Originally Posted by
hobbit1983
Bull. Very fatigued pilots will make mistakes. This will be a factor sooner or later.
I remember this argument being made years ago around 250 hour pilots rapidly excelling in to the left hand seat. Accidents will happen. But as we have seen over the decades airlines have somehow been able to mitigate this and the risk hasn’t materialised (yet, don’t know if it will or won’t).
The problem with fatigue is the same issue hasn’t been able to be made tangible yet either. Colgan was a clear example of fatigue but the commuting habits were blamed and the 1500 hour rule was instigated which was clearly ridiculous as both pilots were well above the minimum requirements. But it’s had the unintended consequences of massively driving up t’s and c’s in the USA. As far as I understand it gone are the days of food stamps for regional pilots.
But fatigue is a horrific insidious nasty problem that I believe is covered up by the fact that there are 2 pilots on the flight deck. I remember reading an ASR stating “I woke up to find the FO asleep”.
So what do we do about it. There is no getting around that flying an early shorthaul means that most won’t get a decent night’s sleep because of fretting about waking up at 3am. A late is no better. A day longhaul is great, but you have the return to contend with. Augmented crew. Lovely, but you still only get 2-3 hours in a bunk with at best what a 90 minute doze and then the required longhaul pee.
in my humble opinion the only bullet proof safe way to fly is a 4-8 hour duty with the pilots reporting at about 8-9 am. But that’s impractical.
So we pilots make do we cope. I have learnt in my career that a) probably things won’t go wrong (knowing that they can at any point but probably won’t). b) I can land an aircraft adequately after having been awake for 24 hours and c) it will get worse, but having recently re read fate is the hunter it was even worse before. The only thing that has really changed is the acceptance of risk.
we’ve all muttered “well if only the ceo/head of crewing/ head of HR/ head of flight safety etc etc etc flew my roster……. But they won’t.
sorry this is a ramble that has no conclusions. I refer you to the seminal song everybody’s free by Baz Luhrman