I want you to imagine waking up at 5:00am on a Monday morning and then being at work by 6:30am.  Once at work, you’ll be climbing into another car and driving 1 hour trips across a busy metropolitan area such as Chicago or Dallas or Los Angeles.  At each stop you’ll have about 5 to 10 minutes to go to the bathroom or to get something to drink or munch on through the day.  You do this from 7:30am until 7:30pm at night. 

Once finished, because you are far away from your home, you get a motel room and go someplace to eat like Chili’s.  You do get to sleep by 10pm (and mind you I just gave you only 2.5 hours to find a motel, get something to eat and then get yourself prepared to sleep which sounds like a lot but really isn’t) but you are in a strange, hard bed and your sleep is disturbed somewhat. 

You get up at 5:00am again, shower and pack and get a ride back to your duty station and climb back into a car to drive from 7:30am to 7:30pm again under the same conditions described above.  Once done, you do get to go home and sleep and arrive home at around 9pm.  You have to eat, get to sleep and, once more, get up at 5:00am to do this routine one more time all day.

How tired are you going to be on that third day of duty?  Almost anyone, physically fit or not, is going to be pretty exhausted.  He or she will be prone to make mistakes in their daily work and will find it difficult to stay awake at the wheel at certain points of the day.  That’s the life of a domestic airline pilot.  It’s really not any different for flight attendants, by the way.   Oh and before we go on, I want to point out that that pilot working those duty hours will actually only be paid for about 8 or 9 of the 12 hours they’ll be working on such a schedule. 

Now, some people might be tempted to say they could or did handle such a schedule and it wasn’t any big deal.  Really?  No big deal?  Well, I’ll agree that many of us have had to work such a fatiguing schedule (including myself during my courier driver days 20 years ago) but let’s not act like it isn’t a big deal.  It is.  Under such situations, most people will make bad mistakes, act irritable towards fellow workers or even customers, they’ll eat poorly and they’ll be prone to falling into micro-sleeps (nodding off for brief moments) during their work. 

Is that who you want flying you from Chicago to Cedar Rapids?  Well, you have probably a 2 in 3 chance that your pilot on such a flight will be just that fatigued.   Think about that for a few moments.

 Earlier in 2008, two pilots (an experienced captain and first officer) fell asleep while flying a go! Airlines (a subsidiary of Mesa Airlines) commuter flight in Hawaii.  The NTSB has released a final report on that incident which can be found HERE.  In short, both the captain and first officer had flown schedules not unsimilar to the scenario I described at the start of this post and both fell victim to fatigue.  While there was no harm suffered from their falling asleep, it is a disturbing development.   Mesa fired both pilots as a result of this incident which, in part, ultimately came to light from their self reporting the problem (as well as the problem being originally identified by ATC when they tried to clear them to their destination.)

It highlights a problem that is growing among pilots over the past 20 years.  Fatigue and work rules to mitigate it are a major subject of many, if not most, union contract negotiations.   Airlines are fighting new work rules as proposed by the FAA in court now.  Pilot unions are refusing to cooperate with work rule variances on many new ultra-long haul routes that have the potential to be major money makers for airlines.   Two years ago, American Airlines bid to fly a route from DFW airport to China and ultimately had to amend their proposal because the pilot’s union refused to give a work rule variance for the 18+ hour flight.  American Airlines lost the bid as a result. 

In Part 2, I’ll discuss the opportunities to make a real change in this problem that could benefit both pilots and airlines. 

Filed under: Airline News, Airline Service, Deregulation by ajax