Originally Posted by
dragon man
As there are no long term studies I’ll throw up some anecdotal evidence. Brisbane based 747 crews for 3 years doing back to back JFK patterns. They were shattered, sleep patterns destroyed, sick leave up. A management pilot admitted to me that if the 747 wasnt finishing up they were going to close it down. One FO is still on long term sick leave. Also with both direct Heathrow and JFK rules have to be sorted out . Past experience has shown that you shouldn’t do both ports in the same roster for fatigue reasons . I may be laughed at but I’ll go on the record now as saying that there will be a lot of grief from this, when we had 30 747s I flew with an FO one day who had been on workers compensation for 6 months suffering sleep deprivation. Be very very careful what you sign up for.
This is an excellent post. Very long single sectors or TODs are fatiguing. There's no way around that. But, crew numbers and mix, and decent rest areas can make it possible. The much, much bigger issue is rostering and recovery arrangements, if you ask me.
How long do you get in JFK/LHR before the return sector, is there an extended rest at home before flying your next sector, are there rules about back-to-back ULH sectors (not necessarily prohibiting them, but adding in extra rest of you do them) versus a LAX/HKG/HND sector (all hypthetically, of course).
It's generally not that hard to design safe operating procedures for a single, long duty. (Whether the IR and accountants want to pay for those procedures is another question.) The much more important part of a FRMS is allowing recovery of sleep debt and combating chronic fatigue.