Hey everyone, hope you are all having a good day. I am back in Oklahoma today after commuting home last night (future post on commuting to come). It’s a lovely 106 degrees at the moment but I still enjoy it better than the humidity of Miami. Today I wanted to take the time to talk about some common words or concepts that you’ll most likely see in a lot of my future posts. These can be confusing for someone that hasn’t been in the airline business, because of this I wanted to explain as much of it as I can now to avoid confusion later on. If you ever have a question or don’t understand something in a post feel free to email me a question or post it as a comment.
First thing I want to talk about is “reserve” and what all it entails. Perhaps even before I get to that lets talk about schedules in general. For pilots and most other airline employees are schedules are built in 1 month blocks. So often times, especially if you’re not senior, you will have a different schedule every month. Normally about the middle of each month the entire crew base will bid on their “line” for the next month. Each line is an individual schedule. There are normally about the same number of lines there are employees in that base. Within a line it is broken down further into what are called “sequences”. A sequence is made up of, in most cases, a 2, 3, 4, or sometimes 5 day trips. I will post an example of a line and sequence at the end of this post. For the unlucky new guys that are at the bottom of the seniority list the “lines” are normally all picked by the time it gets to the bottom guys. Let me back track and also mention what “bidding” is, everything in the airlines is based off seniority with the company. The number 1 guy basically has his choice of any “line” that he wants. So he only has to bid on one line. However if your say number 30 on the list, you have to select 30 lines that you would like and you get whichever one is left when it’s your turn, make sense? For the pilots that don’t get a line they normally end up on “reserve”.
Being on reserve is basically what the name entails, were more or less “on call” to fill in for the line holders when they can’t make a flight. This can happen for a number of reasons like a pilot getting sick, being on vacation, or operational things like getting stuck somewhere due to maintenance or weather. At my airline, and most for that matter, there are two different types of reserve. There’s “RAP” which stands for Reserve Availability Period, this is a 2 hour call out. For example a pilot can be on RAP from 5AM to 8PM, he doesn’t have to be at the airport but if called by the airline he has to be at the airport ready to go within 2 hours. The other type of reserve is most commonly called “Ready Reserve” or “Standby Reserve”. This is an 8 hour period where a pilot has to be in uniform at the airport ready to fly at a moment’s notice. At my airline we have to ready reserve periods S1 which is 6AM-2PM and S3 which is 2PM-10PM.
Seems like these posts always end up way longer then I have pictured in my head before I start writing so for now let’s leave it at that. That’s a good general overview of how the schedules work. In my next post coming shortly I will post an example sequence and give some explanation to it.
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