I am pretty sure aviation is a route I would like to take. However, I am a little spooked about the schedule aspect. Being away from home a lot and even missing Hollidays doesn’t bother be so much. And I know a lot of companies vary but what I’m more concerned about is unpaid time off. For example I know medical professionals, service industry professionals, etc. that are able to take several weeks of time off as long as it’s unpaid and then come back to work. Are pilots able to take quite a bit of unpaid time off assuming they have high seniority? Or do airlines tend to limit the amount of unpaid time off you can have? Also, a pilots wife once told me that it is difficult to plan trips since you don’t know if your time off is approved until the month before. Is that usually the case? Having the flexibility to travel often is important to me and I am just wondering if I’ll realistically have that flexibility once I gain enough seniority.
Again I know this could all be airline and seniority specific but I’m just trying to get a general idea of what I can expect. I hope this made sense!
Welcome to the forum. Each airline varies in their specific time off policies. At the regional I’m at, you can request “personal leave” which is granted if they have sufficient staffing on the requested days.
Of course, each airline is required by law to allow up to 12 weeks of FMLA. You can also request “part time” status which typically runs on seniority and can be hard to obtain.
As for requesting vacation, typically you can request “Master Vacation” up to three months in advance for one-week long blocks. For example, last week we just bid for DEC-FEB master vacation.Then if you miss that window, you can still bid for month specific vacation up to the month prior. For example, you can still request vacation for a 4 day weekend in DEC prior to NOV 1st. If it’s a last minute weekend away, then you simply bid off for it during your monthly bids that typically happen between the 10th-15th for the following month. So to keep with the example, you would bid for DEC schedule November 10th-15th.
What Hannah is describing is specific to her airline, SkyWest. At the airlines I have worked for, we bid our vacations about a year in advance and bid all twelve months at once. We do have the ability to save a few weeks and bid for it in the monthly vacation bid, but this is rarely done as the good slots are usually all taken up then.
No, you generally cannot take large amounts of unpaid time off. The airline invests a huge amount of money in keeping your training current, in return they expect full time employees.
While it can vary by airline, regardless of seniority, airlines hire pilots to fill their staffing needs and hire and build schedules to cover the flight schedules. Leaves other than military or sick are really not something that happens often.
I’m newer to the airline world so I don’t know as much about bidding/vacation. What I do know at my airline is we have a certain period of time where we can submit the time off request. We must use our vacation time at one period if we want to use it, it cannot be broken up into multiple days, I’m sure crew scheduling would love for that… I just put a “permanent bid” in for the base I wish to hold during my attendance at my airline. I can always go back and update that as I wish whenever, but that is not a monthly bid to acquire schedules.