We as front line employees see problems with regs all the time. In this particular example, one of the most egregious problems has to do with rest regs. While there are certainly companies who have taken it upon themselves to improve rest and duty POLICIES, not all have, and that is a HUGE safety risk.

You said it yourself Experimental: "these have worked for 60 years, why do we have to change them now?". Well, because they ARE a problem, and even if there hasn't been a major accident yet, what will you say when there IS an accident because of it? How safe do you feel when you're flying on 4 hours of sleep? Are you completely honest with IMSAFE everytime you fly?

Forget accidents, how many near-accidents or incidents have there been because of these rest and duty regs? Busted altitudes, missed clearances, TAs/RAs, runway incursions, etc. There HAVE been examples already with pilots falling asleep and having the autopilot fly the airplane to the destination and continue circling. There was a rash of these, what, a year ago? I find it hard to believe that there were three in a month, and then that it hasn't happened since. I think what is more likely is that the media got bored with the story. The other thing to worry about is micro-sleeping, where people fall asleep for a couple seconds or minutes, but don't realize it when they wake up. Microsleep | Microsleeps is a good source on it. The stick shaker went of for, what, 4 seconds before the pilots had any type of response? What's more likely, that two trained (even poorly trained) pilots did absolutely nothing while the stick shaker went off, or that two extremely sleep deprived and fatigued pilots had a micro sleep incident, were confused when they woke up, and ended up not being able to save the airplane? The most terrifying thing about microsleeping is that unless somebody TELLS you that you had an incident, you won't know it just happened.

I don't mean to pick on you Experimental, but your attitude is exactly why the FAA has problems with rule making. This is how a culture of blood rule making comes about. "It's worked until now, why not wait until it stops working to fix the problem?"

I'll tell you why it's worked until now (well, until recently):

1. The majors have had contractual duty and rest protections that went way above and beyond what the regs specify.

2. The regionals, which are by their nature much more personnel cost sensitive than their major partners, have had lower rest and duty protections, because they have traditionally been stepping stones.

3. The regionals have until recently been a minor part of the overall flying equation, and until recently you didn't have these "super-regionals" with thousands upon thousands of pilots like Skywest, RAH, etc.

4. Up until a couple years ago they had airplanes with three pilots in the cockpit.

5. Half of the time you speak of was under regulation.

6. The majors haven't had their contracts cut to the level today any time in those 60 years. Worse mainline contracts makes it harder to improve the regional contracts.

7. Airlines have never in the past 60 years asked so much from their crews in terms of the amount of productivity.

8. I could keep going, but you get the point. Oh hell, here's one more: security used to be non-existent, it was a two minute walk from the curb to the airplane, and the hotel was right across the street from the airport, not in a different county half an hour away.

So, like I said, they've worked over the last 60 years because those 60 years have been different that what they are now. We as front line employees have seen that we cannot trust management to come up with their own rest and duty regs, because especially in these times when all management seems to be focused on "short term get me my bonus management styles", we'll see them go for the cheapest possible solution, to hell with how unsustainable it is.