A day in the life of a pilot?

[Pags]

I highly doubt that many JOs work 12hr days. They may be at work for 12hrs, but it's not like they're laying bricks or doing differential equations the entire time.

 

[statesman]

If you're in P-3/P-8 and you have a flight its a full 16 hour work day at least. Unless its an easy home cycle flight, but even then a short day is probably about 10 hours.

 

[Pags]

If you're in P-3/P-8 and you have a flight its a full 16 hour work day at least. Unless its an easy home cycle flight, but even then a short day is probably about 10 hours.

Yeah, and every day underway when we flew I had a 14-16hr workday in tower. Just because I was at work doesn't mean I was straining myself with stressful work; there was lots of staring at the water, bullshitting, doing crosswords, reading.

 

[CommodoreMid]

9-10 hour flight in P-3/P-8 means 3 hours beforehand of briefing/preflight/troubleshooting/coordinating with various BWCs before you even get off deck (and that assumes everything is working correctly) and on the back end 1 hour gripe writing/crew debrief, and then post mission product creation/Monday morning quarterbacking. Oh and then you've got to deal with ground job shit (at least clearing out the inbox) to avoid getting shit on. At least 16 hour day right there. And as a TACCO inflight those 9-10 hours you're herding cats the whole time. If you have a long transit to the oparea you'll have some time to cook a meal or something, but at least on my crew I spent the time updating shit in chat and beating up my AWs to, you know, actually do their jobs and monitor radar for safety of flight purposes, and on the back end writing the purple.

 

[Pags]

9-10 hour flight in P-3/P-8 means 3 hours beforehand of briefing/preflight/troubleshooting/coordinating with various BWCs before you even get off deck (and that assumes everything is working correctly) and on the back end 1 hour gripe writing/crew debrief, and then post mission product creation/Monday morning quarterbacking. Oh and then you've got to deal with ground job shit (at least clearing out the inbox) to avoid getting shit on. At least 16 hour day right there. And as a TACCO inflight those 9-10 hours you're herding cats the whole time. If you have a long transit to the oparea you'll have some time to cook a meal or something, but at least on my crew I spent the time updating shit in chat and beating up my AWs to, you know, actually do their jobs and monitor radar for safety of flight purposes, and on the back end writing the purple.

You win, your life sucks the most.

 

[Hotdogs]

I highly doubt that many JOs work 12hr days. They may be at work for 12hrs, but it's not like they're laying bricks or doing differential equations the entire time.

In the skid community you may work relatively normal 8-10 hour days licking windows depending on your job, but the vast majority have to spend anywhere from 1-5 hours at home in the books or prepping briefs in addition to what our ground job requires. So yeah we're not punching the clock at work for 12 hours, but I spend a good amount of time up till 1 to 3am getting ready for shit for the upcoming week. Squadron hazing may vary. Just requires good time management.

 

[Renegade One]

I love the whole "piss excellence" part for the first thing in the AM. I never thought of it that way before.

I'm less in love with the whole "my community has it worse than your community" slant that I'm seeing. It is a true statement that I never had to fly a 9-10 hour flight (except when I did in AWACS or whatever…) when I was a no-kidding fleet seat-fill.
There is quite enough pain and bullshit in this profession to last you all a lifetime. Make of it what you will. Sounds kinda strange/weird…but enjoy it while you can. This is the shit you will tell your grandchildren about…and mightily bored they'll be!

Caveat: Peanut gallery old guy who no longer knows anything. Except about the whole "pissing excellence" thingie. That's why our CVNs have stainless steel sinks in the SRs.

 

[jmcquate]

R1's right. the 10 hour day you guys put in flying Grey things with Navy/Marine stenciled on the side is something people would and in a way pay to do. And R1 that's the second time I've caught you using a very obscure quote from "A Bridge too Far".

 

[statesman]

You win, your life sucks the most.

Thats all we VP guys need to hear. We're too scared and cautious to ACTUALLY be aggressive, but if we feel like our lives suck hard enough, and we spent long enough in preflight, we can take solace in thinking that we bring something to the fight.

 

[MIDNJAC]

I highly doubt that many JOs work 12hr days. They may be at work for 12hrs, but it's not like they're laying bricks or doing differential equations the entire time.

Might be community specific. Single seat VFA = you have a ground job + collateral ones + duty at all times, in addition to studying and prepping for SFWT type events. Maybe I just work harder (dumber) not smarter, but that was my experience. I would readily admit that there are some hours of ready room cowboy BS in there, as nobody can just hammer out evals for 15 hours straight, but it is time that you are at work and not at home drinking beers or chasing the wife around the bedroom. I will say that during non-workup home cycle stuff, that figure is probably a little exaggerated, but during workups and deployment, there aren't many days that I didn't stick around for over 12 hours with something useful to do at work. A real (ie not good deal) flight for us is about an 8 hour evolution, so whatever work you have to do beyond that still has to get done. On deployment, a flight is closer to a 10 hour obligation including mass/element briefs, a 6-7 hr mission, post flight mx paperwork, and any high five debrief you can muster.

 

[Pags]

Eval for 15hrs straight? WTF are your CPOs and LPOs doing? How does a hornet squadron have enough evals that you'd need to work them for 15hrs? I had ~200 sailors on the boat and there was no way I could do 15hrs of evals if I had tried.

I've worked the big job (DH) plus collaterals and never had to work 12hrs at the desk. I tried to be at work between 8-10hrs a day on non-fly days for presence and to stay ahead for big fly days. If I didn't fly for awhile, I'd have at best, as a mini/DH (safety/admin) 4 or so hours of real work. The rest was looking busy and managing by walking around.

I get that flyers in big wing jets have long days because they have long mission times. But most RW and fast mover missions are 1.5-3.0. And brief times can be long, but for every upgrade mission you have, there'll be an equal number of instructional flights when you're a contributing member of society that you don't have to study for. Your first year or two in the squadron can be a lot of studying, but at that point you don't usually have a big ground job to worry about. In other words, you can do an hour or so of work for the job and then spend the rest of the day studying. Of course I've seen plenty of FNGs turn a 1hr a day job into an 8hr a day job and then bitch that they don't have time to study for their flight which is horseshit.

I'm going to swag that most of you in the fleet are flying at most 2-3 times per week. Which should give you ample time to work a ground job and study for the days when you're briefing/flying/debriefing for 8hrs. Some of you are either working too hard and make work jobs, are rocks, or are making stuff up.

 

[MIDNJAC]

I wasn't trying to say that one would spend 15 hours writing evals. When I was a divo, I probably cut the evals for my 3 shops in about a dedicated couple hours total. Actually, divo was probably the least time consuming ground job I had. My point was that in a work day, there was certainly some non-working time just hanging around the ready room, so it isn't just sitting there for the amount of time I mentioned at a computer typing up random busy work. I also wouldn't say that most "fast mover" flights are 1.5-3.0. Maybe back at the beach, but on cruise, most are 6.0+, unless you get lucky and catch a night prof or one of the few ULT events. I agree that you can spend an hour or two doing your ground job, but I would say that the "a lot of studying" you speak of can be very large amounts of time. Especially once you are doing level III/IV. Maybe I just sucked at studying. I'd say the 2-3 flights per week was not my experience at really any point in time during my JO tour (normally 4-5 if not more), but I'm sure mileage varies by squadron/airwing and platform there. Whatever though, my posts keep getting severely misinterpreted, so if you need me, I will be down in the wardroom doing my other job of complaining about the food....

 

[Flash]

If you're in P-3/P-8 and you have a flight its a full 16 hour work day at least. Unless its an easy home cycle flight, but even then a short day is probably about 10 hours.

...P-3/P-8...At least 16 hour day right there...

A lot of the pain I saw VP guys endure was self-inflicted, way too many bosses generating way too much work just to make sure they looked good. Some squadrons it seemed there was a competition to see who got out the door last while a few seemed to do well enough with folks leaving at 1500 at the lastest most of the time when home.

 

[Pags]

I wasn't trying to say that one would spend 15 hours writing evals. When I was a divo, I probably cut the evals for my 3 shops in about a dedicated couple hours total. Actually, divo was probably the least time consuming ground job I had. My point was that in a work day, there was certainly some non-working time just hanging around the ready room, so it isn't just sitting there for the amount of time I mentioned at a computer typing up random busy work. I also wouldn't say that most "fast mover" flights are 1.5-3.0. Maybe back at the beach, but on cruise, most are 6.0+, unless you get lucky and catch a night prof or one of the few ULT events. I agree that you can spend an hour or two doing your ground job, but I would say that the "a lot of studying" you speak of can be very large amounts of time. Especially once you are doing level III/IV. Maybe I just sucked at studying. I'd say the 2-3 flights per week was not my experience at really any point in time during my JO tour (normally 4-5 if not more), but I'm sure mileage varies by squadron/airwing and platform there. Whatever though, my posts keep getting severely misinterpreted, so if you need me, I will be down in the wardroom doing my other job of complaining about the food....

Right on. I didn't intend to turn this in to a measuring contest, but I thought the "12hr days + 5hrs at home" answers were a bit off base for a "typical day" and that I'd wager that over the course of a three year JO tour most guys average 9-10hrs a day at work which leaves some time for a life, a spouse, etc.

6hrs on cruise I get, but there isn't much else to do on the boat other than fly. IMO the only thing worse than an 18hr work day underway (no crew rest for ships company!) is 2hrs worth of work underway.

Being in a syllabus is painful. I did my Level III in two weeks prior to cruise so my timeline didn't leave a lot of time for studying; I barely had time to prepare briefs. WTI signed me off, I had a day off with the wife and then off I went on long cruise.

I also had many 12+hr days of FCF, something the fixed wing crowd doesn't get to enjoy.

 

[CommodoreMid]

Concur on the self inflicted pain sometimes, but when your boss (or their boss) is the one generating the work, your options become slim. I once got called in on Easter weekend to compile flight hour data in a different format than what we normally used and find some new random metrics because some civilian at NAVAIR decided on a Friday he needed this new P-8 information by Monday morning.

And like Pags said, not trying for the dick (or metaphorical one in my case) measuring contest, but depending on your airframe mission requirements just executing your flight tasking and then trying to stay afloat on your ground job can become an absurd amount of time at work.