Why Cologne???

 

WHY COLOGNE?

FedEx has been flying throughout Europe for many years, but positioning crews from the U.S. has been very inefficient.  The cost of commercial round trip tickets, downtime for crew rest and the week on/week off for U.S. based pilot schedules didn’t lend itself to efficiency.  Additionally, while we are No. 1 in express delivery at home and in much of the world, we are No. 4 in Europe. The powers that be want to change that...

Our major European hub is in Paris with flights connecting both East and West to Asia and North America.  As pilots we would have thought that was the logical place to base us, but issues of immigration, visas, labor laws etc are strong influencers and here we are in Cologne.  This is our secondary hub, and even though we are based here, 90% of our trips begin with a Commercial Deadhead flight to some outlying European city such as Budapest, Barcelona, Basel, Helsinki to name a few.  The airplanes usually sit there over the weekend, the pilots fly in on Sunday, operate them throughout the week, and the company then flies us commercially “home” to Cologne on Friday. 

It’s this positioning of crews feature that allow Jan and I the ease of extensive travel.  Many of our adventures revolve around my week on/week off schedule.  For example, my next trip begins on 5/6/12 with a commercial flight to Barcelona.  The company is OK with me positioning myself to Barcelona on my own schedule as long as I’m there when I need to be and rested and fit to fly.  We will leave on May 1, driving to Spain with stops in Chartres and the Lot region of Southwest France.  It’s about a 600 mile drive and we have the luxury of stopping whenever and wherever we feel like it.  I will work 4 nights in/out of Barcelona, Janice will have Corey, Allison and a friend, Kelly, with her to sightsee during the week.  On Friday, I’ll finish work, we’ll drive to the coast for 2 nights R&R, and then continue our sightseeing trip to Madrid, where we’ll drop the girls for a return flight to the States. Janice and I will then head back to Cologne.

While in Europe I’m flying the Boeing 757. This airplane connects in Paris with the Widebody fleet (B-777 and MD-11) for the long haul flying. I love the airplane so far and my relative seniority in the base affords me a fair amount of scheduling flexibility.  To date FedEx flies to the above mentioned cities as well as Stockholm, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Vienna, Paris, Tel Aviv, Athens, Munich, Oslo and the U.K.  We’re told to expect many more cities as we continue our growth in the region.