Scheduling and a Four-Day Trip…Done!
Posted by Jeffrey on June 20th, 2008
Different airlines have different ways of scheduling.
SkyWest has a combination of locals, 2-day, 3-day, 4-day, and “stand-up” trips. Locals mean that you are home that night. A “stand-up” means that you do one leg late in the evening somewhere, go to the hotel, get maybe 3 to 5 hours sleep, maybe, then head back to the airport and do one leg back. The whole time you are on “duty” making money for very little work. I hate “stand-ups.” I don’t need a lot of sleep but “stand-ups” wear me out.
Anyway, I just finished a four-day trip last night. It wasn’t your typical four-day but it wasn’t the worst I’ve been on either.
Day 1: The first day was COS to LAX. An early show, but very straight forward. Ended up watching Tiger and Rocco battle it out at the US Open.
Day 2: We went from LAX to DFW and back. Thunderstorms popped up in DFW unexpectedly and caught us and a lot of other airplanes with not enough fuel so we diverted to SPS. I wrote about this last time.
Day 3:Another easy day but long. We flew from LAX to SAT to ORD. Beautiful day. We had a jumpseater from United. Very nice guy. Flies F-16. What a deal he has! He works for United but is active duty Air Force and keeps all his United privileges. He and his family were just coming back from a week in California. — A word about jumpseaters. I don’t mind having jumpseaters but I would rather not. I am all for giving a pilot a ride home or to work, and I would rather help them out than not help them out, but in the same breath, it’s a little bit of a hassle to accommodate someone in the jumpseat.
Day 4: ORD to ICT to ORD to COS. It started out nice but after arriving in ICT, thunderstorms started building. Personally I would rather experience snow than thunderstorms. On our trip back to COS, we had to go way north to get around some weather which turned a 2 hour trip into almost a 3 hour trip. I felt bad for the passengers. It was a long trip. Our routing caused problems for Denver Center I think because basically we had to jaywalk across the arrivals into Denver which was beginning to experience thunderstorms. So they kept us at mid-altitudes and slow, which just added to our trip.
Once we landed in COS, I was wiped out. And just after we landed we discovered that DEN was in a ground stop because of thunderstorms.
Just another day.
To Your Flying Success…
Jeffrey
