FFB:
"All depends on the individual I think. Whatever your age if you are overweight and/or take no exercise or do not use the rest period sensibly then you might be more susceptible to fatigue/tiredness."
Sounds all very simple. I once had a chief pilot who said that rest management was a major part of being a pilot, and if I was not rested before duty it was my fault. Rest periods are for resting. Again, sounds all very simple. However in the real world it does not work.
I've had many rosters of max hours followed my minimum or near minimum rest periods. In other words for many days it was work/sleep/work/sleep. There was no time or energy for excercise, especially with long-haul in such a pattern. Hours on end sitting down; weight went up, energy went down. Same true with intensive short-haul.
In the second case, minimum rest before early starts, real rest/sleep is not always easy. There is a real world outside & inside your house. They do not abide by the same schedule.
One of the problems with this whole argument is the immotive 'F' word. If fatigued it means you have reached your limit. In other words being 'very tired' is OK. I know many colleagues who are regularly 'very tired'. Should it be like this? I'm shocked when I talk to my doctor friends, some surgeons. Their schedules are appalling. If the patient knew they were under the knife of a tired person.......anasthetic is a wonderful thing. I wonder if the pax would also be shocked if they knew the truth of some of our schedules.
The medics think they can measure fatigue; I wonder; but this is why the word is used. The bean counters think they can quantify the limit and so use it. Thus they come up with a schedule, which in theory, should prevent fatigue. i.e keep you away from the limit. As has been said, everyone is different and effected in different ways. Thus there should be quite some buffer built into this schedule because there is a spectuim of individual limits. Is there an adequate buffer? There might be some, hence discretion. But the FTL's need to be used sensibly. They can not apply in black & white to all applications. For some uneducated twits to say that the FTL's are robust in preventing fatigue is to demonstrate that they know very little about the subject and should follow Eisenhower's advice.
In most applications, whether it is design or operational, there are buffers built in. It could be stress design of components or applications of operational limts. There are always margins. It would not seem to be the case with FTL's. It is often said that the weakest link in the accident chain is human, conveniently called pilot error. Many accidents have been a perfectly servicable a/c being dumped into the ground by a not quite so fully serviceable crew. All efforts seem to be going to make the a/c more reliable and less likely to break, but at the same time weakening the already weakest link by running the last link in the chain to absolute limits. It ain't rocket science to realise that it won't work for ever. Instead of being proactive, as aviation is supposed to be, the pressure of money is making everything reactive.
I would like to see a study by the BBC, or anyone else, as to why this is the case and the consequence thereof. I'm sure the public would find it sober and shocking reading. When was there a 'Paddington/Potters Bar' type investigation into a plane crash. In those train crashes the investigation went right to the top and deep into the culture of the industry. It included the regulators, incident histories, what was known in advance, management styles etc. Same happened after Herald of Free Enterprise. Aviation could do with something similar, before the worst happens.
There was a little of this with the KLM TFN accident, but the well documented cause of events stopped at the airfield and in the cockpit. I can not remember many crashes where the investigation has gone 'upstairs'. There were a couple which discovered deviations in engineering practices, known by management, which led to component failures. Rather than find out the real reason for this 'corner cutting' and cut out the root of the problem, the CAA's just introduced more/stricter paperwork filters. If there is an endemic attitude problem I'm not sure paperwork will cure it. It will then become a game to beat the system.The cancer has to cut out, deep.
Ask your self why there are so many youngsters queing up to get into airlines balanced by many others who, after 30 years or so, can't wait to quit? Something needs to change. Was it always this way? 20 years ago, I don't think so.
Last edited by RAT 5; 4th Jul 2007 at 15:13.