DWN3GRN

Air Line Pilots Association, International
1625 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20036
(202) 797-4033



Good morning. I am John Prater, president of the Air Line Pilots Association, International (ALPA). ALPA is the world’s largest pilot union, representing nearly 54,000 pilots who fly for 36 airlines in the U.S. and Canada. ALPA was founded in 1931 and our motto since its beginning is “Schedule with Safety.” For more than 77 years, ALPA has had a tremendous impact on improving aviation safety. ALPA is a founding member of the International Federation of Air Line Pilots Associations (IFALPA) and the U.S. and Canada representative to the Federation which joins the pilots of over 100 nations together in safety and security harmonization efforts. Today, ALPA continues to be the world’s leading aviation safety advocate, protecting the safety and security interests of our passengers, fellow crewmembers, and cargo around the world. ALPA has lived up to its mandate to the extent that many in the industry, including a former FAA administrator, have referred to us as the “conscience of the airline industry.”

We applaud the Committee for holding this hearing and appreciate this opportunity to testify about regional air carriers and pilot workforce issues. We would like to begin our testimony by discussing crewmember fatigue.

Crewmember Fatigue

Fatigue may adversely affect every flight crewmember every time they fly. Due to airline economic conditions which require pilots to work longer days and more of them than ever before, fatigue has reached alarming levels within the industry. The FAA’s flight and duty time regulations are woefully inadequate to address today’s situation and have not significantly changed in over 60 years, since well before jet transports came into use in the late 1950s. The current U.S. flight and duty time rules are a patchwork of regulations that are intended to address disparate domestic, international flag, and supplemental operations. There have been a number of attempts to revise the regulations over the past 25 years, but those attempts have met with generally abysmal results because of the contentious disagreement by the stakeholders as to which changes were appropriate or needed.