A 24/7 Business: How Often Must Pilots Work Weekends?

This job with a great office view requires frequent weekend and holiday work. Here's a closer look.


Photo by Skift

Pilots have an enviable job: the great office view, travel perks, and other rewards from a professional flying life are well worth the arduous flight path to the front seat.

But this job has a cost: and if evenings, weekends, and holidays off are your top priorities, then you may not enjoy it. Flying is a 24/7 business. Nearly so, anyway.

With commercial air travel launching each day early in the morning and traversing the globe all night, especially on holidays, a new pilot must adjust quickly to a highly irregular schedule. But it is not all bad. In fact, the 1966 Clint Eastwood movie “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” comes to mind as an apt descriptor of airline pilot scheduling: there’s good along with the bad and ugly.

How often must pilots work weekends?

It depends on many factors, some covered here, but on average, pilots work weekends half the time. Some months will be more, some less, but this average is based on my own experience and that of several other airline pilots I know or work with. This average holds true for holidays, too. As a real-time, real-life example, my schedule for April included working half of the weekends and Easter, and my upcoming May schedule includes three weekends, including the Memorial Day holiday weekend.

Seniority

Once in an airline job, much of a pilot’s quality of life – scheduling, base assignments, aircraft type – is based on seniority. A great feature of airline pilot work life is that promotions and assignments are not handed out based on personal achievements or popularity – a problem known to surface in more traditional employment. But this great feature also means, at least from a scheduling perspective, you are just a number. The better your seniority, the greater likelihood you will have the base assignment you want and the schedule you wish for, at least more often.

And while your overall seniority with your airline will continue to improve over time, there are seniority lists for equipment type, bases, and positions – such as a first officer or captain. So, a very senior first officer might hold a weekend-free schedule, but if they take a promotion to the left seat as captain, their seniority – among other captains at the company – might not be enough to continue to hold weekends off.

Line holder versus Reserve

A line holder is someone who, in airline industry parlance, has a set schedule for the upcoming month; they know what days they are working, what trips they will fly for that month, and even down to the detail of what other crew members they will work with for the month and what hotels they will overnight in.

A pilot on reserve will have specific days, or blocks of days for a given month, where they must be available and ready to report to the airport on short notice, to accept a trip assignment. Most reserve pilots have 2 hours to report to the airport when crew scheduling calls, but it can be longer. These pilots are on-call to fill any last-minute gaps an airline has in its operation, from a pilot calling in sick or being repositioned to work another assignment, among other causes.

Being a line holder or reserve is also a matter of seniority. For example, more junior pilots on the seniority list, either as first officers or captains, will receive reserve schedules until their seniority for that base and equipment type can “hold a line.” But a more senior pilot could voluntarily hold a reserve schedule to be home more frequently or have a better chance of having weekends off.

It all comes down to the seniority and preference of the pilot in making the schedule work as well as possible. Regardless of how much a pilot works his or her schedule for an ideal layout, the reality remains that aviation is a 24/7 business. But it is worth it.