ to 12 hours of being on duty
every time I go to work: during that same time I am usually scheduled
to fly somewhere between 5 and 8 hours. For every "hour" of flight
time I am on the job in uniform for nearly 2 hours. Often when I am
"off duty" I am not home. I am in some cheap hotel getting my
"required rest" prior to flying another day of a multiple day trip.
None of those hours count as work in any way. I can be gone for three
calendar days, that's 72 hours, and the most I will have "flown" about
15 hours. I'm gone for 3 days in uniform on the job or at the company
assigned hotel and I have "worked" for 15 hours. Heck that's less
than two regular 8 hour 'shifts'. It depends on how you look at it.
I am not visible to you when I show up at the airport 2 hours prior
to my flight. You don't see me doing my manual revisions making sure
I have the latest navigation charts and changing company procedures in
my manuals. You don't know that I am analyzing the weather for our
flight and checking the condition of the airports and reading through
the pages of information the company is required to supply me with.
When I show up at the jet and run through my preflight ritual that
includes checking every switch position and aircraft system for
correct placement and operation none of that is considered "work" -
really now! There is flight information that needs to be entered into
the computers, engineering performance charts that need to be
consulted, conversations that have to take place with air traffic
control over the radios and several checklists that need to be
accomplished. None of the time it takes to accomplish these steps is
factored in when you hear the 85 to 90 hours of "work" that is
quoted.
Your pilot "works" 85 to 90 hours the same way a professional
baseball player only "works" the time he fielding a ball that is in
play or at bat during a game, or the way an attorney is only "working"
when they are in court arguing a case before a jury or the way your
surgeon is only "working" when they are actually doing surgery. It is
a much skewed number and not representative of what is really
involved.