Fatigue....insidious and difficult to detect, booze the easy answer to pilot bashing
For those pilots who are yet to have a fatigue issue I can tell you that you are in for a surprise, in that you will be the last to know that you have become a victim of the appalling and dangerous EASA flight time limitations rules.
The current EASA regulations are simply not safe in the long run and are now the largest risk to the traveling public despite the headlines in the papers that go for the very occasional drunk pilot issue as if it was an everyday happening.
In forty years in the business I have only seen one of my crew mates turn up drunk ( and he only got as far as the hotel lobby ) but discovered myself flying multiple flights under fatigue but failed to recognise the symptoms in myself.
I was fortunate enough to be in a financal position to take an 80% Roster to combat the effects of fatigue and feel much better for it but with the huge debts that young pilots have to pay off to get into the industry some of these people simply can’t afford to take the option of working less and become unwilling victims of fatigue.
It is so easy for those who write for the papers to headline drunk pilots because the tests can say conclusively if they are guilty and it makes a good cheap story, far harder to sell a newspaper report about fatigue as it is about as hard to pin down as it is to nail a jelly ( jello for the Americans ) to a wall, and yet fatigue is the biggest danger in the industry at the moment.