Pilot fatigue has been a growing concern among safety advocates.
Since Wilbur shouted..."Wake the
up, Orville."
Nothing has changed. Nothing...since we hid our girl behind the radio rack of a DC3. She had slithered down all the jagged bits because it was the third day we had done 16 hours, and she worked the hardest. 40 odd, people on that aircraft, somewhere north of Jersey.
I used to unplug my captain's headset and give the Shhhhh signal to our girls, so that he could get a decent kip. "Don't you land it...don't you land it" He would keep saying, as he got his pillow out of his flight bag.
As a young f/o I loved it, but I couldn't extrapolate this to my life a few years later. In recent years, I stepped onto a colleague's aircraft in the middle of the night. There were so many corrections in the tech log that the page was soggy with biro. 'I'm soooooooo tired.' he kept saying.
The solution isn't another
committee, it's a total re-think to how we operate aircraft making use of human beings. Man and machine...nope, second thoughts, never going to work. Lateral thinking needed here. I had more protection in my Essex home from human fatigue / failure, than the average passenger carrying jet transport. Let's start making the flight-deck monitor the crews every bit as much as the engines...if not more so.