As CEO he has the final responsibility. He should be reported to the Hungarian CAA or even the UKCAA as they have a British AOC. Wizz pilots, do your duty!

Hmmm, EASA Subpart Q wasn't as restrictive as much around the world but that is untidy. Is the CEO in this case the accountable manager or just a senior person within the AOC?

Nevertheless, fatigue was found to be a contributing factor in 16 commercial accidents between 1993 and 2016.

Source: [url]https://predictivesafety.com/16-plane-crashes-caused-by-fatigued-aircrew/

Rather than striking I suggest the pilots go sick at the end of sector one or three when the aircraft is away from base - let this pip squeak of a CEO sort it out then.

I would bet a large percentage of airline CEO's have said similar.

https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....8ffb940de8.jpg

A lot of airline managers are thick as mince half wits but this bloke seems of Olympic standard. Time to draw that line fellow pilots.

But publicly, on camera?

I just read this in the BALPA news letter,

The comments about fatigue made by Wizz Air CEO József Váradi are unacceptable. An airline CEO's priority is to safely operate flights that make the airline money. If you forget your safety obligations, you can forget the rest.

Therefore, BALPA has called for Wizz Air to clarify that it would fully support any pilot who does the right thing by not flying if they feel fatigued, for the safety of their passengers, crew and aircraft.


Safety is the number one priority for our members. Read our full,

“6th consecutive early”. They do that? Unbelievable. How many days to recover from that? Working that sort of roster is clearly not viable for anyone. The management should fly with a crew for a few weeks to appreciate quite how tiring it is. Well done the pilots for declaring unfit. It takes courage.

Yeah errrmm.... No. Much better to have the union behind you.

Not that I'm disagreeing with you as fatigue is a major issue but I sometimes question facts quoted by a company trying to sell a product. The report that they are quoting was a BBC article which I couldn't locate and the report doesn't say how many accidents occurred in that time period

Corporate greed, nothing less. This sought of pressure has cost lives in the past. This guy comes across as a bully. You must stand up to a bully.

It has been discovered, in recent times, fatigue increases the chances of micro blackouts. This in addition to the other risks to flight safety.

Bull. Very fatigued pilots will make mistakes. This will be a factor sooner or later.

A company that start you early, transitions to late, back to early, back to late in a 6 day block.

Threatening letters to crew regarding "being fit for duty"
These letters have being sent around for over 10 years.

The Hungarian CAA are just puppets in the Wizz play, their head office is in Switzerland.
As for the crews there is little or no culture standing up to authority in many of the countries their operate, don't forget the "bad apples" video.
This is who they are.

I remember this argument being made years ago around 250 hour pilots rapidly excelling in to the left hand seat. Accidents will happen. But as we have seen over the decades airlines have somehow been able to mitigate this and the risk hasn’t materialised (yet, don’t know if it will or won’t).

The problem with fatigue is the same issue hasn’t been able to be made tangible yet either. Colgan was a clear example of fatigue but the commuting habits were blamed and the 1500 hour rule was instigated which was clearly ridiculous as both pilots were well above the minimum requirements. But it’s had the unintended consequences of massively driving up t’s and c’s in the USA. As far as I understand it gone are the days of food stamps for regional pilots.

But fatigue is a horrific insidious nasty problem that I believe is covered up by the fact that there are 2 pilots on the flight deck. I remember reading an ASR stating “I woke up to find the FO asleep”.

So what do we do about it. There is no getting around that flying an early shorthaul means that most won’t get a decent night’s sleep because of fretting about waking up at 3am. A late is no better. A day longhaul is great, but you have the return to contend with. Augmented crew. Lovely, but you still only get 2-3 hours in a bunk with at best what a 90 minute doze and then the required longhaul pee.

in my humble opinion the only bullet proof safe way to fly is a 4-8 hour duty with the pilots reporting at about 8-9 am. But that’s impractical.

So we pilots make do we cope. I have learnt in my career that a) probably things won’t go wrong (knowing that they can at any point but probably won’t). b) I can land an aircraft adequately after having been awake for 24 hours and c) it will get worse, but having recently re read fate is the hunter it was even worse before. The only thing that has really changed is the acceptance of risk.

we’ve all muttered “well if only the ceo/head of crewing/ head of HR/ head of flight safety etc etc etc flew my roster……. But they won’t.

sorry this is a ramble that has no conclusions. I refer you to the seminal song everybody’s free by Baz Luhrman

Who does this CEO think he is? A hospital CEO ? Woking fatigued is unfortunately the default for those of us in healthcare now. We allied ourselves with our colleagues in aviation b/c they showed the gumption to prove that excessive hours lead to crashes and deaths.

Clearly this forum is going to have a pilot bias and I certainly don’t disagree with the sentiments above, but a word for the rest of the industry.

The whole aviation sector globally is understaffed and/or running on empty. It is truly in a mess at the moment.

There are not enough engineers to go round - the race to reactivate and fix aircraft take a lot more effort, cost, time and stress than it did before. There isn’t enough hangarage to go round. People are doing more and more overtime, likely for no extra pay and at breaking point.

The OEMs can’t get airplanes up in the air right now as they struggle to meet demands.

The airport terminal workers that are seeing the wrath of passengers on a daily basis, probably earning a pittance at the expense of their managers, working silly hours to try and keep the operation moving. The Daily Hate Mail like to hate unions, but these people are typically not in a union and have no recourse against questionable business practices.

Look no further than Air France for an horrific safety record. Long distance commutes from the south of the country, paid for by AF prior to a long haul duty. This with their pilots attitude and behaviours that would not be tolerated in a UK airline, the ability to get things so very wrong, so many times. What a history.
All this.... and self inflicted.

The Daily Star(!!) have it as the lead story on their front page - as they put it "Hmm! What could possibly go wrong?" and "Anybody else see the flaw in his cunning plan?"