What it’s like inside your plane’s hidden ‘crew rest’
thepointsguy.co.uk
thepointsguy.co.uk
I have a relative who used to work for American, so I had the opportunity to fly on standby for a few years (D2 for anyone who plays the nonrev game). They have reciprocal agreements with a bunch of airlines around the world.
I was flying Iberia from Tel Aviv to Madrid once and just barrrrrrrely managed to squeeze on a flight. It was a 6am flight that I assumed would be empty but happened to get overbooked because of another canceled flight, so all those magical empty seats vanished before my eyes.
They managed to squeeze me on in one of the flight attendant jump seats - not the one in the cockpit, but the super uncomfortable vertical half-seats at the front of the plane. The only other standby passenger was the husband of one of the flight attendants.
Right after we took off, his wife came up to both of us and said “hey it’s 6am, you guys look tired - do you want to sleep in the crew rest?” I mean, why not?
So he took the bottom bunk and I took the top one - I think this was an A330 or 340 — it wasn’t nearly as fancy as the 787 here, but it was damn cozy. Pitch black, full lay flat, and I slept the whole 5 hours like it was 5 minutes.
Later a few friends told me this was absurdly against every regulation and that I basically had a once-in-a-lifetime experience. But I guess shrug Iberia Airlines, eh?
That's an experience I've never had on a flight
Is there a worse place to wait than those airports? The shops sell Rolex watches, Hugo Boss suits, alcohol (let me lug some bottles of vine/booze across the globe to save $12) + perfume. Obviously some overpriced cafe's and restaurants there as well, but not exactly a cool place to "hang out".
Plus it’s a bit more secure so you can feel less worried about sleeping and your luggage going missing.
If you’re lucky, there might not even be any babies or children.
But we're definitely not going to be flying private. :)
On an airplane you lose the internet, but the same general strategy works for me. Re. sleeping, it works for me to sleep when I'm able to and say "well if you can't sleep right now, read your book. Oh, you're too tired to read your book? Maybe it's time to sleep"
There are also the stories of the people who have lived for months in airports. I guess you are lucky it was "only" 9 hours, but yeah, it doesn't sound pleasant.
We were in Caracas; so we were advised not to go into the city. It became a 9 hour stint at Burger King pretty much, which is enough.
If you look at long airports visits from a "survival" aspect, it's probably quite nice. Or at least compared to being on the "Alone" show; but certainly not something I'd recommend :-)
Don't make the mistake I did of taking them before take-off ... and then have the plane discover a fault on the runway ....
I normally wake with bit of a fright when the wheels touch down for landing though.
If you want to be polite it's probably worth telling the crew to wake you if you snore.
And before the anyone tries to swoop in and score virtue points by linking to some study about how alcohol reduces "muh quality REM sleep" I'd just like to remind everyone that the alternative here is not sleeping on your flight.
Before the first use you put the mouthpiece into very hot water, bite it with jaw going forward, then let it cool down. You can reshape it the same way later in case the fit is not good enough. This was the case with me - I was waking up with a totally sore jaw (too much forward shift). After the reshape it is much better.
People report it is possible to make it possible to breathe through the mouthpiece. I found it unnecessary - maybe it even improves the airflow through the nose (I am not sure - could be placebo).
Googleable keywords is "mandibular advancement device". Good luck.
I have a feeling they're all struggling to sleep or sleeping poorly.
Honestly, it's been a trial-and-error process. I discovered a few things that work for me (YMMV, of course):
* Length of flight helps. I NEVER could sleep on international flights to Europe when I lived in NYC, because those flights were ~6-7 hours, which is, I think, the worst possible length for sleeping. By the time dinner service is done and the lights are out, there's about 3-4 hours of solid quiet time before they start prepping for breakfast/coffee service. Not enough. When I moved to SF, the 10-12 hour flights to Europe turned out to be the perfect length.
* Time of flight helps. The best possible flight for sleeping for me are the 7pm departures out of SFO that land in Europe 10-12 hours later. That's basically normal sleep time for me, so my body is actually in sync with the flight.
* Supplements help. The magic combo for me is 3mg of melatonin + 1 glass of red wine :)
Ambien has costarred in a few of those "I'm sorry, they did what?" stories. It can make your behavior random if you don't fall asleep quickly or get woken early.
It's the reason that I fantasize about planes one day offering real beds — or at least seats that can be put (in economy class, mind you) into a flat position.
But only because I had only just started my paid career as a software engineer, my boss had gone on vacation leaving me to run the computer systems at a multinational research facility, and I had worked for 72 hours without any sleep right before leaving :)
I don't think we'll ever get bunk planes as long as revenue maximization is at the core of the airlines' operations.
Sadly, the requirement for everybody to be able to leave a burning plane quickly gets in the way of that particular dream.
It can also happen if you fly into an airport that was closed for the week before because it was bombed.
Still remember that one twenty years later.
Just before falling asleep I managed to see the sun rising on the quietest flight I've ever taken. Just one and half an hour, but it felt like I had never slept before :D
Incidentally, that was the trip that actually started my career as a developer.
Uhhhh, shouldn’t whatever safeguards are in place protect against that, whether there are trusted randos in there or not?
Or do you mean non-rest crew (even jumpseaters) need to stay on the floor to protect the working crew?
There’s a big difference between American Federal law where the Feds are in charge of enforcing Federal law and the States are in charge of enforcing their own laws; and Pan-EU laws where a law is really an agreement to pass a bunch of laws by the member nations who then enforce them using whatever enforcement mechanisms they have. By passing the agreement as laws through their own legislatures, they in effect become a part of each member nation’s national laws. As far as I know there’s no EU FBI/DEA and the closest agency to it is more like Interpol.
See also the kerfuffle between Apple, Ireland and the EU where the EU went after both Apple and Ireland to get the Irish to enforce some European agreement that may or may not have prohibited whatever Irish tax regime was (is?) in place.
These types of EU laws are called EU directives, which as you described first need to be "transcribed" into national law by the respective parliaments. As a result they don't go into into force in all member states at the same time, and there is some more leeway concerning their implementation.
However, there are also EU regulations, which are immediately binding in all member states in their original form as soon as they are passed by the EU, much like US federal laws.
It is true though that even for EU regulations, the EU generally does not have their own enforcement capability and so there can still be differences from state to state on how strictly regulations are interpreted.
The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is an example of the latter kind of law, btw.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b2/de/d4/b2ded457430d5313d223...
(Number 9 and 44.)
The emergency exit row is also great for cheap legroom. But sometimes the seats don't recline
https://www.airliners.net/photo/Air-France/Airbus-A340-3/214...
It was integrated into a cargo pallet, so could be removed on planes serving routes where it wasn't needed:
https://www.airliners.net/photo/Lufthansa/Airbus-A340-313/43...
So novel that I took pictures to show my friends when I got back in the ground :-)
There are entire websites dedicated to helping you find a flight on a particular aircraft because some passengers know the difference between a good aircraft and flying rattle can.
I'm confused about why you'd care about an amenity that's purely for the crew. It's not obvious how anything about it could affect you while flying, especially its location in the aircraft.
Air from the outside is dry, and there are strategies to mitigate this. One of them is recirculation, and in some cases, humidifiers. But my understanding is that recirculation is controlled by the crew, and humidifiers are an option the airline may or may not take.
Unless an airplane has a condenser of some sort, and I don't know any plane that does that, there is no magic. Moisture has to come from inside the plane, either though passengers breathing (that's the idea with recirculation) and/or heavy onboard water tanks (humidifier).
Always a laugh seeing 2 or 3 crew enter a few minutes apart from each other.
It's a weird layout though, because in order to make headroom for the downstairs, it blocks out some seats 'upstairs'.
I feel like that's stretching the term 'amazing' to beyond breaking point. Mandatory safety equipment! Small mirror!
That's how I learned about this magical place's existence, and that you aren't allowed to make a 8.5h flight when it's broken, even if the rest of the plane is perfectly fine.
Turns out, if you dump a plane with 350 people suddenly onto the three customer service people serving at CDG for United, it becomes quite the shit show. I doubt any of the crew would have preferred this option over continuing to fly to Newark as intended, if they were remotely friendly with the ground crew, or had to serve there themselves.
Fun part was the passengers for other flights walking into the terminal and gazing at the queue of 350 people wrapping around one of these giant blocks at CDG, in wonder. Mood of the people in the queue was not that of the highest enjoyment, though.
You'll have a massive queue with some harried staff member hastily scanning the 3-ring binder seemingly trying to reinvent the process from first principles. The whole process seems to kick off when the first passenger hits the counter, too - not, say, when the airline first knows that this situation is inevitable.
I think they are always hoping for a miraculous save ("It turns out half the passengers have old friends in the city they want to overnight with, and the other half got on to other flights with 10 minutes notice, hooray!").
I worked at a company that had this kind of situation once. The product was in shambles, but the shit hadn’t really hit the fan yet. I didn’t want to deal with it, so I did the minimum, collected my paycheck, dodged the issues as much as I could, and finally got out just in time. Literally it felt like the entire building was detonating behind me in a massive explosion as I put on my sunglasses and walked to my car for the last time. Did not look back. Lived to code another day.
I've been in the same situation, and the first officer said as much to us. "Sorry, this is EasyJet, so we fly back to Gatwick where we have our spare plane and maintenance people. BA would have a spare pilot and a spare plane, and would fly that out with the spare parts and maintenance people to meet this one."
Imagine flying 12 hours in a plane only to be back where you started.
https://www.cntraveler.com/stories/2016-07-08/british-airway...
After the first officer returned to the cockpit, some of the other passengers on my EasyJet flight complained to the cabin crew. They said things like "it will be fine, standard procedures, happens all the time".
Companions also have no guarantee of a seat, if the flight is overbooked, you're out of luck. But.... on most flights it is allowed to have more passengers than seats, this all has to do with regulations on cabin-crew members vs number of passengers. So, it is not unusual for companions to sit in the cabin or cockpit jumpseat, or, you guessed it, the crew rest. As long as the regulations allow this of course.
I have flown many times as a companion, mostly in smaller planes (that do not have a crew restroom), but also a couple of times in a 747, which have crew rests in the cockpit (2 full-size bunkbeds, and 2 business class seats and a bathroom).
There is usually 2 business class seats reserved for flight crew. I had a memorable flight one Christmas where I was bumped but the captain gave up his rest seat for me (the spouse of one of the working cabin crew).
When it comes to airline union contracts any and everything is negotiable, so rest areas and crew seats may simply not exist if things continue the way they are going.
All that makes it a little hard to say what the real effect is. It would probably be a bit slower, but I bet with all of the optimizations for their 90 second test evacuations, the all-bed-plane could still evacuate faster than a plane-full of real passengers.
I guess there's just nobody ambitions enough around to try something really new.
Back in grad school, one of my friends was married to a gentleman who was a pilot in the Air Force and his job was flying aerial refuelling tankers (aka KC-130s).
I learned two interesting facts from him:
- Even with the "War on Terror" going on in full swing, Air Force pilots were under the same FAA crew rest procedures as commercial (e.g. Delta, United etc) aviators
- In the event that a hostile air force was targeting the AWACS (giant airborne RADAR platforms), the combat air traffic controllers would route the KC-130s in between the attackers and the AWACS. The idea was that the attackers would be confused and take out the tankers instead. The thinking here was that losing a tanker (essentially a giant flying gas can) was more acceptable than a complex electronics platform filled with specialists. Makes sense but still sobering from the perspective of the tanker crew.
This is obviously not true, is it?
For example 33-hour flights with a crew of 2.
https://www.defensenews.com/air/2019/04/29/heres-how-b-2-bom...
That said, for USAF purposes, crew rest isn't during flight: > Crew rest is compulsory for aircrew members prior to performing any duties involving aircraft operations and is a minimum of 12 non-duty hours before the flight duty period (FDP) begins. [0]
If they're in flight, it's "Controlled Cockpit Rest"
[0] AFMAN 11-202v3: https://static.e-publishing.af.mil/production/1/af_a3/public...
So... it isn't the same as FAA is it? Because crew rest is during the flight for the FAA - hence the whole point of the article, which is about crew rest stations on the aircraft, not before.
How else could the crew uniforms always be so crisp
Take however much those tickets cost then and then just adjust for inflation. I'm sure they weren't cheap.