Some years ago, my airline announced a merger with another major carrier. In the past, these mega-mergers have been good and bad for the pilots. Some go swimmingly, while others still live with a fractured pilot group. Our merger fell somewhere in the middle on the scale of success. Now that it’s finished, however, we can finally start working together—rather than functioning as two separate airlines, as far as pilots and equipment are concerned.
Soon after the seniority lists were merged, pilots were able to bid to bases and equipment previously unavailable to those of the other airline. For nearly all my time at the airline, I’ve been a Boeing 737 first officer based in New York. For all of those years, I have been commuting between that base and my home in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. While New York was only a short commute by geographical standards, the reality of the commute has been, more often than not, agonizing. Ground stops, ATC delays, flow control, overbooked flights, traffic jams, blizzards, hurricanes, thunderstorms, superstorms—you name it, I got hit with it.
The path between Washington and New York is well covered with multiple airline flights, trains, buses, and my own car—or even personal airplane, if needed. To say I’ve become somewhat of a road warrior would be an understatement. My tote bag is filled with train and bus schedules, and every week brought at least some fretting over how to get to/from work.
Since the point of work is to make money, I always preferred the cheapest option, which was riding on one of my airline's flights. But while cheap, it was the most stressful way to get to work. Employees ride standby or only when there are spare seats. It wasn’t unusual to have a flight with plenty of seats the night prior suddenly become overbooked upon arrival at the gate. Then, you’re faced with a dilemma. Roll the dice on another flight, get back in the car, or run to the train station? Driving myself was the next best option if time allowed it. I could drive the 460-mile round trip for $120 in gas and tolls (tolls are substantial in the Northeast Corridor). Each way was about 3.5 hours with no traffic. The stress level usually was pretty low when I drove, but the costs added up if I did it often.
The train was an expensive option and it didn’t save much, if any, time over driving. Typically, it was $120 each way for the train based on a last-minute fare, which was always the case since I’d just been left behind by an airplane. Finally, I had the most-expensive option of flying my own airplane to work. I did this just three times in my Cessna 172. I would land at Linden Airport in northern New Jersey, to avoid the worst of the fees at the bigger airports near New York. Besides the expense, the threat of severe weather/icing often kept the option of flying myself to work off the table.
As you can imagine, commuters waste a staggering amount of time and money getting back and forth. Some commutes by airline took me as long as 12 hours because of delays, diversions, and myriad other snafus. Adding insult to injury was the fact that if I was going to work, I felt exhausted before I even started—a real safety concern at times. After a 14-hour duty day of flying, I’d often get hit with huge delays on my commute flight home, making 20-plus-hour days a too-often occurrence. I’d arrive home to life as usual, but I’d be an absolute bear since I hadn’t slept much at all.
And then there was the crash pad—my appropriately named home away from home that allowed me to get some rest before or after a trip without spending a fortune on hotels. The only problem was the crash pad reminded me of a college fraternity house, minus the fun parties and young singles. No, this was a house full of old, married guys who tended to snore in the bunk just feet from you. My first night, I realized I was too old to live like that again. But I did it out of necessity.
So when that day came in October 2013 when we could bid different bases, I wasted no time bidding for a slot in the Baltimore-Washington area. I had to switch airplanes, but I’d fly any airplane at my airline to avoid a commute. I’ve always said commuting was the worst part of my job, and I know now that I was right. Instead of spending about a half-day on either side of a trip getting to/from work, I now leave a few hours ahead of a trip. Instead of dashing through airports trying to connect to a commuting flight out of a different terminal, I simply walk outside and catch a bus to home or to my car.
I’m quite sure commuting to work took a few years off my life span because of stress, but I’m now enjoying the ability to simply go to work and not waste days per month just getting to/from my base.
