Leaked Airline Memos: Majority of Employees With Omicron are Vaxxed, Healthy Pilots Offered More Pay to Cover Shifts

On Monday, The Daily Wire’s “Morning Wire” podcast revealed that in wake of massive absences due to COVID-19, major airlines such as United and Spirit Airlines are reportedly offering employees more pay to help cover shifts for colleagues out of commission due to the illness.

In a memo obtained by The Daily Wire, United specifically cited Omicron as having caused a “significant” increase in pilot illness, making the higher pay necessary to keep flights on track. Despite the airline industry being heavily vaccinated, the Omicron variant has caused an uptick in COVID-19 absences.

As the Morning Wire reported, more than 4,000 flights were canceled just this past weekend. While a massive storm in Chicago was partly to blame, it appears the main driver has been amongst pilots.

United Airlines’ CEO Scott Kirby had previously stated that the company had been forced to fire “just six of its 13,000-strong pilot group” who did not get the vaccine despite a company mandate.

…Kirby said about 200 employees were terminated because they failed to get the COVID-19 vaccine, six of which were pilots, reported Reuters. Moreover, 80 pilots who received a medical or religious exemption were put on unpaid leave.

CFR 121 contains the legal limit for flight time for airline pilots in the US : (a) No certificate holder conducting domestic operations may schedule any flight crew member and no flight crew member may accept an assignment for flight time in scheduled air transportation or in other commercial flying if that crew member’s total flight time in all commercial flying will exceed— (1) 1,000 hours in any calendar year; (2) 100 hours in any calendar month; (3) 30 hours in any 7 consecutive days;

Here's the best way to describe my yearly flying: Flight hours are limited to 30 hours in 7 days, 100 hours in a month and 1000 in a year. Scheduling rules also say I need at least 1 day off a week, so 6 day trips are the max for me (121 US domestic scheduled).

Let's look at a typical trip, which at my company tended to be a 4 day trip. You want good productive trips, but you can't always get them. On a 4 day trip let's say I have 6 hours of flight scheduled each day, or 24 hours scheduled that week. I am getting paid the better of 24 hours or the actual flight time. Now let's look at my duty day. For a 6 hour day with 4 legs it was not unheard of to have a 12 hour duty day.

So now for a 4 day trip, I'm "at work" 48 hours and being paid for half of that. Now consider that I'm not going home every night and my trip starts at 6 am on Friday and ends at midnight Monday night -- that totals to 90 hours away from home.

How does this compare to a 40 hour work week in an office? In that case you are on duty 40 hours, getting paid 40 hours (or salary) and if you have a 1 hour commute one way, you are spending 50 hours away from home.

Back to the flight schedule. A given month will have trips less productive than 24 hours and although you can probably build a 96 hour month if you tried, the average line of flying is typically going to be 75 hours of flying. You can ballpark that will equate to 150 duty hours and 300 hours away from home for the month. Extrapolate that to a year, and you have 900 flight hours, 1800 duty hours and 3600 hours away from home. I would say this represents the average US domestic 121 pilot. Some do more, some do less, but this is pretty typical.

What do we do with all of that duty time that isn't flying? Let's see: · Eating · Updating charts · Checking the weather · Checking the paperwork · Coordinating with gate agents, ramp agents, fuel agents to make sure we leave on time · Programming the FMS and getting our IFR clearance · Preflighting the airplane · Postflighting the airplane · Doing the weight and balance · Sleeping

Note, that all of these activities require we are at the airport, in the secure area and we are not being paid. The pay clock starts (roughly) when the airplane is buttoned up and the parking brake is released and ends when the parking brake is set and main cabin door opened.

Betcha the boys in WW2 wish they’d had those kind of rules.

They were at war, there were men on the ground who would likely die if they didn't fly. The consequences resulting from them not flying because they hadn't had any sleep in the last two days were a bit more important than an airline pilot not agreeing to fly extra because their company was too cheap to have enough reserves to cover the sick calls.

If a military pilot in wartime doesn't fly then people die. If an airline pilot doesn't fly then United doesn't make as much money as they otherwise would, the Smith family is a few hours late to the beach, and some traveling salesman has to spend a couple of hours more spending his expense account at the airport bar. The two situations aren't even remotely comparable.

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