Do they go to one place and stay there and how many days are on and off? What are the vacation allowances and do you get paid by the hour?
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Back when I flew, duty days were 14 hours, with 8 hours rest in between. Some smaller charter outfits would split your day up so your 8 hours was spent at the destination before you return to your hub.
International flights use relief crews, extra pilots who take over during cruise while the Captain and First Officer rest in specially fitted bunks away from the general seating area.
Long trips are usually a day outbound, a day or two in the destination, and a day homeward.
My buddy who flies 777s for an international pulls about 4 trips a month, plus or minus what the economy demands.
Like with many major airlines, he only gets paid from pushback to parking brake set. Their airplanes taxi slow.
When an airplane is in the air, there are three main people who are responsible for everything: the captain, the first officer, and the flight attendant. The captain is in charge of the airplane and the first officer is the second-in-command. The flight attendant is responsible for the passengers.
Each shift is eight hours long. The captain and the first officer work together for the first four hours of the flight. Then, the captain takes a break and the first officer takes over. The captain comes back after two hours and the first officer takes a break. This cycle continues for the entire flight.
The flight attendant works the whole flight, but they take turns taking breaks. One flight attendant will work for four hours and then take a break for two hours. The other flight attendant will work during those two hours. This cycle continues for the entire flight.
Flight crews can only work so many hours actually operating the airplane before they’re required to rest. This varies a little bit by country (regulator jurisdiction) but it’s usually something like 8-14 hours on followed by about the same off. It can be considerably higher if a pilot union contract is involved. There are also caps on total days worked in a row and total hours flown per year (again, varies by jurisdiction).
At a small carrier that doesn’t go very far, it will mostly be fly continuously (potentially multiple destinations a day) until you run out of time and end up at home, then go home and rest, then do it again. Pretty much like a normal job.
Where it gets screwy is flights longer than half a duty day, so you *can’t* get back home in one shot. Then you need to stay overnight (at least) at the destination to get the required rest before you can fly again, which may or may not be home or may be on to another destination, where you repeat the process in a big circuit until you *eventually* end up back home before your “too many days in a row” limit kicks in.
The airplane, for hopefully obvious reasons, does not want to sit there for a day waiting for the flight crew to sleep, so a new crew will be waiting to pick up the airplane as soon as it arrives. Airplanes and crews are on totally different schedules. Managing flight crews for a larger airline is a giant shell game of constantly moving crews around so that every flight is staffed and nobody breaks their limits. Occasionally crews need to move while they’re not working, these are called “deadheading pilots”.
In most places, the crews are paid from “Out” to “In”…from the moment the airplane pushes back (technically, from the moment the parking brake is released) to the moment it parks at the destination (when the parking brake is set). Their hourly rate tends to look really high because they’re working for a bunch of time outside the actual flight that they’re not exactly getting paid…it’s a lot closer to a salaried job than an hourly. Some airlines have guaranteed minimum hours, which effectively sets their “salary”, and then if they fly more than that it’s like overtime.
In practice, all this combines to mean that long haul pilots don’t fly that many days per month. As a direct result, some don’t have separate vacation, they just have a lot of off days when they’re not working. Some airlines may have explicit vacation days over and above the required crew rest. It’s very situational.
The process for how each pilot picks what days/routes they fly is ludicrously complex and varies wildly by airline.
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