When I’m not able to produce a PlaneMadness Podcast for whatever reason, I still like to update PlaneMadness.Com as much as possible. One of the ways I can do that is through making blog posts, like this one.

What I want to discuss today is the subject of crew hotels. I’d expect that most folks who aren’t in the airline industry would probably be surprised to learn that to crew members, the subject of what hotels we stay in is a very important topic.

To understand this, one has to imagine spending half their life in hotels. That’s right. For a typical crew member, a 15 day per month schedule could be called average. For more senior folks (see Pilot Seniority), that number’s less while for the more junior folks, it’s more. But for an average amount of time that a crew member spends in a hotel per month, 15 days away from home seems like pretty typical schedual. So you can see why crew members care quite a bit about where their airline decides to put them up - These hotels can become like our second homes.

First let me mention that when a union is involved, there are contracts in place which determine to a large extent what hotel accommodations are utilized. This is true in many cases for non-union carriers as well who have verbal agreements with their employee groups. These contracts may stipulate things like:

• Each crew member to his or her own room
• No rooms on the first floor
• Restaurants within walking distance
• Availability non-smoking rooms, etc.

But let me turn away from the legalese contract mumbo-jumbo and just focus on some basic tenets of crew hotel worthiness. When you ask two crew members what they think of the same hotel, they may disagree on certain things, but they’ll probably all agree on the following:

• Hotels within walking distances of shopping centers, restaurants, movie theaters, etc. are better then any hotel ‘in the sticks’
• Big name hotels are usually cleaner then ‘mom and pop’ type outfits
• Getting you’re own room is always better then sharing one
• Never take a bath. Always take a shower. Too many other people have used it before you!
• Free internet is the only kind; Hotels that still charge for internet access are draconian!
• Why do they always put us on the same floor as the 12th grade girls soccer team?
• The hotels with shuttles that go somewhere besides the airport are revolutionary!
• Jacuzzi bubbles are nice
• Jacuzzi bubbles are annoying

The debate could rage on, but I think you can see what crew members care about and what makes a good crew hotel. By the way there is no one particular hotel chain in my opinion that provides a better crew hotel then another. They all seem to have their pluses and minuses. A lot of the time what makes or breaks a hotel is location anyway. I’d rather have a fair hotel in a great location then a great hotel in a fair location, but that’s just me- On my overnights I try to get out of the hotels as much as possible!

And with that, I’ll wrap it up. Fly safe.

~Capt’n Chris

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I’m sitting here in my hotel room contemplating that I have to start getting ready for work in about an hour and fifteen minutes from now. I’m listening to a mashup from DJ Schmolli called ‘Sabotaging The Kooks’ which features the Beastie Boys, as well as the new free song from The Offspring called Hammerhead. You can get it here: Offspring.Com

Speaking of The Offspring, I’ve been listening to them for 15 years, since their early years in Orange County California where I’m originally from myself. I can vividly remember driving through LA traffic every night on the way to college while listening to ‘Bad Habit’ - A song about, well, bad traffic… among other things! Most of the band members are around my age and interestingly enough I’ve got a very good friend who lives next door to one of them and another good friend who is working for one of them. With all this I still haven’t met any members of The Offspring, suffice to say how cool that would be. Also, you may have caught Joe d’Eon’s excellent interview with Dexter Holland several months back. Dexter is an avid pilot, I’ve seen his airplane a few times, but for the sake of his privacy, I’ll keep it’s type and location to myself.

On another note, you may have noticed that I added the category “About the Job” to this site. I’ll be posting everything I write that has anything to do with being an Airline Pilot in that category now.

So with that, I wanted to give you a little insight into the subject of seniority, something I said I’d touch on in a future post. The easiest way to explain the term ’seniority’ to anyone who’s unfamiliar with it would simply be to describe a totem-pole. Now imagine that there’s a bunch of nicks in that totem-pole, from top to bottom, and every nick is one hire date of one pilot at an airline, starting from the top down. The pilot at the top was the first pilot hired and has first choice in everything from domicile to aircraft to even the tiniest little details having to do with his/her schedule. In other words, seniority is everything to an Airline Pilot.

Each airline has it’s own seniority list - it’s not something you can take with you when you leave. Hence all of the problems with integrating seniority lists when airlines merge. Even more important, seniority protects you when airlines have trouble and furlough pilots. The lower you are on the totem-pole, the greater the chances are of getting laid off when times are tough. So it’s important to get hired at what you think will be your final airline at as early of an age as possible.

Although no one has the exact answer, I think most pilots would agree that getting hired at a major in your early thirties should be good enough; although I know plenty of pilots who were hired at the majors in their mid-twenties, one of which is set to retire at his carrier as the number one pilot - And he will have been since the age of 54. Another pilot I know was hired by a major carrier in the 1960’s at the age of 20. Yes, 20. He retired #2 but essentially was the number one pilot since the actual number one had been out on a medical for some time. That’s pretty impressive when you consider that the major airlines employ literally thousands of pilots!

Well folks for lack of time I’m going to have to cut this post short - I need to get ready for work. Look forward to more posts ‘About the Job’ in the coming days/weeks as I try to fill this category up!

As always, fly safe!

~Capt’n Chris

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Airline Pilots spend a lot of time on the road, as you probably already know. The specific amount of time each pilot spends away from home varies with airline, domicile and seniority. By the way, the terms domicile and seniority mean the city you are based in and the length of time you’ve been with the airline, respectively. The more seniority a pilot has, the less amount of time he or she has to be away from home, typically, and for that matter the greater choice in domiciles we can choose from to boot. I’d go into greater detail on seniority, but I’d like to stick to the meat of this post (pun intended). Note to self: Make a post about seniority in the near future.

I’m back out on another trip as I write. The airline put us up in a Marriott this time, and in the way of crew hotels, this one isn’t bad. The area is nice (that’s ‘crew code’ for safe to walk in), the hotel is clean, the furniture looks new and the air conditioner control unit on the wall is state-of-the-art, a tell tale indicator of basic hotel ‘air’ worthiness!

So it was no surprise this morning when I went downstairs for breakfast to find a full buffet for only $8.95; $7.71 after my crew discount. At first I was a bit skeptical that I could get a quality buffet for such a low price. I thought the food had to be limited in choices or perhaps it was served in such minute quantities that a double serving was in order on everything just to get a regular sized meal! But to my smug grin it was none of the above. As a result I actually felt that I had discovered a rare find and was quite happy.

We airline pilots spend a significant portion of our annual income on food. Not hard to believe, considering the amount of time away from home our career demands. I’d be able to give you a very accurate amount of 2007’s airline food bill if I was at home right now, since that’s where I keep track of it on my desktop computer via Quicken. But for the sake of expediting this post to ‘press’ so to speak, I’ll try to figure it out here in the hotel room as opposed to waiting.

We’ll use a typical three day trip as an example. Day one, the show time is usually so early that I just grab a banana and some water on my way out the door. I’m hungry again by 11:00 AM or so and that’s when I usually grab a sandwich from the terminal. I find the cost of an airport sandwich is usually around $10 bucks. Come dinner time I’m getting the munchies again and by now since we’re usually at the hotel the crew and I will generally grab something in either the hotel restaurant or in a restaurant near by. I usually spend another $20 dollars there but sometimes it’s higher if we go out for specialty food like sushi, etc. So we’ll say day one’s total food bill is around $30 dollars. Day two’s show time is usually early if day one’s release time was late afternoon and in that case day two pretty much matches day one as far as eating habits go. Day three can sometimes show later in the afternoon in which case I’ll grab breakfast like I did this morning and then catch dinner in the terminal later on in the evening.

All and all, I figure I spend $30-$45 dollars per day on food while I’m out on a trip. If you take the average of that ($37.50 per day) and multiply it by each of the days I’m gone:

• A 2 day trip costs $75.00
• A 3 day trip costs $112.50
• A 4 day trip costs $150.00

Now, the question of how many days I’m gone per month/year needs to be answered and it varies, so again we’re back to averages but they won’t be that far off from the real numbers. I figure, depending on the month, that I’m gone between 12-18 days. So we’ll use the average of that:

• 15 days per month
• 180 days/6 months per year

So now let’s take the average daily expenditure on food and multiply that by the number of days per month/year I’m gone:

• $37.50 X 15 days per month = $562.50 average monthly expense on food
• $37.50 x 180 days per year = $6750.00 average yearly expense on food

I look at the yearly expense and think, “…damn, that could be another motorcycle!”

Now, this post wouldn’t be complete or fair if I didn’t tell you that the airline compensated us for what’s known as TAFB, or Time Away from Base. TAFB is a calculated hourly per-diem amount for all time from initial trip check-in to the final release time after the trip is over minus that time where the main cabin door is shut and the parking brake is off. In other words, it’s an hourly wage outside of the time where I’m flying the airplane- Which makes sense because we crew members ought to be paid for the time we’re sitting in the hotel (away from our families) for the airline. That amount varies by airline but it’s usually not over $2.00 per hour - Yes, $2.00 per hour. It’s not a wage that’s governed by individual state minimum wage regulations; rather, it’s covered under the Railway Labor Act which is Federal in nature and therefore overrides state labor laws.

In a nutshell, if I do 6 hours of flying in a day, that’s covered under one wage- the higher one, while all the other time is covered under the lower, per-diem wage.

I must say though that most crew members I know just count their per-diem wage towards their ‘total’ wage and take the subject of food pretty seriously, since in the end it all effects the bottom line still.

And with that I need to hit the gym and get ready for work, so I’ll sign off for now. Look for another blog post tomorrow.

Capt’n Chris

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Well I just wanted to take a quick second to say Happy First Birthday to PlaneMadness.Com - One year ago today, the first podcast was released!

It’s been an interesting voyage. Along the way I’ve been privileged to have met a lot of you and I look forward to meeting more of you in the future! I want to extend a heartfelt thank you for all of your support through your emails, your comments, and for buying me a Starbucks now and then.

I especially want to thank all of you for making my efforts worth it - Without your input and feedback it wouldn’t have been as rewarding or nearly as enjoyable. I look forward to continuing to provide you with more interesting content in the future!

All the best and thanks again,
~Capt’n Chris

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Seems as though the South American drug cartels are going high tech- They are building crude submarines to haul their drugs in. This is a video from the United States Coast Guard intercepting one of these subs. As you can see, although they resemble the type of sub used in the civil war, they are quite effective and reports are that they can carry as much as 20,000 lbs. of cargo at 15 knots. In the last 6 months alone, the Coast Guard has intercepted 42 of these crafts!

~Capt’n Chris

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