stefan 🛡️

What a 19-hour workday looks like as a long-haul pilot flying to Tokyo. Summarised, bed to bed. I get up at home at 07:00 local time in Norway. Take a shower, have some breakfast, get dressed and head out the door at 08:30. Walk to the bus stop and arrive at Gardermoen, Oslo Airport, around 09:00. Check-in is at 09:10. This is when my flight duty starts. I then take a regular flight as a passenger from Oslo to Copenhagen. There are no A350s from my company operating out of Oslo, so they have to shuttle me down. Before the flight, I usually get my flight plan package (weather, NOTAMs, weights, fuel, route, etc.), which is quite nice, as I can go through it while sipping some coffee and enjoying the morning views. The flight lands around 11:00. I then walk to our reporting centre in CPH and meet the other pilots. We are at least 3 pilots on these flights, and one of us will be the third pilot, decided ahead of the flight. We look over the flight plan once again together and agree on final fuel. Close to 85 tonnes is not unusual for this flight. When done, we meet the cabin crew and brief them. It's important for the cabin crew to know about, for example, malfunctions and areas of turbulence. Then we all walk together through passport control and head to the aircraft. We arrive about 1 hour before departure. If all goes according to plan, we go off-block (push back from the gate) at 12:50. After reaching initial cruising altitude, the third pilot will start his rest. On this flight, we might each have 1 hour and 45 minutes of rest twice. During the flight, we usually eat three times: something light to start with, dinner in the middle, and breakfast when we get closer to Tokyo. If it's a night flight, not as much. Flying south of Russia and through China is a bit noisy, and you constantly have to monitor the radio carefully. There are also some areas of challenging terrain in case of a decompression (loss of cabin pressure), but other than that, pretty straightforward. We arrive in Tokyo a little before 08:30 local time, taxi to the gate and park. My last flight to Tokyo took 12.5 hours, a bit longer than usual, as we did a go-around due to a temporary runway closure. We run our final checks and leave the aircraft in the hands of the technicians once all the passengers have disembarked. Then we go through immigration and get to our crew bus. Tokyo and Seoul have the most relaxing buses, btw. Just what you need after a long day. The bus ride takes anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour, and in Tokyo we arrive at the hotel at about 10:00 local time. Looking back, 19 hours have now passed since I woke up in Norway. This was meant as a simple timeline of the day. There is of course a lot more to it in terms of procedures and the flying itself, but I hope that gave a brief insight.