Summary
- The minimum rest period for pilots is 10 hours, with 8 hours of uninterrupted rest required. Hotel contracts are taken seriously to ensure crew members get sufficient rest.
- Long-haul flights often have longer layovers, between 24 and 36 hours. Layovers between north/south routes tend to be longer, allowing crews to stay closer to their local time zones.
Layovers are one of the most significant variables of a flying career. Some are relatively short, while others are long. Some hotels used for layovers are near the airport, while others are many miles away in the city center. Pilots and flight attendants sometimes stay at the same accommodation, while other times they stay in different places. Every layover is different, and in this article, we'll explore the length of a layover.
Rest rules
A layover's length is dependent on a variety of things. The most unflexible variable is the pilot's required rest period. In the US, pilots need at least 10 hours between the end of one duty period and the commencement of the next. If a crew arrives in their layover city at 11:30 pm, they can't begin duty the following day until 11:30 am.
Technically, the 10-hour clock starts 15 minutes after the parking brake is set on a domestic arrival or 30 minutes after an international arrival. This is an acknowledgment of the time it takes to complete post-flight duties and exit the airport's secure area. The van ride to the hotel does not count as duty time.
Contained within the minimum 10-hour duty-free period on a layover is the requirement for eight hours of uninterrupted rest. For this reason, every airline/pilot contract has stipulations keeping crew members off the first floor, away from elevators, and in corner rooms whenever possible.
If a crew member cannot obtain sufficient rest because of inadequacies with the overnight accommodations, the morning flight would have to be delayed since the layover did not comply with Part 117 of the Code of Federal Regulations, which contains crew rest requirements. Hotels' contracts with airlines are taken very seriously for this reason. For the hotels, airlines represent consistent business. For the airlines, adequate hotels represent a legal requirement to operate.
Get the latest aviation news straight to your inbox: Sign up for our newsletters today.
Long-haul layovers
The 10-hour duty rule is only a consideration for short-haul flying. Long-haul crews usually have a minimum layover of 24 hours or more. This partly concerns extended rest rules, but much of it is tied to the simple reality that the airline does not fly another plane to their layover city until the next day.
There are exceptions, such as American Airlines' operations at London Heathrow, where a New York-based crew might fly the next day's trip to Phoenix or Seattle rather than back to their base at JFK. Still, most long-haul operations are simple out-and-backs from a hub with a 24-26 hour layover.
The gem of layovers (and the ones which tend to go to more senior crews) are those which are on between north/south routes. For instance, the layover for US crews in South American cities like Rio de Janeiro or Santiago tends to be 36 hours. This is because they arrive in the early morning and do not depart the next day until the early evening.
Across the board, airlines do not fly long-haul morning or midday departures from south to north because passengers would not have any connection options upon arrival since it would be late evening. Instead, airlines keep their planes on the ground in the places like Brazil, Argentina, and South Africa (or LAX, in the case of Qantas) and have maintenance carried out as they wait for their evening departure.
Long-haul flying is easier on the body's circadian rhythm when the trip follows lines of longitude rather than latitude. Flying northerly and southerly routes allow crews to stay closer to their local time zones. Flights from London to Johannesburg and Los Angeles are both about 11 hours. The difference is that the flight to South Africa displaces the circadian rhythm by 1 hour. In comparison, Los Angeles is a jarring 8-hour displacement.
Simply stated, the length of layovers is determined by when the crew is legally allowed to fly again and when a plane will arrive in their layover city for them to fly. The second part of this statement is vastly complex and has many moving parts, which the scheduling department spends lots of time analyzing. Suffice it to say that layovers are puzzle pieces that schedulers solve. On the pilot end of the layover, the biggest concern is ensuring we're in the hotel lobby before the van departs for the airport.