A regional airline pilot on reserve!
I have ready reserve tomorrow from 6:00am to 2:00pm which means i will have to go to the airport and occupy the crew lounge for the duration of the shift. I will be there to cover any crewman who calls in sick, misconnects from another flight, has some sort of accident or family emergency at the last minute or if the company needs me for maintenance flights etc.
The problem is that it is nearly a three hour drive to work from my driveway. So i will have to use up the last little portion of my day off commuting to a hotel located closer to the airport. Since i have ready reserve from 6am to 2pm for the next 5 days, i will be essentially living in this hotel for the week since it is far to inconvenient to make get home at 5pm and leave the house again at 3am the next day.
The reserve day starts out with a 4:30 wake up call. The airport is only about 10 minutes down the road from the hotel so i have plenty of time. Im parked in employee parking by 5:30. The employee bus picks me up along with several mechanics, a few starbucks employees, and another pilot from another airline. We offload at Terminal C at 5:40. I have the routine down for passing through security quickly. Pack the watch, keys, cell phone and any other metal items in my overnight bag... run it through the X-ray machine and walk through the metal detector. I was smart to buy shoes without metal so security is a snap usually. A quick stop in at the McDonald's in Terminal 4 at 5:45am to grab a quick Egg McMuffin and some orange juice then its off to the monorail for the short ride over to Terminal 2.
The pilots lounge is dark... but the room is slightly illuminated by the time share infomercial on the TV... someone must have forgot to turn it off last night. Have a seat at a computer terminal to sign in for my shift about 5 minutes early. According to the flight schedule there are no open trips - yet. Flights will be arriving in from the overnights soon so the ghost town of a crew room will be bustling with pilots and flight attendants within an hour and a half, but for now its just me and my breakfast. After breakfast i'll head over to the "quiet room" kill the lights, lay back in a recliner and turn my cell phone on max volume so it will wake me up when crew scheduling calls me out to a trip. I didnt sleep well last night so im out in minutes. I awake occasionally and check my watch to see how the hours are passing... its 8:45am now - no call out yet. I awake again at 11am to the sound of a crying baby in the busy terminal on the other side of the door. I turn on the lights and whipe the sleep from my eyes, straighten my tie and head to SubWay for lunch.......
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