The trips that nobody wants

High-speeds are trips that start in the evening with a trip to an outstation, followed by a short stay on the ground and a flight back in the morning. The downside for the crew is that you are on duty the whole time. Typically, the airline will provide rooms in a hotel close to the airport, where you can try to grab a few hours of sleep. The ground time is scheduled to be less than what would normally be required for a full night of legal rest.

Therein lies the rub. A typical CD will start around 7 or 8 p.m., though for short flights, the check-in time might be even later. You will be considered “fresh,” so you’re expected to make it through any delays and mechanical issues, even if it means you have to stay on the airplane at the destination. You will technically still be on the clock until you arrive back in base the next morning. Properly scheduled, the airline can have you back on the ground early enough for a full, FAR-legal rest period so that you can do the same thing that night. The flip side is that if there is a delay or a diversion coming back in the morning, you will likely time out before you can operate the flight, and the company has to find a place for you to get legal rest before reassigning you.

If this sounds miserable, rest assured, it is. Most pilots despise CDs, but there are cases where it makes the most economical sense for the company. For example, if a city only has one departing flight in the morning and one arriving flight at night, this may be the only way to schedule without having to spend a lot of extra money staging crews. Alternatively, it may be a city with multiple flights a day, but the inbound and outbound may be the only ones on a given fleet. And sometimes, it just saves money.

In my regional days, CDs were mostly avoided like the plague. Fatigue is a huge issue, with stories of close calls abound. The worst trips were long flights, and we had a few that had legs that were two or more hours one way, so the time on the ground might be around five hours. An hour to an hour and a half of that was lost getting back and forth to the hotel and falling asleep and waking up. We also had one that included two flights on the outbound portion, a three-hour hotel break, and then a return. It goes without saying that some of these trips had very high sick call rates.

That said, there were some pilots that loved doing CDs, especially if they lived close to the airport, since they would get far more time at home. We had schedules that consisted of nothing but CDs, and we had some pretty restrictive rules that the company agreed to in order to have them. It was a win-win: The company got the CDs, and the pilots that didn’t want to do them could avoid them.

FAR Part 117 helps to make CDs less attractive for the airlines (flight attendants still have quite a few of them), but they can still be the best, or even the only, solution for some destinations. If you find yourself scheduled for one, the best advice I can give you is to do whatever you can to get a nap or some rest before going to work. Not everyone naps easily, and for those who can nap, we all have our own formula for success.

But it goes without saying that trying to flip your body clock is hard, and if you’re too tired to fly, you need to call in fatigued or sick and try again another day…or night.