Are there a lot of crews that are based at non-hubs in the US? I have noticed a lot of crews flying in uniform as passengers from airports such as GSO and RDU. Does this just mean that they live there and commute? I wonder which airports have the highest percentage of commuting flight crews?

Interesting, I recently flew MIA-SCL and EZE-MIA on AA, and the flight crews were based out of SCL and EZE. They were all Chileans/Argentinians as far as I could tell, too.

AA does have a number of FAs based in EZE and SCL that are Argentine and Chilean nationals. The EZE crews, at least, are notorious for providing horrible service and having a lousy attitude. Hopefully you did not experience that.

Those commuting crewmembers are not based out of their home city. That's their domicile. They still start and end their trips at the same base that everyone else works out of (excluding a few airlines that have provisions which allow them to start trips away from base).

It varies from airline to airline, as to what station has the most commuters. At CO, a good number of our commuters come out of Denver since we had a base there several years ago. When we closed our small LA base shortly after 9/11, the number of commuters there went up, etc, etc. There are lots of Florida commuters all over every airline's system for various reasons - a big draw is the lack of state income tax. I can't think of a station in our system where we have no commuters - even int'l cities. I know several that commute from Paris, Rome, London, etc. They're probably on most of your flights, though usually not in uniform.

US Airways Express crew to PHL the other day said they were GSO-based at the end of the flight. I didnt realize there were US crews based there.

I've flown on UA to Paris with flight attendent crews that were based in Paris. It surprised me that they would have a base there, since they don't have many flights to Paris.

Ed

On longer flights, I'd guess that most crews probably have to rest after the flight as to not exceed work hours, so every flight might be a new crew (ie. no turnaround?). If might have been easier to hire French FA's (who in addition to French, most likely know English as a 2nd language), than to find American FA's who know French. Could also be an indirect kickback to Airbus to hire some workers from France.

Jeff

At NWA, our Detroit Base is 75 to 80 percent commuters. It is very rare to work with an actual native. Our FA base has about 4,300 alone, not counting pilots, gate staff, mechanics, etc. who also commute!