JohnBurke

And this is the thrust of the belief. Anecdotal.

What is needed is an exhaustive study that doesn't fly in the face of current sleep science.

It's one thing to say that ten crews felt a bit better and performed a bit better, but statistically speaking, that could be skewed for any number of reasons: the test subject population is far too small the the study far too limited.

Sleep science today is built on exhaustive (pun in tended) studies with a lot more than just an ECG and the notion that the crews performed better.

Concrete research needs to be performed to match that and at a minimum make valid determinations, not anecdotal, of the physical benefit derived. "Other airlines do it." Isn't science.

I've spent a lot of years pushing the boundaries, too...a lot of years pushing into places that I couldn't have imagined and some that wouldn't be believable in a fiction novel, and I've spent a lot of years squeezing in sleep where ever I could. I've had a lot of 72 hour days over the years and I'll say that today red bull, multiple red bulls, don't raise my pulse any more. I'm a sleep scientist's poster child the same way that a crack ***** is the darling of the emergency ward. I just slept through four hours of fire alarm testing, if that says anything.

Sleep science has been an interest, and I've followed it and the changes that have occurred in it. There are 70 million adults in the US who are sleep-deprived and most don't know it, and far more that get inadequate sleep. Those that get inadequate sleep cannot make it up with a cat nap or "power nap."

Those that do get adequate sleep may benefit from a few minutes of shut-eye enroute...but ONLY if getting adequate sleep. If getting inadequate sleep (meaning at a minimum two or more complete sleep cycles), a cat nap won't do a damn thing to address a sleep deficit of sleep debt; it may give the illusion, but it won't provide an actual benefit.

The real key, outside cat naps, is to focus on sleep, and circadian disruption. Only once adequate sleep is addressed on an ongoing basis (chronic debt settled) then and only then can a valid examination of inflight controlled rest be addressed scientifically. Until that point, there's no way to separate the perceived benefits from a healthy subject, especially if the control is adequately rested and not sleep deprived.

Much of the work that needs to be done can't be done in flight because it does involve deprived individuals in subject groups...and a lot of that work is known already...which includes the fact that power naps won't fix sleep debt. They're a hollow, ineffective substitute for a sleep cycle, when the subject has not received adequate rest.

If I were going to have a tombstone (which I won't), it would be a toss up for an epitaph between that, and "I should have had the blue pill."