The worst reserve assignments

It is called different things by different airlines: ready reserve, field standby, hot standby, emergency reserve, and probably others, to say nothing of the unprintable names it takes on. Airlines love ready reserve, and pilots hate it. You spend a certain amount of time sitting at the airport, in uniform, with your bag packed, waiting to see if you will fly, and hoping that you will either a) go home on time, or b) at least get a great trip if you do have to fly.

Ready reserve is the epitome of boring, and there is rarely any extra pay for it. The shifts may be as short as three or four hours, and they may be as long as eight. Because it is such an undesirable assignment, it tends to go to the junior pilots on reserve. That means that if your airline has it, and you are new, it is probably in your future.

I’ve been on both sides of the situation. As a reserve, I have sat so much ready reserve that I can tell you where all the secret tunnels are in certain airports (but I won’t) because I often spent a lot of my time just wandering around. As a regular lineholder, I’ve had ready reserves show up at my airplane unexpectedly to fill in for a pilot that, for some reason, couldn’t be there. I’ve also been sent on trips while sitting ready reserve.

Recently, I had a family emergency that popped up less than thirty minutes before I was supposed to push back on the first leg of a trip. There was no way I could try to fly, so after making the appropriate phone calls I was removed from the trip, and the schedulerswas forced to put out the fire created by my disappearance. The first option was to call the pilot on ready reserve, who no doubt was caught off guard. The chain of events that happens next depends on several variables: Can the missing pilot come back to the trip at all? How many days is the reserve legal for? Are there any other reserve pilots in the affected domicile to domino up and fill all the manpower slots? If the reserve isn’t legal for more than a day or so, the company may have to start the musical chairs of moving reserves around to cover each leg of the trip. If the trip comes back through the missing pilot’s domicile, that helps. If it doesn’t, then the schedulers start looking at having one join from another base, which means deadheading (riding in the cabin as a passenger), which takes seats out of inventory.

Each carrier usually has a set of rules for the ready reserve pilots to follow, such as a minimum of X number of days of clothes packed, where you are allowed to go (or not go) at the airport, etc. Once the call to go fly is made, there is usually a minimum amount of time set aside for the new pilot to get to the airplane and get ready. If the pilot being replaced is a captain, then he or she needs to wait for the Dispatcher to update the flight plan in order to complete the pre-flight planning. It’s tempting to rush this, but it’s the one time you need to force yourself to slow down and ensure that you don’t miss anything.

Once at the airplane, the normal routine is out of sorts and the time crunch feels worse, especially if the flight has been boarded and is late. Again, you have to force yourself not to cut corners and to do all of your standard duties, such as checking the onboard maintenance logbook (if you can’t check it on your EFB), briefing the flight attendants, making a quick PA to the passengers, verifying that the flight plan is in the flight management system (FMS) correctly, and taking a few minutes to introduce yourself to the other pilot.

The argument over the validity of having ready reserve never ends. The airlines always want more, and the pilots always want (much) less. In truth, they are rarely called out on trips, but it does happen, and it can save an awful lot of money when it does. But odds are, it isn’t going to go away, so make sure you have some reading material, some movies downloaded, and a bathing suit in your suitcase.