Cockpit Confidential (19 page)

How much it dwindles remains to be seen. It's somewhat telling that virtually no regional carriers have raised their salaries or benefit packages to levels that would appear aimed at retaining or attracting pilots. Bear in mind too the willingness of pilots to suffer for their art, so to speak. There will always be pilots—some would say too many of them—happy to endure almost anything for the sheer thrill of the job. If you ask me, there will be plenty of experienced pilots out there in the foreseeable future hungry for work, and airlines big and small can continue to expect a hundred or more applications for every available job.

There's almost no such thing as a typical schedule. In a given month, one pilot might spend ten days on the road logging sixty hours in the air; another pilot might be gone for twenty days, with ninety hours aloft. That's a big range, because seniority has enormous impact on where and when we fly, and because schedules are very flexible.

Every thirty days, around the middle of the month, we bid our preferences for the following month: where we'd like to fly, which days we'd like to be off, which insufferable colleagues we hope to avoid, etc. What we actually end up with hinges on seniority. Senior pilots get the choicest pickings; junior pilots get whatever is left over. A top-of-the-list pilot might be assigned a single, thirteen-day trip to Asia worth seventy pay hours; a bottom-dweller might get a long series of two- and three-day domestic trips scattered throughout the month. And if we hate what we get, it's always changeable. We can swap, drop, and trade with other pilots, even on short notice.

A lot of people assume pilots are assigned to specific destinations and fly there all the time. One of the more amusing questions I often get is: “What's your route?” Seniority permitting, it's possible to visit the same place over and over, if that's what you want, but normally it's a mixed bag. As I type this, my month ahead has scheduled layovers in Las Vegas, Madrid, Los Angeles, and São Paulo, totaling seventy-six pay hours and fourteen days away from home. Not bad, though I'm hoping to dump that Vegas trip for something better…we'll see.

Those at the very bottom are assigned to on-call “reserve” status. A reserve pilot has designated days off and receives a flat minimum pay rate for the month, but his or her workdays are a blank slate. The pilot needs to be within a stipulated number of hours from the airport—anywhere from two to twelve, and it can change day to day. When somebody gets sick, or is trapped in Chicago because of a snowstorm, the reserve pilot goes to work. The phone might ring at 2:00 a.m., and you're on the way to Sweden or Brazil—or to Omaha or Dallas. Among the challenges of life on reserve is learning how to pack. What to put in the suitcase when you don't know if your next destination will be tropical or freezing cold? (Answer: everything.)

At most carriers, cockpit crews are paired together for as long as a particular assignment lasts. If I've got four different trips on my schedule for the month, I'll fly with four different captains. Some airlines, though, use a different bidding system in which captains and copilots are matched up for the entire month.

And, just as there's no such thing as a typical schedule, there's no such thing as a typical layover. Domestic overnights can be as short as nine or ten hours. Overseas, it's usually a minimum of twenty-four hours, though forty-eight or even seventy-two hours aren't unheard of. I've spent up to five full days on a layover. On longer trips, crew-members will occasionally bring along family members (
see travel perks
).

For cabin staff it works the same way. A senior flight attendant might grab the same coveted layovers in Athens or Singapore that a senior captain does. There are, however, fewer duty-time restrictions and contractual protections for flight attendants, and they tend to work more days. A pilot might fly three or four multi-day trips in a month, while a flight attendant might fly seven.

Should you therefore extrapolate that the largest planes on the longest routes are operated by the most senior and most experienced crews? Not always. One factor is the airport you are based out of. The larger carriers typically offer six or seven base cities to choose from. Certain of these bases are more preferable to pilots than others, and so seniority becomes a relative thing. I'm based in New York, for example, which at my carrier tends to be the least desirable, and therefore the most junior, base. This allows me to fly international routes even though my overall seniority is low. And not all pilots enjoy international flying, even if it pays better.

Many pilots are based—or to use an ugly-sounding airline word, domiciled—in cities other than those in which they live, and will “commute,” as we call it, back and forth. More than 50 percent of crewmembers commute, pilots and flight attendants alike. I'm one of them. I'm based out of New York, but I live in Boston. Although commuting is a privilege that allows crews to live where they please, it can also be practical. If you're a regional airline pilot making $30,000 and trying to support a family, living in an expensive metropolitan area like San Francisco or New York City would be very difficult. Also, aircraft and base assignments change frequently. The opportunity to commute keeps employees from having to uproot and move with every new bid posting.

Commuting can be stressful. Employees ride standby, and company rules require us to allow for backup flights in case of delays. This can mean having to leave home several hours before sign-in, or in many cases, a full day prior. Crewmembers commonly rent a part-time residency called a crash pad, where they'll stay, if needed, on either end of a commute. (The décor and sanitary standards of the average crash pad are a topic for another time.) Others, when it's affordable, rent hotel rooms.

One way to cut down on commutes is to bid international trips. Overseas rotations tend to be longer, with some lasting ten days or more, and you don't fly as many of them. An international category pilot might commute in only two or three times each month, while a pilot on domestic runs does it five or six times.

My own commute, with barely forty minutes of flying time, is as painless as they come. Multihour commutes through two or more time zones, however, are not the least bit uncommon. I've met pilots who commute to New York from Alaska, the Virgin Islands, and France. Legend has it there was once an Eastern Airlines captain who was domiciled in Atlanta but lived in New Zealand.

Crew fatigue has long been a serious issue. It has been cited as a contributing cause in several accidents, including the 1999 crash of American Airlines flight 1420, at Little Rock, Arkansas, and that of Colgan Air flight 3407 in 2009. The airlines and FAA have been very resistant to the tightening of flight and duty time regulations, with even small changes facing opposition by carriers and their lobbyists. It wasn't until December 2011 that the FAA finally got around to unveiling a comprehensive package of changes that, while imperfect, were a welcome and positive step.

In my opinion, too much of the agency's focus has been on long-haul flying. The circadian-scrambling effects of a twelve- or fourteen-hour nonstop are indeed of concern, but it's also true that long-haul fatigue is comparatively easy to manage. Long-haul pilots don't fly as often, and these flights carry augmented crews with comfortable onboard rest facilities. The more serious problem is at the other end of the spectrum: short-haul regional flying. Regional pilots fly punishing schedules, operating multiple legs in and out of busy airports, often in the worst weather, followed by short layovers at dodgy motels. I'll take a twelve-hour red-eye ocean crossing followed by seventy-two hours at the Marriott any day over having to wake up at 4:00 a.m. and fly six legs in a turboprop, with eight hours of supposed rest at the Holiday Inn Express.

And it isn't cockpit time per se that presents the toughest challenges. The real menaces are long stretches of duty time and the often-short layovers between them. On a given workday, a pilot might log only two hours on the flight deck. Sounds like an easy assignment, except when those two hours come at either end of a twelve-hour duty stretch that began at 5:00 a.m., the bulk of which was spent waiting out delays and killing time in the terminal.

In FAA-speak, the layover buffers between assignments are called “rest periods.” Until the changes unveiled in 2011, a rest period could be as brief as nine hours, and the very definition of “rest” itself had failed to account for things like travel time to and from hotels, the need for meals, and so on. If a crew signed off in Chicago at 9:00 p.m. and was scheduled to sign on again at 5:00 a.m., that constituted an eight-hour rest. But once you subtract the time spent waiting for the hotel van, driving to and from the airport, scrounging for food and so on, what existed on paper as an eight-hour layover was in reality only six or seven hours at the hotel.

Finally this has changed. Pilots will now receive a minimum ten-hour rest between assignments, with an opportunity for at least eight hours of uninterrupted sleep. This provision was long overdue, but nonetheless is one of the smartest things the FAA has ever done.

Meanwhile, I disagree with the contention that high-tech cockpit automation exacerbates fatigue. Pilots grow complacent and bored, we're told, to the point of shirking their duties and in some cases falling asleep, thanks to the low-workload environment in a modern cockpit. It's a persuasive argument, but my feeling is that boredom and automation have relatively little to do with one another. Or, more to the point, they haven't any more to do with one another than they've had in the past. Pilots are at times extremely busy; at other times there are long periods of quiet. Duties come and go, ebb and flow. It has always been that way. Boredom was a factor sixty years ago, when planes had rudimentary autopilots and propellers spun by pistons. It's going to be a factor in any profession where there are long stretches of reduced workload—such as when flying across oceans—and when a large percentage of tasks become repetitive and routine. I operate eight-, nine-, even twelve-hour nonstops all the time. There's a certain tedium that I expect and have to deal with. But it's hardly the fault of automation. Heck, if I had to have my hands on the wheel that whole time, expending full concentration, by the end of the trip I'd be five times as bored and ten times as exhausted.

When I was hired into my first regional cockpit job in 1990, I had accrued 1,500 total flight hours and possessed a freshly minted ATP certificate. Those were, at the time, average to below-average qualifications. How things change. Over the next two decades, as the regional sector grew and grew, thousands of new pilot jobs were created. To fill these slots, airlines sharply lowered their experience and flight time minimums for new hires. Suddenly, pilots were being taken on with as little as 350 hours of total time, assigned to the first officer's seat of sophisticated regional jets.

The short answer is no. Logbook totals aren't necessarily a good prognosticator of skill or performance under pressure. A given pilot's smarts are not so easily quantified, and as the accident annals will attest, low-time crews hardly own a monopoly on mistakes. All pilots undergo rigorous airline training programs before they're allowed to carry passengers, and the largest regionals have state-of-the-art training facilities on par with any major and have tailored their curricula with low-time new-hires in mind.

The long answer is more complicated. I remember myself as a young, five-hundred-hour pilot and imagine being assigned to a regional jet. Would I be qualified to the letter of the law? Sure. But am I the best and safest candidate for the job? No. The reality is, there are valuable intangibles that a pilot that green simply does not possess. Therefore, I suppose it is fair to say that regional airlines have become, on some level, less safe. Mind you, we're wrangling with statistical minutiae: less safe is not the same as
unsafe
, and this is by no means an admonition against flying aboard RJs. Nevertheless it warrants our attention.

Regulators agree, and the rules are getting tougher. The Airline Safety and Pilot Training Improvement Act, passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in 2009, brings important changes to training and hiring protocols. The law requires that pilots possess an ATP to be eligible for any airline cockpit job. Requirements for an ATP include a minimum of 1,500 hours of flight time (broken down over various categories) and satisfactory completion of written and in-flight examinations. Additionally the law will redefine the ATP certificate itself, emphasizing the operational environments of commercial air carriers and requiring specialized training in things like cockpit resource management (CRM), crew coordination, and so on.

These changes will make it easier to weed out pilots who lack the acumen for airline operations. For those who progress, it will allow an easier transition from general aviation into the high-demand training environment at a regional. It will lower their training costs and, ultimately, make for safer cockpits. And theoretically at least, it should encourage the regionals to begin offering better wages and benefits, since, for a would-be pilot, obtaining an ATP will entail a financial investment on the order of six figures.

As mentioned in an earlier chapter, most regional airlines, even those that are wholly owned, are entirely separate entities from whichever major they're sharing a paint job and flight number with. They are contractors, with their own employee groups, training departments, and so on. For crews, there is no automatic advancement from a regional to its big-league partner. A young pilot (or flight attendant) might get a thrill from flying an aircraft that says United or Delta on the side, but it's the small print—Connection, Express—that counts. A pilot for United Express is no more a pilot for United Airlines than the cashier at the concourse newsstand. If he wants to fly a 777 for United, he submits his résumé and hopes for the best, just like anybody else. There are partial exceptions to this, such as at American Eagle and Compass Airlines, whereby limited numbers of pilots are granted conditional flow-through rights to American and Delta, respectively.