Nothing on this page is legal or employment advice, and nothing here describes any particular employer or agreement. It is a list of the questions crews on this site kept telling each other to ask.
Why It Matters More Here
Passenger flying is scheduled around passengers, who broadly wish to travel in the daytime. Freight is scheduled around a sort window, a market opening or a factory shipping deadline, none of which care what time it is. That gives cargo rosters their defining features: night duties, back-of-the-clock flying, multi-day rotations away from base, positioning sectors, standby, and long periods where you are neither working nor at home.
Because so much of the burden falls outside flight time, the parts of an agreement that matter most are usually not the ones about pay per hour.
Questions Worth Asking Before You Sign
Duty and rest
- Which regulatory regime is the roster built under, and what are the actual maxima — not the typical case?
- How is rest defined, and does it start at the hotel door or at chocks?
- What happens to rest when a duty extends? Who can extend it, and how often?
- How are night duties and back-of-the-clock flying compensated or limited?
- What is the fatigue call process, and — the real question — what happens to someone who makes one?
Time away from base
- Maximum consecutive days away, and how days off are protected once a rotation slips.
- Whether days off can be moved, with how much notice, and how often.
- Positioning: is it duty, is it rest, is it paid, and in what class of travel?
- Standby: how it is defined, called and compensated, and whether it can convert to a duty at short notice.
Money that is not salary
- Per diem, when it starts and stops, and whether it survives a delay.
- Who pays for the hotel, the transport and the visa, and what the standard is.
- Loss of licence insurance and what it actually covers.
- Training bonds: amount, duration, and what triggers repayment.
The career questions
- Seniority: how it is calculated and what it governs.
- Fleet and base changes: who decides, and with what notice.
- Type rating ownership and recurrent training arrangements.
- Notice period on both sides.
Where the Rules Sit
An agreement operates on top of a regulatory floor and cannot go below it. In the United States, flight, duty and rest requirements sit in the Federal Aviation Regulations and differ substantially between Part 121 domestic, Part 121 supplemental and Part 135 — a distinction that matters enormously in cargo and that catches out people moving between operations. The regulations themselves are published on eCFR Title 14, and the FAA publishes the guidance material. In Europe the equivalent flight time limitation rules are published by EASA. Elsewhere, your national authority.
Get It Read
The consistent advice from the crew room: have somebody qualified read it before you sign it. Where a professional association or union is present, that is what they are for and their industrial staff have seen the same contract fifty times. Where one is not, an employment lawyer for an hour is cheap relative to a training bond.
And keep your own records — duty times, rest, days away. Not out of suspicion, but because the person who needs those numbers eventually is you, and nobody else is keeping them on your behalf.
The fatigue side of all this is on Safety Briefs, and the practical business of protecting rest is on Hotels.