Punkpilot48

What about the Comair or Colgan incident to see what fatigue can do?

Airhoss

ATI has had a couple of severe fatigue induced fatal crashes. The three engine take off at KMCI was another blaring example.

https://aviation-safety.net/database...?id=19950216-0

IHateYou

According to the owl on here that posted, as long as you run for exercise or drink beer at 7 am before driving kids to school, then fatigue will not be present. You will be soundly rested and defy human biology. If only the Colgan crew knew that.

duvie

There’s a possibility the user whose story is in doubt is in fact very real. Most of us have flown with pilots who handle fatigue very differently from one another. So, extrapolate that and there are going to be outlier pilots who can do the freight-dog hub-turn life without consequences. I think the reasonable argument is that those people are fairly few and far between.

One of my best friends flies for FedEx and the amount of soft time and benefits he gets versus a legacy passenger carrier are pretty incredible. He commutes and bids seven day trips with deadheads on either side and a weekend layover; the result is that he is only actually flying about 8 to 10 days a month and can use his travel bank to create a PS commute to and from home. He flies the 767 and although he does not do too many hub-turns, he often flies at a different time of the day/night every day of his trip and feels pretty beat up for at least one or two days at home.

Comparing apples to apples, the narrow/mid body flying at a passenger legacy probably has about 15% of its total block hours at night, maybe less (San Francisco as an extreme example will have about half the pairings with an all night segment. On the 737 maybe 10% have two all night segments in a four-day trip and the union general pushes back against the company when they see those pairings. What this means is that for those who fly ANF trips, one of their four days is that night, but over half the pairings have no night flying at all). Saying that FedEx has plenty a day flying, may mean that 25% of trips have no night flying. But that means 75% have night flying, and to be honest and realistic, I would bet at least 40% are exclusively night flying, many of which are hub turns which are far more brutal than a single leg all-nighter.

FedEx is an absolutely amazing job for certain people, but your lifestyle is going to be fairly different than a legacy passenger pilot. Anybody who tells you differently, is either ill-acquainted or not being totally truthful

oldmako

The Colgan "accident" had a lot more to do with incompetence than it did fatigue. If well rested, the accident would have likely just occurred at some other place on some other day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khFbqsVgr6I

PotatoChip

100% accurate.

Larry in TN

We're talking about night freight schedules.

OOfff

No matter how much of an outlier, nobody is immune to fatigue after being up for 25 hours, regardless of how much they run

IHateYou

Nobody is immune to fatigue. Nobody. He may be able to do that here and there with little impact but he said he does it every week. It’s impossible he’s not fatigued. It’s biologically not possible.

duvie

For the sake of truthful discussion (which is why we’re all here):

A. In a world of 7 billion people, there are people who are immune to fatigue at 25 hours. Like a lithium battery vs nicad, at some point every human will run out of juice, but the performance diminishment isn’t linear for everyone and the time to exhaustion is also different.

B. He is probably more diminished than he realizes, but (if real) maybe at 25 hrs he is like most of us at 16 hrs. We don’t know.

C. His type of schedule wouldn’t not be healthy for 99% of us.

D. I personally am happy only flying a couple red-eyes a month. I fall somewhere right under the fat part of the bell curve as far as fatigue performance degradation goes