Holiday seasons mean lots of flights. The company you work for can determine whether you will have a few extra flights or a lot of extra flights. The holiday season means we have to throw our usual routine of four to five legs a day, with one day off and possibly a standby day in a week because one thing is almost for certain, minimum rests, one day off a week only and lots of schedule revisions!
The load that you fly changes too. The flights are always full, and the extra flights mean you have to chase your schedule because if you get delayed in the morning, your friend flying the aircraft after you is going to get home extra late, with their crying kids wanting to join the holiday rampage. It's not the best times for some people.
Carrying families mean you also have problems such as a family of four insisting to carry a house load of carry-on baggage in addition of their excess baggage. Sometimes, they carry so much that you end up over the weight limit. Explaining a family of 6 that their choice was to let three boxes of dolls for the kids or their 3 cubic meter box worth of oleh-oleh (gifts) or one of their suitcases of clothes to fly later in the day is sometimes harder than to explain to a shopaholic that the white dress is better than the pink dress with fluorescent green polkadots.
Then you get loud passengers that you can hear all the way in the cockpit on take off, or the dreaded baby crying louder than our engines on take off during a night flight. One thing I cannot stand is when after six flights, I have to pax back to Jakarta, sitting a row behind a crying baby and a row in front of 7 year old kids whose solution of boredom is to kick the seat in front every three seconds. All that while sitting to a know it all passenger who claims he's seen the Airbus A380 in Makassar.
The nice thing about holiday season is though, we do get good kids flying, and we love to take them into the flight deck and see their eyes go wide in amazement. We like to play with them sometimes, select the autopilot to leave the LNAV/VNAV and go into ALT HOLD and SPD. We then play with the speed a bit and they can spend 5 minutes at the moving throttles. Or change the heading a little bit and tell them "Look! No Hands!"
One thing is for certain on holiday season, you get damn tired. If you work for a company that gives peanuts for the flight hour pay, it sucks. If they give you a nice number for that, then, despite all of the grudges you may have on the season, it may be worth it. I may be tired by the end of the day, but at least the roads aren't jammed packed and I get home quicker.
The load that you fly changes too. The flights are always full, and the extra flights mean you have to chase your schedule because if you get delayed in the morning, your friend flying the aircraft after you is going to get home extra late, with their crying kids wanting to join the holiday rampage. It's not the best times for some people.
Carrying families mean you also have problems such as a family of four insisting to carry a house load of carry-on baggage in addition of their excess baggage. Sometimes, they carry so much that you end up over the weight limit. Explaining a family of 6 that their choice was to let three boxes of dolls for the kids or their 3 cubic meter box worth of oleh-oleh (gifts) or one of their suitcases of clothes to fly later in the day is sometimes harder than to explain to a shopaholic that the white dress is better than the pink dress with fluorescent green polkadots.
Then you get loud passengers that you can hear all the way in the cockpit on take off, or the dreaded baby crying louder than our engines on take off during a night flight. One thing I cannot stand is when after six flights, I have to pax back to Jakarta, sitting a row behind a crying baby and a row in front of 7 year old kids whose solution of boredom is to kick the seat in front every three seconds. All that while sitting to a know it all passenger who claims he's seen the Airbus A380 in Makassar.
The nice thing about holiday season is though, we do get good kids flying, and we love to take them into the flight deck and see their eyes go wide in amazement. We like to play with them sometimes, select the autopilot to leave the LNAV/VNAV and go into ALT HOLD and SPD. We then play with the speed a bit and they can spend 5 minutes at the moving throttles. Or change the heading a little bit and tell them "Look! No Hands!"
One thing is for certain on holiday season, you get damn tired. If you work for a company that gives peanuts for the flight hour pay, it sucks. If they give you a nice number for that, then, despite all of the grudges you may have on the season, it may be worth it. I may be tired by the end of the day, but at least the roads aren't jammed packed and I get home quicker.
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