Originally Posted by
WillowRun 6-3
WS
About Colgan - a few years ago R Zumwalt, NTSB Chair at the time, gave a guest lecture that I happened to attend. He commented on the subject of how pilot fatigue had been treated as a possible contributing factor in the Board's report.
The way the subject was raised, someone asked about whether an accident would need to happen for regulations to be tightened with regard to crew rest or fatigue.... the Chairman's reply: "We've already had that accident." It was quite a stark reply.
(The question was not mine. I asked something about the Air Canada 759 taxiway line-up incident at SFO in summer of 2017 - wish I could recall more specifically.)
Only "one" accident, where fatigue was a major factor ? I think, easily, half of the accidents do have a serious fatigue component. Not to say, the crew rest/scheduling regulations are a serious issue, world-wide.
Though, let me add on top of that, that quite a lot of pilot fatigue does have its cause in the pilots' private life, either due to excessive commuting (Colgan for example), or pilots who want to get the most out of their life and are very active aside of the job, or simply because pilots don't work a "full job" and have secondary jobs, where the total hours seriously active by large exceed the regulatory pilot hours.
I personally know a captain flying a 90% job at a major and doing secondary jobs to "adhoc" drive freight trucks at back hours of the clock. Oh, he also complains about fatigue being an issue, yeah sure.
Pilots often seem to forget that "rest" is intended for resting, just like when people have a 40 h/w office job.
But this deviates from the original subject .....