Do pilots get enough sleep?
In confidential safety memos, pilots recount fatigue-related incidents.
from the January 15, 2008 edition
Page 2 of 3
The airlines, too, insist the system is safe. They note that creating a safety hazard by overworking pilots is not in any airline's interest.
They also point out that in the past, pilots have raised the fatigue issue prior to contract negotiations. Most airlines will be negotiating contracts between the end of this year and 2010.
"We don't think there is conclusive scientific evidence that the amount of hours currently being flown by pilots contributes to fatigue and safety issues," says David Castelveter, a spokesman for the Air Transport Association, which represents major carriers.
But the confidential safety reports, which concerned pilots gave to the Monitor, list a series of potentially dangerous fatigue-related incidents from the last half of 2007. They range from failure to level off at assigned altitude to inadvertent taxiing onto active runways to actually falling asleep at the flight controls. In one report, a captain who accidentally crossed onto an active runway wrote that his copilot tried to warn him, but he "was tired and didn't listen."
The memos come from the Aviation Safety Reporting System, which is a joint NASA/FAA program allowing pilots to report problems anonymously, as well as the internal safety awareness programs of several airlines. The idea is to identify safety problems and address them.
FAA regulations currently forbid pilots from being at the controls of an airplane for more than 30 hours every seven days, 100 hours a month, and a total of 1,000 hours a year. For every 24 hours, a pilot must be able to "look back" and see at least eight consecutive hours when he or she was not in the cockpit.
The airlines call that eight hours of "rest," but pilots note that it includes the time it takes to travel to a hotel, eat, get ready for bed, sleep, and then get back to the airport. Even the FAA acknowledges that pilots may get only about four or five hours of sleep during that eight-hour period to prepare them for what can be as long as a 16-hour day of flying.
Pilots say they're also required at times to fly a night shift for a day or two, then are switched over to a day schedule. They're also called in the middle of the night if the airline needs to change their schedule. The potential effects of these practices concern the NTSB.
"The regulations should not be based so much on X number of hours. They should take into account when somebody gets up at 4 in the morning, or if someone goes to work at midnight or flies a red-eye," says Capt. Robert Sumwalt, vice chairman of the NTSB, who is also a former pilot. "They should be scientifically based on research of circadian rhythms, sleep, and rest requirements."
The airlines note that many carriers have labor contracts that call for fewer flying hours than the maximums mandated by the FAA. For instance, the union contract for pilots at American Airlines requires that they fly only 78 hours a month, with the option to fly five more. Such contracts were fairly common before the growth of nonunion, low-cost carriers in the past decade. Then there was 9/11, which helped create an unprecedented economic crisis in aviation. Record layoffs and a series of bankruptcies followed.
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