helped

A pilot has revealed his one method of balancing work and family life in the industry, despite the seriously long hours and time away from home that comes with the role

It’s widely recognised that pilots work lengthy shifts and spend considerable periods away from home. While on duty, they usually work between 10-14 hours daily, encompassing flight time, briefings and taxiing, although this can stretch to 16 hours when unexpected situations arise.

Throughout the week, the schedule can become more demanding, with pilots working up to 60 hours across 7 consecutive days, averaging around 20 hours weekly in the air. While travelling to different countries constantly and experiencing the world sounds thrilling, it can prove incredibly challenging for pilots with families.

One pilot has recently shared how he successfully balanced his career with family life. During a TikTok Q&A session, Captain Steve, employed by American Airlines, outlined his approach to making it work.

Following someone sharing their ambition to become an airline pilot, they ask: “What is your advice on a work-life balance in the industry?”

Steve responds: “Well it’s like anything else if you travel, you have to balance being on the road and being home, the electronics help these days, you can FaceTime, communicate much more effectively and frequently than you did back then.”

When his children were young, the pilot succeeded in spending quality time at home while working as a reserve for the airline.

He added: “I did reserve on the airline and didn’t work as much on reserve, I’d get called a few times a month, maybe for a trip where when you’re regular line holder, you’re going to fly four or five times.

“Was it a big difference? Yeah, it was a huge difference because I got to spend more time with my kids and I still got paid as an airline pilot to be on call.”

While working as a reserve wasn’t straightforward for Steve but he “made the sacrifice”.

He went on: “There were some inconveniences with being on call as well but I made that sacrifice to be with my family so there is a way to work it up, where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

Numerous elements influence working hours. Short-haul pilots might complete 4-6 legs per day (consecutive flights). Long-haul pilots typically endure lengthier stints, such as 12-15 hours on a single extended flight.

Early starts, such as 5am, can cut into allowable duty hours owing to fatigue regulations. Between shifts, pilots must receive a minimum of 10 hours of rest, incorporating 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep.

Lauren Betts arrived at UCLA unsure she could continue playing college basketball.

After a turbulent freshman season at Stanford almost took her out of the game entirely, she joined rising stars Gabriela Jaquez and Kiki Rice in Westwood.

Betts blossomed in three seasons as a Bruin, but none of her games were as special as the final one she played at Pauley Pavilion. During a second-round NCAA tournament win over Oklahoma State on Monday that at times was closer than many expected, Betts dropped a career-high 35 points and nine rebounds to lead UCLA to the Sweet 16.

“This community, the minute that I transferred over here, has just welcomed me with open arms,” Betts said. “The fans have just been so supportive of me through my entire journey, through my mental challenges, through just basketball, everything. I feel like I’ve grown so much, and they have really taken care of me here.

“It’s not even about basketball to me at this point. Like the people, like Coach Cori [Close] said, that we’ve been able to affect and just the difference that we’ve made, I think has been huge. And so for me, like, just to see all the people waving at us at the end of the game was really special.”

Betts wrote about her journey to joy on March 9 in The Players Tribune, the second time she has spoken or written in detail about her battle with depression and thoughts of taking her own life. She has become well known for not being afraid to be honest about her mental health challenges and being an advocate for those in need of support. It has endeared her to the UCLA community that’s embraced her, along with her teammates.

She wrote that her transparency about suicidal thoughts and an ensuing hospital stay midway through her sophomore season, first with her UCLA teammates, felt like a release from all the anxiety and self doubt that hounded her as she tried to live up to expectations at Stanford and UCLA.

“I want people to know that I’m doing better,” Betts wrote. “But I also want to be very realistic. My mental health isn’t perfect. It’s an ongoing project.”

UCLA center Lauren Betts, left, and teammate Charlisse Leger-Walker laugh together on the bench during Monday’s NCAA tournament game against Oklahoma State.

(Ronaldo Bolanos/Los Angeles Times)

Her teammates are in awe of her efforts to be the best person she can on and off the floor.

“She makes everyone better not just because of the basketball player she is, but the leader she is,” said Gianna Kneepkens, a graduate student who transferred from Utah to UCLA. “She challenges us, she pushes us, she just wants what’s best for the team. When people are getting tripled, she’s not worried about, ‘Oh, like, can I get the points?’ She’s seeing who is open so that we can score. So I just have had such a great time playing with Lauren and she’s one of the biggest reasons I came here.”

During the Oklahoma State win, UCLA led from wire to wire. But the Cowgirls outscored the Bruins in the second half and the Bruins’ shooting fizzled out during a tense third quarter. Betts, however, didn’t falter.

Her 35 points came in just 34 minutes. She was 15 of 19 from the field and nearly reached a double-double with nine rebounds.

Betts had long established herself as one of the best players in the country, but she doesn’t lead the nation in scoring, in part, because UCLA is a balanced team with many scoring options. Her performance against Oklahoma State was a reminder that she is still the Bruins’ most formidable player and remains the heart of the program’s push to win a national championship.

“That [scoring is] always in her bag,” Jaquez said. “Maybe some nights she passes more, but that’s just what makes her so special. She’s going to win 99% of her matchups.”

UCLA’s offense runs through its star center even with some of the best shooters in the country. Their starting lineup spaces the floor, with former Washington State leading scorer Charlisse Leger-Walker as a fifth option.

“She puts a lot of pressure on herself a lot of the time and always blames herself when she shouldn’t be and no one else is thinking that way,” Leger-Walker said of Betts. “And I think over this past year, she’s really been working on trying to not do that so she can be the best she can for this team. We obviously need her to be confident, just being able to trust herself, because that is what is going to make our team so much better.”

UCLA center Lauren Betts shoots the ball during the Bruins’ NCAA tournament win over Oklahoma State at Pauley Pavilion on Monday.

(Ronaldo Bolanos/Los Angeles Times)

There are games that often belong to someone else. Jaquez has turned in big games this season and Rice was the Big Ten tournament most outstanding player. The Bruins have featured six different leading scorers across all games this season.

But it still always comes back to Betts, who has been UCLA’s top scorer a team high 14 times.

“Lauren is one of those players that is always so dominant,” Leger-Walker said after the win over Oklahoma State. “I didn’t even know until she came out that she had 30-something [points.] I was like, ‘Yeah, what the heck?’ That’s just her, you know, she’s a bucket. And she’s gonna always be dominant in that fashion and she is just such an impact player for this team.”

Betts’ 27 minutes, 17.1 points and 8.7 rebounds per game are slightly down from last season. Her 3.2 assists per game are slightly up. Her role, like many other UCLA players, has evolved to fit the star-studded lineup.

In the same way Leger-Walker went from a three-point sniper to a point guard or Rice went from a distributor to a shooter and Jaquez from a hoop driver to a three-level scorer, Betts transformed from a post-up only scorer to the conductor of the Bruins’ office in the middle of the floor.

“She anchors us on both ends, down in the paint, especially defensively,” Rice said. “Her ability to switch out on guards and play on the perimeter and help us out is really, really big. And obviously offensively, she’s such a big offensive player.”

If the Bruins do win a national title, it’ll be on the back of their star. Sure, UCLA is a team full of them, but Betts is still, as Jaquez describes her, “that girl.”

For one last run, Betts can be that for a community and team where she’s found not just acceptance, but true celebration.

“I think she’s found a really deep purpose,” Close said. “And when you can use your pain for great purpose and other centeredness to have an incredible legacy in the lives of others, that’s an incredible gift. But it’s a gift that she’s worked really, really hard for.”

March 26 (UPI) — The flow of humanitarian aid to Cuba has increased in recent days with shipments of food, medicine and fuel from governments, regional allies and an international flotilla of activists amid a crisis marked by widespread blackouts and shortages of basic supplies.

However, alongside the arrival of that assistance, a debate has also grown inside and outside the island over its real impact, distribution and motives of some of those behind it.

Mexico provided the most significant shipments, with more than 1,200 tons of food transported on two Navy vessels in mid-March, followed by new cargo announced days later.

Meanwhile, Caribbean countries are preparing additional packages with powdered milk, infant formula, nonperishable food, medical supplies and energy equipment, such as solar panels and batteries. China sent 60,000 tons of rice.

Fuel shipments confirmed by Russian authorities, in an attempt to ease the energy crisis affecting the island, have not arrived and seem to be in limbo because of the U.S. embargo.

Cuba faces a structural deficit in electricity generation — because of a massive shortage of oil — that has led the system to operate under severe pressure, producing barely half of the electricity needed to cover total demand.

The gap between supply and consumption has forced authorities to implement widespread outages to avoid a total collapse, especially during peak hours, causing prolonged blackouts across the country that affect hospitals, transportation, cold chains and daily life.

Seeking to assist, the international flotilla “Nuestra América” arrived in Havana starting Friday. Organizers said they transported more than 20 tons of essential supplies.

The initiative brought together more than 650 participants from 33 countries, including doctors, activists, political figures, artists and digital content creators. Most participants arrived by air, while a vessel arrived Tuesday in Havana. President Miguel Díaz-Canel personally received those aboard.

Organizers of relief missions say Cuba is on the verge of an “imminent humanitarian collapse” and attribute the situation to United States policy, including sanctions and restrictions linked to oil trade.

But inside the island, some Cubans express doubts about the destination of that aid.

“These people come here to benefit the regime in Cuba,” said Berta Solórzano, a resident of Old Havana, in statements reported by Radio Martí.

Activist Yanaisy Curvelo, mother of a political prisoner, expressed an even more direct view:

“They believe in dictators, that’s why it works like this. …. None of those donations go to the people, everything goes to the stores — in MLC [a digital currency created by the Cuban government] or dollars.”

Near the port of Havana, where the relief ship Granma 2.0 docked, a resident identified as Manuel Soria said, “What they came here for is to support the dictatorship of the Castro regime. If it comes under these conditions, then they should not come anymore because we have not seen any help. We have not benefited, what we are is hungrier every day.”

Opposition figure Manuel Cuesta Morúa questioned the convoy’s approach.

“Instead of talking about the conditions and circumstances and the real situation of the country, they decide and dedicate themselves to reviving their utopia,” he said.

He also used a metaphor to describe the situation: “The most powerful image I have was given by [Cuban American] activist [Manolo De Los Santos] Ramallo is that this is like the Titanic. It is like someone playing music on the deck of the ship while it’s sinking.”

Doubts are not limited to opposition sectors. Cuban researcher Elaine Acosta, affiliated with Florida International University in Miami, described the convoy in statements to El País as a political maneuver more linked to elites than to citizen needs, and she warned about the risk of aid diversion.

Egyptian filmmaker Basel Ramsis Labib, with historical ties to Cuba and experience in flotillas to Gaza, questioned the initiative and described it as “ridiculous.”

“Cuba is not Gaza,” he wrote, adding that anyone who wants to help can send medicine and food directly, without incurring the high logistical costs of a flotilla.

He said those resources could have been allocated more efficiently to the population and criticized what he described as a component of “egocentrism” and a search for political visibility.

He also questioned the symbolic nature of the initiative, including the name “Granma 2.0,” and warned that some attitudes are “insulting” in the face of food shortages, fuel scarcity and the energy crisis.

“The Cuban people need gasoline, medicine, food and serious reform,” he said.

The controversy was amplified by the participation of international figures and scenes that some considered disconnected from the crisis context.

Irish hip hop group Kneecap performed a concert in Cuba during a blackout, which generated criticism on social media over the contrast between the event and the country’s energy situation.

Another focus of criticism was American political commentator Hasan Piker, who participated in the convoy and said he sought to raise awareness about the effects of United States policy on Cuba. During his visit, he described the country as “incredible” and highlighted the resilience of its population.

His statements were criticized and compared to a disconnect between that discourse and his behavior. Piker came under scrutiny for staying at a luxury hotel and wearing expensive clothing and accessories, prompting comparisons with living standards on the island.

Former Spanish Vice President Pablo Iglesias also became part of the controversy after defending the humanitarian mission from Havana in a video recorded from a five-star hotel, according to posts and analysis shared on social media.

In that message, he said the situation is “difficult, but not as it is presented from outside.”

The reaction included direct criticism from Cuba. Journalist Ariel Maceo Téllez questioned the legitimacy of such interventions and said Cubans understand their reality better than foreign observers.

In his message, he denounced the coexistence of widespread shortages and the development of luxury tourism infrastructure, noting that many Cubans cannot access those places.

Humanitarian aid to Cuba has increased in volume and visibility, but its impact is conditioned by internal distribution capacity, state control and the persistent energy crisis.

The Cuban Observatory of Human Rights said in its 2025 report that 89% of the population lives in extreme poverty and that 71% has been forced to skip meals due to food shortages.

The real impact of the aid will depend on its ability to effectively reach the population in a scenario of increasingly widespread needs.

Reporting from El Progreso, Honduras — Not long after Jesuit priest Jack Warner met a bearded, 22-year-old Midwesterner in 1980, the two Americans bonded, drawn together by the goals and questions that led them both to El Progreso, a small city not far from vast banana fields — the campos bananeros.

Warner was 35 and had arrived a year earlier to form the Teatro La Fragua, a theater company for Hondurans. As the young priest looked to forge a relationship with the campesinos, his friendship blossomed with Tim Kaine, who had taken a year off from Harvard Law School to join the Jesuit mission.

“He was 22 years old,” Warner said, “and it was the typical thing that a 22-year-old would do: What do I do with my life?”

Kaine, now a 58-year-old U.S. senator from Virginia and the Democratic vice presidential nominee, has often said that his time in Honduras helped him answer that question, giving him “a North Star” to guide his life toward public service. It’s central to his biography and likely to arise Tuesday night when he debates his Republican opponent, Mike Pence.

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When Kaine traveled to Honduras, the nation was in the throes of turmoil, flanked by countries torn by civil war and ruled by the heavy hand of a U.S-backed military bent on stamping out what it perceived to be communism spreading in the region.

“I got a firsthand look at a system — a dictatorship — where a few people at the top had all the power and everyone else got left out,” Kaine said in July at the Democratic National Convention.

He also witnessed extreme poverty. His experiences, coupled with the Jesuit goal of being “men for others,” led him to become a civil-rights lawyer for 17 years, specializing in housing-discrimination cases. Honduras convinced him, he said, “that we’ve got to advance opportunity for everyone.”

Kaine now serves on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and this year co-sponsored a bill that would increase aid to Central America’s “Northern Triangle” — Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.

Key to his experiences in Honduras was the friendship and example of Warner and a handful of other Jesuits. And a Christmastime visit to a poor man’s house taught him a lesson that resonates decades later.

During his time in El Progreso, Kaine lived in a barracks, along with Warner and other Jesuits. After their work days wrapped up about 5 p.m., he and Warner frequently commiserated over office duties, students, the teatro and the poetry Kaine was writing. Warner, a former English teacher, worked with Kaine on his verse. Over time, they became confidants.

Father Jack Warner admires a painting created by an actor who performs in the Teatro la Fragua in El Progreso, Honduras.

(Veronica Rocha / Los Angeles Times )

Both men grew up in the Midwest — Kaine in the Kansas City, Kan., suburb of Overland Park; Warner in St. Louis — and had been drawn to the Jesuit mission of social justice from an early age.

Kaine attended Rockhurst High School for boys, run by Jesuit priests who ran a demanding schedule of daily Masses, theology classes and community service activities with retreats.

Kaine, who earned a bachelor’s degree in economics at the University of Missouri, was at Harvard Law when he began to question his faith and the path he should take in life, he says. Because he had made a brief trip to Honduras in 1974 to deliver donations to the Jesuits, he decided to write them and see whether they could use some help. They said yes.

“He took a rather strong decision to seek out an answer — not everyone comes to Progreso,” Warner said.

Kaine had to tell his law school dean, and his parents, of this new direction. “The dean, not to mention my parents and friends, were confused about what I was doing and even questioned whether I would come back,” Kaine once recalled in a Virginia Tech speech.

By September 1980, Kaine was rumbling along in a bus into northern Nicaragua, where he visited another American Jesuit, Father James Carney. In Honduras months earlier, Carney had encouraged peasants to fight for their land, and he was expelled by the Honduran military, which saw him as one of the leftist priests who embraced liberation theology and the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua.

Activists, some of them priests or the peasants they worked with, would be banished or killed by authorities. Carney would later disappear in what was believed to be a clandestine Honduran military operation backed by the CIA.

“It was a time when anytime the police stopped you, you got really nervous. You never knew what was going to happen,” Warner recalled. “We were under a military dictatorship at the time and very heavy military control. It was scary, and one had to live very carefully.”

In El Progreso that September, Kaine soon met another Jesuit, Brother James O’Leary, a missionary also from Missouri.

O’Leary, who died in 2002, was often described as an outspoken, occasionally cranky but also skilled carpenter, painter and electrician who built houses and chapels for the poor. Kaine worked with him at his Loyola Technical Vocational Center, helping to boost the school’s enrollment and teaching carpentry and welding. As a youngster, Kaine had picked up skills working in his father’s ironworking shop in the Kansas City area.

Kaine declined to be interviewed for this story, but in a speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, he recalled what O’Leary taught him.

“I learned from a great mentor there, Brother Jim O’Leary, that faith is about more than words or doctrine — it’s about action,” he said. “And that led me to spend my life in public service.”

One of Kaine’s former students at the vocational center, Alex Hernandez Monroy, recalled the daily lessons in carpentry and welding from the shaggy-haired young American.

“His Spanish wasn’t very good, but despite all that he interacted with us,” said Hernandez Monroy, then 13 and now 48. Although Kaine couldn’t pronounce certain words, the students appreciated his efforts.

“Something very important that he did was that he visited the families of the students,” he said. “We were not used to interacting with Americans, so it had an impression on us to see someone like him educating us.”

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Using some of the skills he learned from Kaine and O’Leary, Hernandez Monroy teaches carpentry to a group of 15 students at the school. “They taught us that we could help our kids,” he said. “The majority of our youth are at risk, so that left an impression on us.”

::

About 35,000 people lived in El Progreso in 1980, when it was dominated by the presence of the United Fruit Co., the world’s largest — and often exploitative — banana company. Today it has a population of about 200,000, and the winding roads leading to the city are lined by brightly colored, one-story concrete homes.

During Kaine’s time there, however, it was a collection of dusty, rural villages and banana camps, with mountaintop towns accessible only by foot or mule. As a center for union activity, it became a target of the communism-fearing Reagan administration.

While war raged in neighboring El Salvador and Nicaragua, Honduras remained calm — but was gripped in fear. It was the staging ground for many of the United States’ clandestine operations aimed at toppling other governments.

People dared not speak about activism or union organizing lest they risk being among those who “disappeared.” More than a dozen priests were killed in the 1970s and 1980s after being associated with liberation theology, considered a Marxist-tinged doctrine that preached to the poor.

While Catholic priests in Central America were attacked for advocating on behalf of the poor, Kaine maintained a low profile and didn’t attract notice from the military.

Warner, a slender man with gray shoulder-length hair, recalled Kaine’s time in Honduras during a recent interview at the theater in El Progreso.

“His interest was in the students and what he was doing in his work, which is what we were all doing,” Warner said. “Trying to figure how we can do the work without being kicked out of the country for exploring it.”

Kaine also saw poverty and expressed his feelings about it through writing, as did Warner.

The priest maintained a daily newsletter with accounts of poverty and life in El Progreso. “We all have our defenses to shut out the existence of human misery, most of which consist of closing our eyes and pretending it doesn’t exist,” Warner wrote in a December 1980 newsletter. “Hopelessness then becomes a way of life for both parties.”

Warner published one of Kaine’s poems, titled “Still Life,” in which he described the “thick misery” of the town of San Pedro Sula. “In the saddest slum of San Pedro, lives are played out in the shade of a highway where buses glide like lost thoughts overhead.”

He likened the challenges, or “questions marks” facing the town to fingers testing the wind. “Each predicts change that just won’t come.”

Kaine spent nine months in El Progreso before returning to Harvard. He has kept in occasional touch with Warner and has returned to Honduras several times, most recently last year. This year, he and 25 senators called for an end to immigration raids in the U.S. targeting women and children who were fleeing violence in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.

When he accepted the nomination for vice president, Kaine said that the three basic values he absorbed in Honduras hold true today: “Fe, familia y trabajo.” Faith, family and work.

Students take a break before heading to class to learn carpentry at Loyola Technical Vocational Center, where Tim Kaine volunteered, in El Progreso, Honduras.

(Veronica Rocha / Los Angeles Times )

“I came to understand the power of faith and communal worship,” Kaine said at Virginia Tech in 2006. “I learned how to speak Spanish and began to understand how the things which can seem to divide us — like language and skin color — were so much smaller than the dreams and fears that unite us.”

Kaine also has repeatedly recalled what became one of his most indelible memories of Honduras.

He and Father Jarrell Wade, a Jesuit known as Father Patricio, had traveled by mule to visit a dirt-poor family around Christmas. As they prepared to leave, the husband handed Wade a bag. “Merry Christmas, padre,” he said.

Inside the worn bag were fruits and vegetables he had saved for the priest. Wade took the bag and thanked him.

Kaine was appalled and angered that the priest would take food from such a poor family — “I was fuming” — until Wade imparted the lesson: “You must be really humble to accept a gift of food from a poor person, and the most important thing in life is the ability to give.”

veronica.rocha@latimes.com

Twitter: @VeronicaRochaLA

Times staff writer Tracy Wilkinson in Washington contributed to this report.

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