Maxalt: the accident at Little Rock, which was connected to a long duty day, resulted in the very first required, scheduled rest periods (8-hours/24) for flightcrew who are on multiple standby/reserve days in a row. Before that-you could never really predict when Crew Scheds could call us out!
"Crew Fatigue" finally was the primary cause of a US accident, as I stated recently somewhere on Pprune. The (US) NTSB showed considerable courage, finally having the b---s to stand up to the FAA on the fatigue issue. Don't know how the British or other Accident Boards stand on safety recommendations versus cost/benefit analysis and national politics (the classic NTSB vs FAA dispute). Of course these people are all career bureaucrats, some are political appointees, chosen by the highest levels...
This watershed event involved a Connie Kalitta charter (cargo) crew. It was my impression that the Captain had slept a few hours the previous afternoon-they were up all night, and the DC-8 cartwheeled at Guantanamo Bay NAS, Cuba. Don't know if the sun was already shining into squinting, very dry, red eyes. The approach supposedly requires a very close turn from base to final approach, with very little time to set up a stable approach, because of Cuban airspace limitations. Another crew with a major US airline barely kept a DC-10 on the runway there-it might have been their first time there. For me to land from a single-engine approach in the simulator might look almost like that.
