Originally Posted by
ToiletDuck
The $50,000 question is why does anything need to be done when there are perfectly good rules in place that already protect a pilot? I guess the only thing I've thought was BS was the min of 8hrs. Bump it to 9 and call it a day. Most of the fatigue related incidents were because of bad decisions made by the pilots. Laws can't fix that. You can take a horse to water but you can't force him to drink. All a pilot has to do is pickup the phone and say "I'm fatigued" and it's a done deal. I've never called fatigue but we have called and had departures pushed back an extra hour or two and it didn't take much effort.
Clearly you're looking at it from a management perspective and not a pilot perspective. The science has proven that performance is severely degraded upon reaching 16-17 hours time since awake. So now you have to factor trip/line construction, commuting, layovers, among others. A lot of you guys think is just a matter of 16 hours duty and 8 hour min rest, that's just the tip of the spear. ALPA, the FAA, the NTSB, the JAA have all been looking at this issue for many years. So please don't be offended if I weight their scientific and practical opinion over that of an f/o with limited experience in the matter.
Reform needs to happen, but many folks on this site are just concerned about how it's going to affect their paycheck, putting safety at the bottom of the list. While there is an element of pilot responsibility in this whole equation, the current rules allow even the "best" companies to create schedules and push pilots beyond the safety boundaries. Schedules and seniority varies among the folks on this site, but be mindful that most of us have been subject to flying fatigue at one point or another.
So I'll ask this question of you and anyone else brave enough to answer. If you were walking your family to the airplane, and you suddenly find out that the two guys "driving the tube" only slept 4-5 hours the night before, would you still let your family board that aircraft???