Originally Posted by
Oberon
This is not a "knee-jerk reaction". NASA did the study years ago, and by all accounts the data suggests that short naps improve pilot performance. We're talking about a 10-20 minute nap in cruise while the other pilot is monitoring and an alarm is set. This could be done with a kitchen timer.
It's a safety issue. For the price of a kitchen timer safety could be significantly improved. It doesn't mean that new duty time rules aren't required, but it would supplement them. No matter how the rules are changed there will be times when a short nap would be beneficial. I would like to have a procedure where I could take a nap legally in order to improve performance.
As a side note, this is not a case were a little is good and more is better. Once you enter the REM phase of sleep it is much more difficult to awaken and you will not feel as rested. All of us has experienced this at one time or another when we fall asleep for 45 minutes or an hour and have to wake up. You may feel disoriented and it takes a long time to feel rested, this would not be good and is why it's important to put an alarm in the cockpit.
It actually is a knee jerk reaction from the media. Before this report did you see or read about napping in flight studies? But that wasn't my point. While fatigue is a major issues that needs to be dealt with, I wasn't making a statement pro or con about napping in flight. I'm merely observing we are going down a road where every incident induces a rush to make rules to "fix" what just happend and armed in some cases with purely speculation.
For instance we had an FO who applied electical and hydrolic power to an aircraft that MX had left its gear handle up without doing an acceptance check. Most of us saw the pictures. Now our manuals are innundated with notes to make sure the gear handle is up. We don't need to be told that having the gear handle up on the ground is bad, I sure hope we all have the common sense to understand that. We just need to do our jobs correctly. Same thing with the Northwest pilots.