3407 WILL happen again if things don't change
 

I finished a trip late the other night and was going to catch a 6 a.m. flight home so decided to just sleep in the crew room for a few hours before my flight rather than pay for a hotel room for just a few hours. It kind of frightened me to see three other pilots sleeping in the crew room for the night simply for the fact that they did not have crashpads. Some of these pilots were staying in the crewroom on reserve until they got called for trips, which could be days on end. After the Colgan accident it just frightens me that pilots are flying these trips after sleeping on couches for days on end in loud crewrooms with totally improper rest. I can understand it if you do not have to work the following day however to basically make the crewroom your home while on reserve is just plain negligent. I just had to get this off my chest and feel that something DRASTICALLY needs to be done before another acccident occurs that can be associated with fatigue. It's really no secret who I work for and CVG is not an expensive place but I guess it goes to show how little most of us make and the shortcuts we are willing to take to try and make the most for our money.

I totally agree with you, however I hope that "something" won't be a requirement to live within an hour or so of your domicile...

to be quite honest I would probably sleep better in a crew room than I would at some of the crashpads I've been to. as a regional FO I can not afford to pay for a regular hotel room in my domicile 5-10 times per month. I don't lead a glamorous lifestyle by any means. When 3407 happens again the public will likely blame the crew again. But my view is that the crews are not in a position where they can directly do anything to better their circumstances so long as they remain airline employees. Personally I will blame the legislators and rule makers who DO have the power to put regulations in place which make the travelling public safer. To date they have held hearings, but done NOTHING.

At this level, it would take a management team that really knows what it is doing. If a new rule where to be imposed, many of the current organizations would not be able to comply. Who could live in the New York area as a first officer for the pay rates they are offering. I just do not understand why airlines do not offer a domicile cost of living adjustment for basing crews in certain localities. All government jobs take this into account.

On the other hand, living where you want is a big part of what the job offers. It has been like this since the begining of time. I just do not see putting an across the board rule that limits a pilot in residence just because he works for a certain company. Many guys do the right thing, commute to base on time, rested and not living in conditions that would not provide proper rest.

There will be one off's. There will be times when crews will have to remain at the airport...weather, late arrivals, this is to commute back home. It is when the few take this to the other side of the commute in and don't take the steps to get proper rest.

Pay has to be in line at those most expensive bases so that crews can get the rest. But at a job that pays so little, there just isn't a place to be found. That is a tough one. Pilots are creative, but when there is nothing to create with, nothing can be done.

Pay has to come up, it is what it is and if they can not provide for the employees, they just can't provide the safety.

I've heard the FAA is contemplating new checkride standards for regional pilots. Since they are reluctant to solve the problems that they the FAA themselves create, like allowing antiquated and dangerous rest requirements to continue unchanged, the FAA may soon require all regional pilots to perform their checkrides with little or no sleep in the preceding 18 hours.

Theoretically, a pilot will report to a room with a loud T.V. and simulated voices piped in and remain there for 18 hours and then report for their checkride process. Pilots will be allowed short dozing periods, bathroom usage and junk food access, but no meaningful deep sleep can occur.

The FAA believes that simulating checkrides in more relaistic conditions is more beneficial to safety by actually quantifying the performance of a crewmember real-world and is more cost effective then actually forcing the airlines to abide by more modern data-supported rest requirements.

To tighten pilot rest requirements to that of truckers or limiting duty periods to that of air traffic controllers or airline dispatchers is apparently too much to ask, so a cheaper alternative may be coming.

It schould be the responsibility of your company to provide adequate rest and that would mean a HOTEL .
For the life of me I cannot understand why you people put up with this .
Maybe management schould spend the night sleeping in a crew room ? :eek:

Ally

As with just about everything, things change with time. Anything a management team deems not cost effective or expense will be set aside. I can not tell you how many times I have seen this happen. ie. hotel downgrades, time rest periods between trips or the crew meal thing.

Either way, we have airlines being run by accountants, not aviations professionals. Safety comes second to the bottom line in many of these meetings.

It is scary in some instances the disregard, but what do pilots do? They keep moving forward.

What would you have done? Increased pay rates?

We could do that but only if we re-regulated the industry again... Even the current "Let-the-government-run-everything" administration won't touch it, it ain't gonna happen...

So the only thing they can do is to give us more time to rest (in the works) but that's not going to make a huge impact on commuting... The other thing they can do is to force airline employees to be within an hour or so of the airport 12 hours or so before their trip... They can't force people where to live but they can force people to "get plenty of rest" before a trip - in effect, making commuting very hard...

We need to be careful what we're wishing for. :rolleyes:

Pilots will sign crappy contracts and then blame everyone else for there woe's. Until pilots take responsibility, nothing will change.

Hope you are right but the US is very unique when it comes to pilots jumpseating back and forth to work... Most airlines in other countries require their employees to live near a domicile... I fear yet another knee-jerk reaction from our legislators, that's all...

Another take
 

If you have a car accident the insurance company raises your rates ,so if a carrier has an accident and it's found out that said carrier contributed to the accident through various actions than the rates schould go up .
Maybe I,m missing something on all of this .

Ally

Dynasty - does your company pay for your hotel room when you're in your domicile? Let's say you sit reserve and after your shift you want a hotel room instead of going to your house/crashpad... Would they pay for it? After all, the airlines assume you live in your domicile, it's up to you to actually live there or to commute... See my point? The crew room sleepers are often commuters who don't want or can't afford a crashpad.

First off I do not think flight 3407 was caused by fatigue. It was caused by a variety of problems. One of the biggest was a lack of cockpit discipline. They were talking during a phase of flight in which they should have been paying attention. Then, when faced with a stall warning, they responded with a panic response. Maybe they were fatigued and maybe they weren't but fatigue was not, in my opinion, the primary cause of this accident.

I consider this accident to be quite simple (although as usual, there was a 'chain' of events). Divinding it in two, the first question is how did they get to the loss of control and the second is what was done (or not done) to correct it.

Although sterile cockpit procedures were broken, my understanding is that from the time they began configuring for the approach to the activation of the stick shaker, there was relatively little if any violation of sterile cockpit (perhaps a couple of minutes before the shaker). It would seem to me to be a simple lapse of attention at a critical time (no one was truly the "PF" ((pilot flying"). Our beloved god Sully also broke sterile and from my observation jumpseating and flying, perhaps 80% of crews do. I think the first question of how they got there truly had little to do with 'sterile cockpit' in and of itself. Fatigue and illness seemed to play as much or more of role of this first question then sterile cockpit issues.

The second question is the problem, in that the recovery actions were opposite of what was required. That seems a aptitude/training/proficiency issue, but to what degree each on influenced this act may never be accurately determined. Maybe there was something that wasn't identified. Perhaps the captain moved his seat forward for the landing and it didn't latch and slid backwards when he rammed the power levers forward ?

The perfect sterile cockpit in my opinion will likely never be uniformly maintained regardless of this accident. Since then, I've observed no real changes there, yet I see crews not flying exactly to its letter, completely involved with the aircraft they're flying and their situational issues.

Would it really help?
 

How many pilots would sacrifice their time off and commute a day early, even if they were given a free hotel room? I'm guessing "not many", especially if they have several trips per month.

I most certainly would. I would simply leave late in the day and get there at night. I wouldn't be giving up much at home since when I commute to work, I wind up leaving early and therefor going to bed early the night before anyway.

I see your point and I think Fred would agree with what your saying ,I,ll have him read this when he gets back.


Ally

I'm a commuter, and as such am concerned about potential commuting rules. I believe that it would actually be unconstitutional to impose such restrictions on people, because there is no guarantee that a pilot who lives in domicile would get any rest either. You would essentially have to require all pilots to report to company barracks 24 hours prior to duty for "supervised rest".

Also few other groups are required to live in any particular location, generally only military or law enforcement, who are essentially on call 24/7 or need to provide a physical presence in the community.

And I don't think the ATA/RAA is going to back any such rules either. Short-term it might not hurt them but they know that long-term they would have to pay people much more to actually live in high-cost areas. They would also lose the QOL crowd who want to live near mountains, beach, etc...those people tend to be willing to work for less to enable their lifestyle. take that away, and the airlines is just an crappy industry with low pay and no future. Might as well work at the ski lift and be home every night...

I have also asked several feds...sounds like the FAA does not think it is practical either mainly because their rule-making process cannot bleed over into non-aviation areas. Where you live and how you get to work has nothing to do with aviation, so it is beyond their jurisdiction. It would take an act of congress to do something like that.

Note that an employer CAN easily and legally require you to live within a certain distance and some do, for various reasons (most airlines don't for cost reasons). The legal issue come up when the GOVERNMENT attempts to do so. There are many, many safety-sensitive jobs other than pilots and if they don't treat them all the same way it would violate fair-and-equal protections of the constitution.

And I do think we will probably have another colgan-type accident. Whatever they to shut the barn door now will not correct the deficiencies and attitudes of all of those who have slipped into the system. If we have two or three more colgan accidents, the government will have to get draconian...new retroactive standards effective immediately, with a bloodbath of ATP revocations/suspensions.

I agree. For the most part, my commute goes smoothly and Im the most tired commuting home, rather than going to work. What all the "industry people" and regulators are not realizing is that this is a money issue, plain and simple. As commuters we do not choose to avoid hotels just to be stingy, we simply can't afford it. If we made a decent wage, Im quite sure getting a hotel room on our own dime wouldn't be an issue. But our pay cannot be regulated, lest we decide to re-regulate aviation, and mgt certainly won't pay us more out of the goodness of their hearts. So here we are.

AV8OR,
I've worked for two companies that paid for hotels in your domicile and bought tickets from the house to work and back. I've argued with the company about why I had to ride a certain flight to work. "We need to put you in a hotel before you start." "But I'm only going to be on duty for four hours with flights here to there every hour." (Was giving a line check.) "Doesn't matter, get on the flight and go to the hotel." Pilots would call travel at the end of their line and say they want a later flight before they go home so they could hit the hotel after they were done and sleep before they got home - no screaming kids and stuff.

One company added the cost of the hotel and tickets to your income so you were taxed on them, one had a letter that said they did it for the company's convenience. The secret was to bid trips that didn't start in your domicile.

I think the only way they could effectively regulate commuting is if they (Gov or Co.) shut off CASS and/or eliminate the jumpseat. I also think that when the dust settles, it will get swept under the rug and it will be business as usual. Nothing will change.

Check out the September Flying magazine,Page 34.Funny how it's on the same page as "Aftermath".Should Gulfstream be advertising this ?

Here We Go Again
 

Please let us stick to the facts. Never once did the NTSB announce that working for 3M had anything to do with this. ( Does investigated and cleared mean anything). And for the record, you had TWO pilots (1 former GIA/ 1 -1600 hr CFI) that managed to lose control of that aircraft, Back to the issues at hand, that do need to be dealt with so things will get better but nice try at hijacking a thread for your own desires to bash a group of pilots....

I'm a pilot not a legislator. I trust they'd be better at making those types of decisions, but I wouldn't let those clowns fly my plane.

That said, I support full regulation in the form of pay/rest/hotel requirements - OR - Full deregulation in the form of a removal of the RLA which would allow us to effectively protest poor working conditions. Its like a big red cell off your nose, you can go left or right, but going straight is certainly not going to result in a favorable outcome.

The current model however favors only management's interests and is designed to reduce labor costs driving down costs for the consumer. The only way you prevent crew members from sleeping in crew rooms is to provide hotels for them. Raising wages doesn't solve the problem, providing the rooms does a much better job.

In aviation safety should be first, but money first is the status-quo.

Some places you don't have a choice. If you are flying a night trip (starting at an outstation) at UPS, you are required to be there 18 hours prior if you use the company provided ticket or get docked 3 hours of pay.

Accidents will happen again no matter how or what you change. But to blame it on fatigue, I think is wrong. Not being in command of the cockpit, to me, was the reason for the accident, so yes it will happen again. Was the type of stall, if that was the primary cause, easy to recognize? Probably not at night on instruments. Everybody has talked about crap when they legally weren't supposed to, but if it is managed by the pic it will be ok. But your right it will happen again and lots seem to happen at night, so WE need to pay attention.

Yep, we need to pay attention.


But try that on your sixth drink.... or your twentieth hour awake.

Sure maybe this accident wasn't connected with fatigue (highly unlikely) however you can say that about any accident in the past and really the only accidents you could blame 100% on fatigue would be if both pilots fell asleep and crashed. Realistically though if you are commuting from across the country and sleeping in the crew room, followed by a day full of flying you probably are gonna be pretty tired. I'm definitely not against commuting and have been doing it since I was hired, however it just really scares me to see these pilots that are in no way rested sitting in the crew room on reserve just waiting for that call to fly. And if this is happening at one place it's probably happening at many more. I know this will never happen but the best solution would be if airlines could provide hotels in base to commuters since they obviously don't want to pay pilots enough to afford their own accommodations.

It is, what it is...
 

I agree the regionals suck when it comes to compensation and schedules. They always have, and always will. But does that justify saying "I am gonna endanger a flight because my company doesn't give me what I want." We need better compensation yes. We also need professionals making better choices. Commution across the country for a regional job is like a high school kid driving two hundred miles a day to work at a mall. It makes no sense.

Very good point. Fight for better pay and work rules but also maintain your professionalism...because that is what the job calls for, a professional pilot.

Lots of reasons for this accident and no single reason is the ONLY reason. the commonality amongst most aviation accidents is a chain of events or decisions which lead to the accident. In the end this was a pilot error accident, end of story. That is NOT a slam on the pilots. Most accidents are, and accidents happen to high time experienced pilots as well as lower time pilots. Should there be better time and duty limits for passenger operations..probably. Should some companies tighten up their training and recurrent standards...probably. Would higher compensation not allowed this accident to happen.. probably not... lots of well paid pilots commute. Hell years ago the AA crew room in MIA had this large wonderful lazy boys that LOTS of pilots AA and AE alike slept in all night. Would adherence to the sterile cockpit rule have saved this crew... I dont think so. In the best of circumstances ...well rested..well paid...well trained... pilots make errors.... what we can do to at least acknowledge that is to learn from the chain of errors and hope we are never in that situation.

You will never get the accident rate to 0. Its just not possible... airplanes are mechanical and sometime break... and pilots are human and sometimes even against all logic do things they shouldnt.

Follow the money, it is all about profit margins and if they are making the predetermined money, they will pull and go. This goes for all airlines, so check you investors and gauge their return rate expectations. If a group dips into their pocket, plan for the worse. I did not see this the first time it happened, at least during the second go around I was well aware, just didn't think an overnight shutdown would occur.

Get a crash pad. They run about $150/month for your own bed. That 150 bucks isn't going to make or break anyone. The pay is low, but not being fatigued in the cockpit is the first step. That little bit of money will go a long way towards hot showers and a place to relax when in domicile.

9 E Pilots please read and take to heart before voting on the TA

What really has to change is that damned two-tiered system that has evolved in the industry. The codeshares are awarded flying based on a competitive bidding system and once the contract has been signed by the lowest bidder they have to work within that cost structure vs. revenue. Fee-per-departure, EAS, capacity purchase. All of these systems are designed to save money for the mainline, and limit the revenue that the regional codeshare is able to realize for every RPM.
The current business model that ALPA is using is an anachronism that goes back to the pre-deregulation era. Having an association of individual pilot groups with a national office. DOES NOT work for ALL pilots in in the union. I support the union, I am a union member. I think it is time to put more pressure on the union to get this national seniority list protocol done to protect our jobs and wages.
3407 IS going to happen again, and the single-level of safety propoganda that the FAA, ATA, RAA puts out is just that. There is a direct correlation between safety and the amount of money that is being spent. Be it pilot wages, better training, better work rules, etc...Professional attitudes and experience are mutually exclusive. Having a professional attitude and good training will not always make up for a lack of experience. Why is that 1200 hours were required for me to fly checks? Yet, I had 300 hr. F/Os that had never been in Class B airspace and didn't know how to read an arrival chart? Not their fault, just the situation out there as recent as early 2008. These guys and gals were motivated, and a pleasure to teach and fly with, BUT they shouldn't have been put in that position in the first place. Just my opinion.

Regards,

ex-Navy Rotorhead

BINGO! Pilots are all talk. Few will put their money where their mouth is and come in a day early EVEN WITH a FREE hotel room.

Yeah, and your cockpit cohabitant will appreciate the better hygiene :D

It's a tough subject and I don't see any easy solutions to the problems you outlined. I agree with almost everything you've said except your statement above.

Aeroflot pilots had a national seniority list because they only had one airline to choose from. Until ALL airlines merge into one super airline a NSL would never work and personally I hope it'll never happen. This country is speeding in the direction of socialism already, no reason to speed up a potentially disastrous process...

Yea, talk about a problem of "too big to fail"...

How can you honestly make this statement without expecting negative feedback? My grandfather was a pilot for AA and this kind of thing has been happening for well over 60 years. Crewmembers sleeping in the crew lounge is nothing new. It makes me angry that you would start a thread discussing you're concern over people sleeping in the lounge after this has been going on for generations without an accident. I understand you're concern to a point, but to generalize the fact that a crewmember sleeping in the lounge is automatically not well rested and therefore not fit for duty upsets me. I slept in a crew lounge last night. I got well over 8 hours of sleep in a dark and quite room and felt perfectly ready to go when I woke up. The government should not be allowed to regulate every little thing we as commuting pilots do. This kind of thinking is what will screw us all in the long run. Rant ended.