First Month as a Flight Attendant in Numbers

I made it through my first month as a flight attendant. It was June 2022, so a 30 day month. Here are the numbers:

Days assigned as a reserve: 18

Days used as a reserve: 15

Total Trips for the month: 5.3

24 hour + layovers: 4

Days converted to Emergency/Extended Reserve: 1

Days on airport standby: 1

Phone calls to home from crew scheduling: 2

Total hours: 102.70

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And now, an interpretation of the numbers:

Days assigned as a reserve: 18

This is the standard amount of days that a reserve is required to be on-call per month. What this means is that, 18 days this month I was required to be within 2 hours of the airport in case they needed me to fly.

Days used as a reserve: 15

As mentioned above, I had 18 days this month in which I had to be within 2 hours of the airport in case the airline needed me. However, for 3 of those days, they didn’t need me and I stayed at home and worked on projects.

Total Trips for the month: 5.3 (I had a 3 day trip that began on the last day of the month)

I had 6 separate trips ranging from 1 day turns (in which I flew out of Seatac and back within one day), to 4 day trips (in which I stayed over night at hotels in other cities).

24 hour + layovers: 4

24 hour layovers are pretty amazing; For longer layovers like this, the airline will typically transport the crew into the city center so that we can explore and enjoy the city. I felt pretty lucky to get four this month: Raleigh, Miami, Detroit, and Atlanta. I also had quite a few layovers that were not 24 hours, but were long enough for me to get out and hike or explore.

Days converted to Emergency/Extended Reserve: 1

During the month of June, I was on “A.M. Reserve,” which means that the airline can call me anytime between 12am and 2pm to tell me that I must be at the airport, again any time between 12am and 2pm. However, sometimes they convert flight attendants to “ER Reserve” which means that they can call you anytime within a 24 hour period. This isn’t really ideal, because it keeps me tethered to the Seattle/Tacoma area for the full day. The airline is allowed to do this 2x per month before they have to pay us a little extra if they use us on ER Reserve.

Days on airport standby: 1

Remember above, when I mentioned that I had 18 days on call and had to be within 2 hours of the airport? Well, sometimes they have us sit airport standby. For airport standby, instead of waiting for a call at home, we sit at the airport in case they need us on very short notice. It’s pretty boring sitting at the airport with nothing to do, so I’m grateful that it only happened to me 1x this month!

Phone calls to home from crew scheduling: 2

When on reserve, crew scheduling will often call a flight attendant to tell them that they have an assignment. I got called once at 3am for a 6am report, and was called once at 10:45am for a 1pm report.

I don’t like calls from crew scheduling because it’s a bit disruptive! I was able to limit my calls from crew scheduling by self-assigning (as reviewed here) when able, and by checking my airline’s crew scheduling website with some frequency. As mentioned above, crew scheduling is only allowed to call between certain hours of the day. For June, it was 12am-2pm for me. If I had reserve starting at 12am, I would check the crew scheduling website before I went to bed, where I could click a button acknowledge any assignments they had for me. Doing so meant that I was able to avoid middle-of-the-night phone calls and worrying about missing a call!

Total hours: 102.7

As previously written about, while on reserve, I am guaranteed 90 hours of pay per month, regardless of whether or not I worked those hours. I hoped this month to get a few free hours! I failed though, and worked all of the hours I got paid for – 102.7 of them. However, towards the end of the month I learned that if you work 5 hours more than your guarantee, you get a monetary bonus, so now I’ll probably be trying to work more than my guarantee vs sitting at home.

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All-in-all June was a great month! I am really enjoying this new life!