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Family and Medical Leave Extended to Flight Crews
Airline flight crews will soon have the same family and medical leave coverage other working Americans have enjoyed since 1993. The House of Representatives approved legislation yesterday amending the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) to allow airline pilots and flight attendants to qualify for leave. The bill now goes to President Obama, who is expected to sign it.
The FMLA requires state agencies and private employers with more than 50 employees to give workers up to 12 weeks off to care for themselves or a family member. But because of the unique way their work hours are counted, pilots and flight attendants have found it difficult—if not impossible—to meet the 1,250-hour-per-year threshold required for FMLA eligibility.
Pilot duty time is capped at 1,000 hours per year. For flight attendants, hours on the job between flights or on mandatory standby do not count toward their FMLA credit, making it virtually impossible for them to qualify for this important coverage.
“Congress never intended to exclude flight crews from this coverage,” says Edward Wytkind, president of the AFL-CIO Transportation Trades Department.
But flight attendants and pilots have had to trade away other benefits in contract negotiations in order to receive Family and Medical Leave Act coverage that should have been theirs from the start.
It’s time that flight attendants and pilots get family and medical leave just like millions of other American workers.
Rep. Tim Bishop (D-N.Y.) authored the Airline Flight Crew Technical Corrections Act. Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) introduced a companion bill, which the Senate passed last month.
Patricia Friend, president of the Flight Attendants-CWA, praised Bishop for sponsoring the bill.
We are very pleased at the passage of Congressman Bishop’s FMLA bill, which finally addresses loopholes in the current language that have denied many flight attendants from qualifying for coverage. Every flight attendant in this country is so grateful to Tim Bishop for passing this legislation on such a strong bipartisan basis.
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The article states, “Pilot duty time is capped at 1,000 hours per year,” Yet this is both inaccurate and misleading.
The 1,000 hours/year limit referred to is actually flight hours; the number of hours the aircraft is in motion. This is counted from when the aircraft begins to be pushed back from the gate and continues until the aircraft is back and at gate at the end of a flight.
Pilot ‘duty time’ is the total amount of time pilots are on duty. This length of time is substantially longer than ‘flight time.’
‘Duty time’ starts (depending on the airline) at least 45 minutes prior to the day’s first scheduled departure and continues until 15 minutes past the time the pilots shut down the aircraft on their last flight of the work day.
Note it’s at the end of this ‘duty period’ that the pilots ‘rest period’ starts which can be as little as 9 hours (or a reduction of 8 hours – but that starts to get more complex).
So next time you see pilots walking out of the terminal to get the hotel van, do make a mental note the FAA and their airline are legally counting that time as the crew’s legal ‘rest period.’
If the hotel van is late or it’s a 40 minute ride to the hotel (the airline selected a less costly hotel a good distance from the airport), it’s all part of the pilot’s legal ‘rest period.’ Same ‘rest period’ rules apply to waiting for the van to get the pilots back to the airport.
Based on this and the odd sleeping patterns of flight crews, one can easily see how a 9 hour legal ‘rest period’ can easily loose 2 hours in transit from the gate to the hotel room and back. How much sleep could you reasonabally expect to get under these conditions? Could you safely work a 14 -16 hour duty day after that much rest?
One would hope pilots will get a shower and visit a restaurant for a bite to eat during their ‘rest period’ as well.
If interested in this area, see research into ‘microsleep’ conducted at NASA Ames. It showed pilots experienced, on average, 3 microsleep incidents during the decent to landing period after a 24 hour layover in Honolulu on the subsequent flight back to the west coast of America.