Waiting for the Phone to Ring – Reserve Life

Another post about the bizarre world of being a flight attendant…

Right now I am on “reserve” for my airline. What that means is that I’m on-call. I never know where I’ll be flying until the day before the trip…if I’m lucky. I could know just 2 hours before I need to be at the airport.

With my company while on reserve, you get 12 or 13 guaranteed days off per month (depending on the length of the month). The other 18-ish days, you’re on-call. Usually you’ll be on-call for either A.M. (midnight-2pm) or P.M. (10am-midnight). What that means is that Crew Scheduling is only allowed to assign you trips and call you between those hours. Crew Scheduling is also allowed to change you to “ER” reserve, which means they are then allowed to call you any time in a 24 hour period.

While on reserve, you can also “self-assign” trips, which means that you can sign up to fly during your reserve period. However, there are lots of restrictions to what these self-assignments can look like. Right now, I’m on A.M. reserve for 4 days, so the day before my reserve started I was able to go on to the company’s scheduling website and look for 4-day trips that start in the morning to sign up for. Yesterday there were ZERO available that fit that criteria! Today I got on to look for 3-day trips, and I tried to get one, but someone else got to the trip I wanted before I did, so I wasn’t able to self-assign. In other words: self-assigning doesn’t always work out. If it works out, it’s kind of nice because I’ll know the day before the trip where I’m going and when and don’t have to live in fear that I’ll be called in last-minute for a trip.

While on reserve, you’re guaranteed to be paid for 90 hours of work. (I know that sounds low, but flight attendants are pretty much rarely paid for the work that they do; usually they’re paid only when the airplane doors are closed, it’s super bizarre). Anyway, so I’m guaranteed to be paid for 90 hours even if I work less that that. However, I get paid a tiny bit more for hours that I actually fly.

With this bizarre pay system in place, I’ve decided that reserve life should be one of two extremes: Either I should try to work quite a bit MORE than the 90 hours I’m guaranteed and make as much money as I can, or I should try to work as little as possible and get paid for sitting at home.

Thus far, I’ve NEVER been called into work (I have the system set to call all people who want to work before they call me to force me to work), and have self-assigned all the trips I’ve gone on. This is fine (Yay! I’ve gotten 15 days off this month and might get more!). I decided that June will be my low-fly month; my goal will be to get paid for hours I didn’t work and to spend a lot of time at home. In July, L will be out of town quite a bit, so I’ve decided to make it a high-fly month and try to work as much as I can (at least when she’s out of town).

Flight attendant life can be quite flexible. This little post explains just one way that I can manipulate my schedule to make it something that works for me and my family. I’m still loving this new career!