When Pilots Call In Sick

Question:  What happens when a pilot calls in sick?   Surely they can't have standby pilots in EVERY city that they could potentially depart from, or could they? And they can't fly a plane with only one pilot in the cockpit, so what happens in a case like this?
 
Jason Plott - Lehi, UT

Answer:  If the sick call happens at a domicile (base) for the airline, a reserve pilot is called in.  A reserve pilot differs from line pilots in that line pilots know their entire schedules a month at a time.  Reserve pilots, as the name implies, are at the ready should they be needed to fill in for line pilots who can't make their trips due to illness, vacation, training, etc.

At really big airports like Chicago and Denver, United Airlines has, or at least had while I was working there, "field standby" crews who are physically stationed at the airport ready to go, but only in narrow-body fleets.  They stand by for four hours at a time.  I used to get field standbys when I was flying the B-727 and Airbus, and got used as a reserve captain more than occasionally but less than often--maybe about 25% of the time.  We would sit around Flight Operations or elsewhere in the airport, waiting for our pagers to go off.

Field standby isn't used in wide-body fleets used on long-haul routes as pilot duty times could easily be exceeded.  However, wide-body flights typically leave out of large cities which are also pilot bases, so reserve crews are on call with a "show time" that differs from airline to airline, but is usually a maximum of about four hours.  I have lived as close as fifteen minutes from my base and was sometimes called to get to the airport as quickly as possible.

If a pilot calls in sick mid-trip at a smaller station, then crew scheduling jumps into action and pilot shuffling occurs.  For instance, if there is a later flight in the same type of aircraft, they may pull a pilot off it to fly the earlier flight, then replace that pilot, who was supposed to fly the later flight, with someone else later on until everything evens out again. Sometimes it's necessary to cancel a flight or postpone it several hours if a reserve pilot has to be flown in, but that doesn't happen terribly often.

Flight attendants also have reserves and must at times be shuffled around or flown in to staff flights.  The difference is that flight attendants are qualified on all fleets, while pilots are only qualified to fly one position at a time (captain or copilot) on one type airplane at a time.  There is a minimum number of flight attendants required for each type aircraft, and often, in times of economic stress, the minimum number will be used to crew an aircraft.

We were short one flight attendant last time I flew to Singapore when one woke up quite ill after a layover there.  Her replacement was flown in from Hong Kong in time to avoid any delay.

My own most memorable experience involving the shuffling of pilots happened when I was a DC-10 flight engineer.  We took off from San Francisco and landed in Maui for a turn right back to San Francisco with just an hour or so on the ground.

When we landed, the station manager summoned me into Flight Operations to take a phone call.  The crew desk informed me a flight engineer in Honolulu had broken his leg and would I please agree to take the rest of his trip?  I would take an Aloha flight over to Honolulu, a pilot who had just laid over in Honolulu would immediately fly over to replace me on my flight back to San Francisco and yet another pilot would be shuffled from somewhere to replace my replacement on his flight.  You can see that crew schedulers really earn their pay in managing scenarios like this, and they occur quite frequently.

My crew scheduler on that Maui trip didn't mention it right away, but the trip I was to fly consisted of an almost two-week extravaganza to the Far East.  In the late eighties, we had trips up to two weeks long.  This one had started in Los Angeles and had layovers in Honolulu, Tokyo, Bangkok, Tokyo again, Bangkok again, Tokyo again, then Honolulu, after which I was deadheaded (flown as a passenger) back to San Francisco.

I was new enough at that time that I didn't heed the Murphy's Law edict which states if pilots do not pack for an overnight trip, they're going to wind up on an overnight trip.  All I had was my flight bag, since my flight was supposed to be out to Maui and back.  Not taking a suitcase was a stupidity I never again repeated after learning the hard way.

United told me to shop in Honolulu for whatever I needed and just submit an expense report, which I did.  We weren't to leave for Tokyo, our first stop, until the next day and I was happy to have an afternoon on the beach in Honolulu after picking up a few necessities for my trip. 

Our trip also had two Bangkok layovers and I used the opportunity to have a few new uniforms made.  They were inexpensive and ready in less than 24 hours.  The only thing I didn't have was extra uniform shirts, but United paid for all uniform cleaning expenses and our layovers were long enough to have it cleaned at all the stops.

Being on reserve is considered a very junior position.  Since I wanted to fly captain as early as possible on every plane I flew, I was almost always quite junior (although I did get to be fairly senior on the Airbus fleet when I was based in Denver).  I flew my share of reserve, but enjoyed playing the part of the cavalry and stepping in to help keep flights on schedule.

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