Colgan leaving lounge lights on in response to fatigue issue
By Jerry Zremski
NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF
Updated: February 25, 2010, 12:33 pm /
Published: February 25, 2010, 12:33 pm
WASHINGTON — The pilot of the flight that crashed in Clarence a year ago slept in the airline's crew room the night before the flight, but now Colgan Air has come up with a way of making it more difficult for pilots to do that.
It's ordered the lights to be kept on in its crew rooms.
Deborah Hersman, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, revealed that company practice at a Senate hearing this morning — and indicated she wasn't impressed with Colgan's solution.
"It won't really mitigate the problem," she said.
The problem of pilot fatigue — exacerbated by long-distance pilot commutes and low salaries at regional airlines like Colgan — dominated the Senate Aviation Committee hearing on the crash of Continental Connection Flight 3407, which claimed 50 lives last Feb. 12.
While the safety board's final report earlier this month did not cite pilot fatigue as one of the likely causes of the crash, senators made it clear that they think the pilot and co-pilot were too tired to fly — and that their exhaustion may have contributed to the pilot errors that led to the crash.
And Hersman — noting that neither pilot of Flight 3407 had "recuperative quality sleep" the night before the crash — acknowledged that similar problems occur at other airlines.
"We don't think Colgan is unique," she said. "We know this goes on in the industry."
The pilot of Flight 3407, Marvin Renslow, slept in Colgan crew lounges on two of the three nights before the crash, Hersman said.
And the co-pilot, Rebecca L. Shaw, spent the night before the crash napping on a connecting cross-country flight from Seattle to Newark, N.J., where she boarded Flight 3407 bound for Buffalo.
The chairman of the Senate Aviation Subcommittee, Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., said he feared that other pilots were also flying fatigued after getting inadequate sleep.
He displayed a safety board map of the routes taken by Colgan pilots who live far from their flying base in New Jersey. It resembled a giant red centipede overlaying the U.S. map, with its legs stretched out as far as Texas and California.
"If any of us knew that the pilot on the plane we were about to board hadn't slept in a bed the night before the flight, would we have any second thoughts about that?" Dorgan asked. "You better believe we would."
Nevertheless, Margaret Gilligan, associate administrator for aviation safety at the Federal Aviation Administration, indicated that a long commute does not guarantee that a pilot will be fatigued.
"It sounds like an odd decision to make," she said of pilots deciding to live thousands of miles from their base. "But many pilots commute and do it very responsibly."
Senators indicated, though, that it would be a good idea for federal regulators to learn more about commuting practices. Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., suggested an anonymous survey of pilots to determine how widespread commuting is — and how often pilots make dangerous commuting decisions like those made by the crew of Flight 3407.
"I'd like to find out, industry wide, the degree of the problem," he said.
Gilligan agreed such data would be useful.
"I don't know how far most pilots commute," she said. "Perhaps we should have that data."
The FAA is planning to release by the end of March a new set of proposed rules governing how much pilots can fly and how much they can work.
But those rules will not directly address the issue of pilot commuting. The committee of interested parties that helped set the stage for the proposed rule could not agree on how to address that issue.
Dorgan stressed, though, that pilot commuting could indeed pose safety risks if it means pilots aren't getting adequate rest before a flight.
"Maybe this has become a practice," he said. "If it is, it has to stop."
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