Hours on the Job, on the ground

Airline Pilot Questions & Answers
1

Hello folks,

Been poking around searching for information, and aggregating into one place for myself. A question I’ve come to and can’t find an easy answer comes from a few facts and a mental perceptions pertaining to reported hours worked.

Fact 1: FAA limits monthly and yearly fight hours to 100/1000 respectively. One of the sheets linking to this site, or one of the aviation mags I’ve read, references that a more typical monthly total might be in the range of 80, on average.

Perception 1: Typically most jobs require 40 hours a week (just using as a baseline for a “full work week”) coming out to ~160hr a month. Working just 80hr, or even that full 100hr, of a month, seems low. It seems then there is more than just the in the air flying being done to which we would be working and doing.

Question: What does a weekly schedule in the industry, aside of conning aircraft, consist of?

Apologies for it’s confusing organization of the question. Attempting to lift the important stuff with bolding for those scanning for answers later.

2

John,

Flight time limitations can be confusing, I still find myself getting confused by them sometimes. Bear in mind that when somebody says “80 hours of flight time in a month”, they mean 80 hours of flying the jet, that does not include time preparing the jet to fly, time sitting in airports, and especially time in hotels. That is pure flight time and by and large, that is how we get paid. So there is much more work than 80 hours, but the FAA only counts the flight time and we get paid by such.

Please take a look at our “Schedules” section as this will give you a great idea of what our schedules can look like. Make sure to look at all of ours as they do vary.

Good questions.

Chris