Unpaid Duty Time?

[music]

Hi everybody! I have a question for you. In one of Dougs articles he says he avg's 53hrs of "unpaid duty time". What is that?

[Doug Taylor]

Basically time when you're at work and not getting paid.

[MQAAord]

When you board an aircraft, during boarding you see the crew (pilots & FAs) doing 'stuff'. Running checklists, doing preflights, making PAs, doing compliance checks, serving pre-departure drinks in FC, all the while not one of the crew is getting paid a dime for that work. The timeclock doesn't start tickin' til the door is closed.

On the back side, the clock stops tickin' when the door opens, so while everyone is getting off the plane, we're again not getting paid!

[Maximillian_Jenius]

[ QUOTE ]
When you board an aircraft, during boarding you see the crew (pilots & FAs) doing 'stuff'. Running checklists, doing preflights, making PAs, doing compliance checks, serving pre-departure drinks in FC, all the while not one of the crew is getting paid a dime for that work. The timeclock doesn't start tickin' til the door is closed.

On the back side, the clock stops tickin' when the door opens, so while everyone is getting off the plane, we're again not getting paid!

[/ QUOTE ]


....yea but if your away from your base your getting paid per diem while either sitting in the terminal or crew room or while pax are boarding and pilots are running there checklist...right?


Matthew

[MQAAord]

[ QUOTE ]
....yea but if your away from your base your getting paid per diem while either sitting in the terminal or crew room or while pax are boarding and pilots are running there checklist...right?


Matthew


[/ QUOTE ]

Sure, that's about $1.30 per hour!

edit to note: Per diem is not meant to be a 'salary', it's your expense money, meant to pay for food & such on overnights.

[Maximillian_Jenius]

Wow that was quick.....

When I first moved here to PHX I went to an information session that America West was having for flight attendants.

I left when I heard that the starting pay for there flight attendants was like $13k.

I made more being a ramp rat with Delta at CVG.

I have serveral friends who are flight attendents for Delta,United,Southwest and Spirit Airlines.

They told me that per diem might be a small hr. wage but that they live for that per diem check at the end of the month.

My friend who works for Spirit had a 12 hr. day the other day but of that he say he only worked maybe 6-7 hrs.

So can't per diem add up?


Matthew

[MQAAord]

Of course it adds up, you start getting your per diem as soon as you sign in for your trip, and it continues 24/7 until you finish the last flight of your trip. If it's a four day trip, and you show at 12 noon, and finish at 12 noon, that's 72 hours, at $1.30 an hour that's $93.60 per diem for that trip. That's nice and all, but again, when we think of 'getting paid' we think of our hourly pay rate, which we get paid for doing our jobs.

So while we are getting our per diem while we're doing essential job functions before & after each flight, we're not getting paid our hourly 'pay rate'.

(Can you tell it's kind of a sticky point with us that we don't like working & not getting paid for it?)

[Maximillian_Jenius]

Hey I agree with ya there.

Don't lawyers and doctors get paid by the hour?

No per deim in those professions.

Imagine as a pilot making $150 an hour working an 8-10 hr. day and getting paid for his entire day.

Or a flight attendant making $25 an hour getting paid for the entire time they work ina given day.

It's a nice dream I know. But would still be nice.


Matthew

[JHines]

lawyers usually get paid a salary, but in most firms they have to log a certain amount of "billable hours" (i.e hours that can be charged to the client). It's not unusual to have to work 10-12 hours in a day in order to be able to log 8 billable hours.

[music]

Oh I understand now. I just wasnt sure if you had some sort of "office work" or something to that effect. I understand now thank you.

[flyover]

[ QUOTE ]
When you board an aircraft, during boarding you see the crew (pilots & FAs) doing 'stuff'. Running checklists, doing preflights, making PAs, doing compliance checks, serving pre-departure drinks in FC, all the while not one of the crew is getting paid a dime for that work. The timeclock doesn't start tickin' til the door is closed.

On the back side, the clock stops tickin' when the door opens, so while everyone is getting off the plane, we're again not getting paid!

[/ QUOTE ]

Not quite accurate, at least in Doug's case. Right now he gets a guarantee based on duty time and time away from base. So theoretically he could never get a door closed and still get paid.

I'm not sure how much unpaid duty time there is. If you sign in an hour prior and hit the bus as soon as you get in, not much. But if you are talking about time spend getting to and from work, that's another matter.

Dave

[MQAAord]

[ QUOTE ]
Not quite accurate, at least in Doug's case. Right now he gets a guarantee based on duty time and time away from base. So theoretically he could never get a door closed and still get paid.

I'm not sure how much unpaid duty time there is. If you sign in an hour prior and hit the bus as soon as you get in, not much. But if you are talking about time spend getting to and from work, that's another matter.

Dave


[/ QUOTE ]

Well, actually that is the way it was for us at AA.

DL has a minimun daily guarantee, which not every airline has. There were times when we were performing essential job functions while not recieving our hourly pay rate.

[av8trxx]

Excellent MQ!

Unpaid duty time sucks when you have long days with big aiport appreciation breaks. My next trip I sign in at 9:25am for a 10:10 dep and finish at 8:43pm. We fly 5 legs with a 4 hour sit after the first turn. Then the next day we have a 2.5 hour sit during the day that starts at 8:30 ending at 8:50. While getting a break to eat can be a good thing, really long ones make the duty day brutal unless you can manage a nap. Plus, that $1.50 an hour doesn't go far to cover meals, like it's supposed to, when airport food is so expensive!

An AA pilot I know tells me they get half their hourly rate while the doing duties between door closed, brake on/off times. Must be nice.

[Mr_Creepy]

I never had any minimum rigs, so I can say that I had A LOT of unpaid duty time!

[Doug Taylor]

I think what he's talking about is how I dutied-in at 1458 yesterday, finally got into the hotel at 0246 last night and paid for 5 hours (for 5 hours of flight time).

[C650CPT]

Doug
Based on your time line I don't see where the complaint is, you only worked half a day.

Joking ... only joking.

I guess you have to mentally tell yourself that you make X amount per day regardless of how many hours you work.


Jim

[MQAAord]

[ QUOTE ]
I think what he's talking about is how I dutied-in at 1458 yesterday, finally got into the hotel at 0246 last night and paid for 5 hours (for 5 hours of flight time).

[/ QUOTE ]

Sounds like you had the same kind of day Bill did! He got back to ATL and was re-routed. The problem with the re-route is that he was over the cap and today was a personal drop day! Which is even less re-routable than a golden day! So now he gets to grieve it, have a nice chat with the chief pilot, and if he's lucky get home by 8 or 9 tonight because the ATL-ORD flights are all oversold. He could have made it home last night too, the last flight left at midnight 40!

Ugh, hope you have a better day today, Doug!

[Doug Taylor]

Got rerouted too. In fact, I'm sitting in RIC on the free airport wireless because our deadhead flight to ATL is already running behind schedule. Get this, we've got a six minute turn in ATL to go onto DAB! Suuuuuuuure!

Worse part is, is that we had to call crew sched upon arriving at the airport this morning (about 0230 or so) and we still sat on hold for 25 minutes. Then security had already locked down the terminal so we had to wait another 20 minutes for one of the thin FA's to crawl under the gate to get someone to let us out!

Fun fun! Glamour glamour!

[triple7]

what did you do with the passengers? why didnt you exit with them on arrival? i landed late at dulles on night in an md88 from atl and they parked on the ramp, pulled up a people mover, and everyone including the pilots got on, shut the door and drove away from teh secured aircraft around midnight.

[chperplt]

[ QUOTE ]
Get this, we've got a six minute turn in ATL to go onto DAB! Suuuuuuuure!

[/ QUOTE ]

That's nothing... I had a -36 minute turn in ATL two weeks ago. I got a scheduling reroute on Saturday that showed a -312 minute turn. Too bad once they corrected the error I was no longer legal to take the trip.

[Doug Taylor]

[ QUOTE ]
what did you do with the passengers? why didnt you exit with them on arrival? i landed late at dulles on night in an md88 from atl and they parked on the ramp, pulled up a people mover, and everyone including the pilots got on, shut the door and drove away from teh secured aircraft around midnight.

[/ QUOTE ]

Pretty simple. Even though you block in, you've still got to do a shutdown checklist, a termination checklist, a non-maintenance station walk around and help coordinate getting the 'carry off' passenger off the flight.

On top of that, since it's irregular ops, if your arrival report instructs you to contact reroute (or 'crew tracking') upon arrival, you've got to sit on hold until someone picks up the telephone.

Naturally, if you arrive at the airport at say, 2330, open the door at 2340, you're not actually out of the airline until well after 0000 if not later under normal circumstances.

We had a disabled "carry off" so I couldn't complete the termination check until after the last non-crew passenger was off the aircraft, and then we had to sit on hold to reach someone with crew tracking to talk about the departure later on that morning.