The history behind stand ups is really just the fact that it used to be legal to schedule someone for 16 hours of duty straight as long as in the preceding 24 hours you had 8 hours of rest. Research behind the window of circadian low, changing wake up times, and changing time zones among many other things, had not been incorporated in to the rules.
My first trip after completing training for Colgan in 2008 I was given my first introduction to flying a stand up. It was actually my first trip off of IOE. IAD - SHD - BKW - SHD - IAD. I didn't think it was too terrible because it was my first trip, and I was just plain excited.
A few months after reserving the line I began to realize just how terrible stand up overnights are, when you are not prepared for them. Remember this is all prior to 117, and before Colgan had any sort of contract, in fact it was prior to even being a part of ALPA.
So Im on reserve Monday - Friday, with a supposed 5am - 5pm on call status and then I'm called at 9am, after just waking up with a full nights sleep, with scheduling telling me that I'm going back on rest because theres a stand up that needs to be covered that evening and there is no coverage. My body clock is completely unprepared for whats about to happen.
The flight out of the hub goes ok. Its normal time. Probably a 10:15pm departure, but when I get to the Microtel in Beckley, West Virginia at midnight and I set my alarm for 4:30am, thats when I realize, this sucks. The alarm goes off and I'm in disbelief because theres no way I actually fell asleep within 30 minutes of making it to my room. I then realize I now have to complete 2 legs back home, both to uncontrolled airports. Arrival time back at the hub is about 7:30am. After I land at the hub I turn on my phone. Theres a voicemail from Gina in scheduling telling me to give them a call when I land, they may have something for me. I've been on duty for 11 hours but scheduling says they need first officer coverage to do a round trip to Shenandoah. Its only a 25 minute flight, maybe 2.5 hours in total of extra duty time, so I wont exceed 16 hours and everything is totally legal. So I plop down in the right seat of a different Saab 340 and tell the Captain that I just came off of a stand up, but "this is legal" so here I am. Thankfully at the time I made the decision to tell the captain that there was no need for the standard swapping of flying duties after each leg. All I was good for was manipulating the push to talk switch.
By the time we get back to the hub, Im about to touch 16 hours, but I dont. So everything is good. After I make my way to the employee parking lot, and then get home, its almost noon. Oh, and scheduling called again, they need me to do another stand up this evening. Ill get 9.5 hours of rest, so its legal.
Suddenly though stuff gets real..
This same airline has an accident that kills 44 passengers, 5 crew members (Joe Zuffoletto was a Colgan pilot who was commuting to Buffalo) and one person on the ground. After the whole tail-icing-up-causing-a-stall idea was shown to be false, the focus turned to rest, and how the crew didnt really get any prior to the flight. I cant recall if they were supposed to operate a stand up, but they did fly the last flight out in the evening after sitting around the airport all day after commuting in in the morning, and when I saw morning, I mean via FedEx out of Memphis landing in the early AM morning.
Colgan suddenly becomes ethical and makes up its own rules regarding stand ups and how they were going to operate them. Only 3 in a row, no extensions after you arrive back to the hub, and only 2 legs total (except for SHD/BKW triangle, and the MGW/CKB triangle.) I do seem to remember though that they hid these new self-imposed rules under a few tabs of the terrible Colgan Air website for employees, and after scheduling tried to break them on a few occasions we alerted
@amorris311 &
@Seggy to the hidden file, who then saved them for a later date and eventually used their own self-imposed rules, against them.
Finally after 117 was put in place a whole new set of rules took over and it was no longer legal to do what Colgan was doing.
I do want to go back to my comment that they are "terrible, when not prepared for them." After Colgan put rules on how they would structure stand up lines, I ended up bidding them for 4 months straight. It was the only way to get off weekends at this point. My schedule would be to fly a stand up on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday night. So I was off from Thursday morning until Monday evening. Stand ups worked really well when you had a captain, first officer, and flight attendant all purposely bid the same line together. The standard idea of showing up 30 minutes prior to flight to get everything ready went out the window. We all knew that we had to be on the plane 30 minutes before departure with whatever pre-flight checks being complete at that time, telling the gate agent to board them up, now. If we pushed any later than 10 minutes prior to departure then we were already behind. Everything would flow really well when you all had the same goal in mind, which was to get to the hotel as quickly as possible. On the other end of the trip, when you had the same crew, we all understood that we could ask for a shuttle or taxi time to be 15 minutes later in the morning then it was supposed to be, only because we all agreed that we'd get 15 more minutes of sleep but then work our asses off once we got to the plane.
If you ever had a reserve crew member take someones place, you would see this whole thing fall apart.
My routine after getting home was to pin up sheets over the windows to black out the room, and then pass out for 8 hours. I had it all worked out, until someone senior to me realized I was never working and had weekends off. It took me 3 solid weeks of normal flying to get my body clock back.
