A question for the airline pilots

MD11Pilot said:
I never talked on the PA for the last thirty years. I didn’t care nor did I ever get a complaint. I flew for UPS.
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yeah, I hear boxes make the best customers. They pay better, complain less. If it weren't for the schedule, I think all airline pilots would fly boxes....:D
 
ircphoenix said:
Wait really? Cargo pays better than pax?

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It was tongue in cheek. I mean the boxes pay better fares to get on the airplane, and behave better as well. Quality of the median PAX these days, not so much lol.

As to pay on the pilot side, yes and no. By virtue of widebody flying, a cargo "major" guy can get into WB pay sooner than most pax guys. FDX pay is generally regarded as one of the highest in terms of total lifetime compensation, and the nature of immediate WB flying has a lot do with it. As a median across all sectors of the game however, the median pay of hauling boxes is lower than passengers (box part 135 drags the pay down to a bigger degree than pax 135, as a percentage of the market share of either sector). So you can't just look at "box v pax" when looking at pay. Scheduling differences can easily sway the math to a lower paying job. So everybody will have a different set of priorities when it comes to that. Of course, most pilots are such captive audiences (so much for a pilot shortage.....) they just are glad to have a job in the first place. So they'll just "dance with the one that brung ya" and these discussions are immaterial, especially when the economy hiccups and the musical chairs stop [again]. So it matters little. I would say the decision is really one of schedules.
 
ircphoenix said:
Wait really? Cargo pays better than pax?

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YES if your at one of the two biggest.

What hindsight 2020 said is true. Pay per hour is somewhat meaningless. Work rules, schedules and seniority rule. The old saying is that anyone can fly but it takes a genius to bid. I routinely flew about 400 hours per year hard time and was working 10-12 day trips, one per month, five weeks vacation and some hard fought for work rules and I was generally on the road a little under 100 days a year and I commuted and made well in excess of $300K. Live in base, pick up extra time etc and the pay was very very good.
 
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Interesting. If I were interested in a different line of work, I'd have loved to know that back in the day. I'm pretty good at terrible schedules.
 
Has anyone else ever had to explain to a coworker that just because the temperature went from 30*F to 60*F that it really wasn't twice as warm?
 
jordane93 said:
Some people read the ATIS verbatim. They say “broken” clouds. Like what the hell does broken clouds mean? I usually just give the temperature andnany significant weather like rain or snow. Passengers just want us to shut up for the most part.
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No, I want the other passengers to shut up when the captain is talking. What I hate is the sales pitch for the credit cards.
 
Rushie said:
No, I want the other passengers to shut up when the captain is talking. What I hate is the sales pitch for the credit cards.
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No fricking kidding. That is such an annoying pain in the ass from my perspective in the cockpit. It is such a fricking pain in the ass and it tends to interfere with our duties at a critical time. The advertising should not be done until after takeoff if at all.

'Did I mention it was a pain in the ass?
 
Never gave the weather on a pre-departure briefing. Always when starting the descent for landing. Something along the lines of :devil:"We're 69 miles from KXXX, we will be on the ground in 6-9 minutes. passing through 6900 feet and it is a cool or balmy 69 degrees. Don't ever remember any body picking up on it.:biggrin:

Noah W
 
Here's a question. Why bother telling the pax what the weather is at the destination? They're already on the plane, the door is already closed. They're going whether they like the weather or not. If they didn't dress warm enough or cool enough, there's nothing they're going to do about it now. Plus, this is the age of the smart phone. They already know what the weather is at the destination. Just skip the weather and get right to trying to con them into signing up for a credit card they don't want.
 
Ryanb said:
Yeah it sounds like METAR info to me too. I’ll read a METAR and see 09/M04 and have to go about trying to convert C into F if I feel the need to know the temp. That’s one thing that I’ve never learned how to do by memory.
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This is how I do it for airports. Generally I use the °C x 2 - 10% +32 (and the reverse when needed), but rhis is too easy:

Screenshot_20181215-144031_Aviation Weather from NOAANWS.jpg
 
And sometimes they are just messing with us.
 
Lindberg said:
What's this Celsius ya'll are talking about? Is it like centigrade?
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Yes.

The SI people seem to have decided years ago to change unattributed unit names to commemorate scientists who worked in the field.

So no more centigrade (I guess meaning based on 100) and now Celsius after Miss Celsius.

Most annoying is no more Mho the previous unit of conductance (inverse resistance 1/Ohm - handy sometimes) and replaced with Siemens.

Once learned who can forget that Ohm spelled backwards is the inverse unit?

Ohm - unit of resistance
Mho - unit of conductance replaced with Siemens
 
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woodchucker said:
that the sooner the world can settle on a unified measurement system

Personally I think temperatures should be in Kelvin.
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As I understand it, it is more or less done. The US is the big hold out. Not sure about Japan and China.

Science everywhere is metric, well SI. It makes everything a lot easier.

E = m C^2 only works if the SI units are used.

E - Joules
m - kilograms
C - meters per second

If other units are used you need to add messy constants.

Of course as a matter of day to day life you would only care if you were making an atomic bomb.

Everything is the UK is metric except for road distances and speed limits and pints of beer. It is illegal to sell say potatoes by the pound now and has been for decades.

A few things are false metric. I was amazed to recently discover that some at least aluminium tube seems to be still in inches. 76.4mm diameter tube??? Ah, really three inches but described as 76.4mm (from memory).

Kelvin is a bit purist even for me. @woodchucker, you weren't thinking of joining Mr Musk on mars were you? Might be convenient for the weather there.
 
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Spring Ford said:
Everything is the UK is metric except for road distances and speed limits and pints of beer.
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Stone...

Spring Ford said:
A few things are false metric. I was amazed to recently discover that some at least aluminium tube seems to be still in inches. 76.4mm diameter tube??? Ah, really three inches but described as 76.4mm (from memory).
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The worst offenders of these is circuit board components.

Component spacing are very easily specified in mils (1/1000th of an inch). Mils have all the goodness of metric without the calories. IC legs for SIP/DIP packages are generally 100 mils apart. How much space does an IC with 4 legs take up? 400 mils. 20 legs? 2000 mils. Trace width for each? 50 mils.

However, most components now ship from SI countries and have to specify their spacing in metric. Of course, for compatibility to actually fit into holes they're still the same actual size...

With the effect is now everything is 2.54-something. So now 4 legs is 10.16mm. Sigh.

On the plus side I'm getting really good at base 2.54 math. Sigh.
 
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Spring Ford said:
Yes.

The SI people seem to have decided years ago to change unattributed unit names to commemorate scientists who worked in the field.

So no more centigrade (I guess meaning based on 100) and now Celsius after Miss Celsius.

Most annoying is no more Mho the previous unit of conductance (inverse resistance 1/Ohm - handy sometimes) and replaced with Siemens.

Once learned who can forget that Ohm spelled backwards is the inverse unit?

Ohm - unit of resistance
Mho - unit of conductance replaced with Siemens
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cycles per second = hertz
 
Spring Ford said:
Science everywhere is metric, well SI. It makes everything a lot easier.
...
Everything is the UK is metric except for road distances and speed limits and pints of beer.
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What about calibers of guns and artillery?
 
The credit card pitches were a new thing for me as I only get on an airliner maybe once a year. This was Jet Blue - are others doing it too? It’s bad enough for cashiers to do it, but at least we can say no and walk away. I assume the flight attendants hate it as well.
 
ateamer said:
I assume the flight attendants hate it as well.
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Depends on the flight attendant. At my airline the FAs get something like 50 bucks for each passenger that signs up for the CC, so some actually look forward to selling them, while some consider it to be such a disgrace that they don’t bother (it’s not required).

I hate it, but nobody asks me.
 
deonb said:
Stone...
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Not really. Illegal in consumer product labeling.

Young people all use kg for body weight and I recently converted myself when I weighed myself every day for three months as part of a three stone fitness program.

Oops - I said it!

We really have gone metric apart from pints of beer in pubs and road speed and distance. I just recalled another one - I only know my clothes sizes in inches - I think everything is dual marked with equal prominence.

In a shop a pint bottle or can of beer would be labeled 568ml. The word pint would not appear on the label anywhere. Strangely the 568ml ones are quite rare and I think mostly imports. Normal beer can is 440ml and 500ml is common too. hmmm. American beer is usually sold in 330ml bottles and soft drinks cans are the same. 3/4 of 440.


I do have a feeling that BSP pipe threads might still be quite widely used but I don't use them myself now and I am not sure. There are probably some other obscure holdouts.

Airspeed is still knots and altitude feet of course.
 
Spring Ford said:
There are probably some other obscure holdouts.
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Bicycles? I'm currently doing some work on one and some parts are in inches while others are mm. Kind of annoying since I'm pretty particular about not mixing my tools.
 
As I look at the jet engine certification report in front of me (well, behind me now, on another computer) I see exactly zero metric measurements.
 
Lindberg said:
cycles per second = hertz
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Hertz. Named after Heinrich Hertz. You must capitalize the name (unit). :D

asicer said:
What about calibers of guns and artillery?
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5.56 mm = .223 inches

7.62 mm = .308 inches

Been calling artillery by SI units for decades, I have no idea what the SAE equivalent of 105 mm, 155 mm are. Likewise, the old 8 inch howitzer would take some arithmetic to figure out the SI equivalent. I just remember, for some obscure reason, that 280 mm and 11 inch are basically the same. Perhaps because the US fielded a 280 mm gun (Atomic Annie) and some WWII ships had 11 inch guns, that the Germans called 280 mm on some of their pocket battleships.
 
And on WestJet, the pilot will give you the arrival time in metric time:

It's as simple as switching celsius to fahrenheit !
 
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