What a shame:
Oops:
Aviation analyst Alex Macheras also posted about the event on Twitter, calling it “deeply concerning”. He also blamed pilot fatigue for it.
Really? I thought pilots were on super strict restrictions about how long they could fly precisely to avoid fatigue.
I suppose they could have stayed up all night binging “Stranger Things”.
Heheheh. Love it!
Wow, overshot the landing by over two hours. That beats the guys who overshot Minneapolis during a commercial flight thirteen years ago. Those dudes woke up over Eau Claire, Wisconsin, so (given approach descent time) they must have been asleep about an hour.
Fatigue rules are a very blunt instrument that offer no guarantee of preventing fatigue.
That was two hours on the ground. They got woken up by the autopilot disconnecting as they reached the end of their flight plan, so minimal overshoot.
@LSLGuy, is autopilot disconnect how the B737 handles this scenario?
Well…ISTM the rules are that they will never fly more than (say) eight hours. Any human considered healthy enough to fly a plane can be expected to stay awake for eight hours. Even adding in getting to the airport and pre-flight and so on and I think that is well within reason of not enough time to be fatigued.
If a pilot stayed up all night for reasons of their own, that cannot be helped but I don’t think the job is putting an undue burden on them. I suspect the main thing is boredom when flying. Once the plane is aloft, on course and on autopilot I suspect the pilots can get drowsy out of sheer boredom. 100% WAG on my part.
It’s not that simple. It’s a lot more than eight hours and a big factor is the time of day you are working and how the shift pattern works. Also some people are naturally more alert at certain times of the day than other people (night owl vs lark) and will be affected differently by different shift patterns.
My previous employer could roster us four nights in a row, total of 40 hours, max of 11 hours in any one duty but we could extend to complete a duty.
So imagine starting work at 7pm, fly four sectors, finish around 5am, in bed at 6am with the sun up. Rest of the family is up and about because they’ve got school, daycare, etc. You are tired but not sleepy because your body actually wants to be awake right now. You manage to sleep for 3 hours, get up around lunch time, eat a bit, then try to get back to sleep. Again you’re very tired but not sleepy because it’s the wrong time of day. A few more hours sleep. Get up, more food, back to work.
Do that four nights in a row and see how you feel. You basically end up jet lagged without having gone anywhere. Every single pilot struggled with it, but it was all perfectly legal.
When your FO is nodding off on short final, it’s not a problem of being bored.
That’s not to say that these guys were dealing with this kind of situation, I’m just showing that the flight and duty rules are a very poor tool for battling fatigue and just being rostered correctly guarantees nothing.
Sleeping on the flight deck is not necessarily a bad thing provided you have procedures in place to prevent both from falling asleep. Controlled rest during the cruise is a good way of ensuring you are alert for the busier descent, approach and landing.
At my current employer I can’t be rostered for that consecutive back of the clock stuff. Different commercial requirements, stronger union, different regulatory requirements.
ETA: Hey, I simulposted with @Richard_Pearse immediately above just now, despite us being on opposite sides of the planet. How appropriate for contents of these two posts.
As originally posted …
As to @Whack-a-Mole’s news cite of sleeping pilots, note that was Ethiopian Airlines. The same scurvy outfit that crashed a MAX two weeks after everybody everywhere knew what to look out for and the convenient switches to stop it cold.
As to the Minneapolis folks mentioned by @JKellyMap, those were US major airline pilots, but not asleep. Just lost in playing with their then-shiny new company tablets and company software. Still damned stupid, but a different sort of stupid.
@Richard_Pearse. Heck if I know for sure. The autopilot actually disconnecting leaving the airplane unmanaged would be a surprising result to me.
Off top of my head I’d expect the lateral and vertical nav functions of the FMS system to go invalid at the end of the planned route = the target runway, but I’d expect the autopilot / flight director system to simply remain functioning in a heading or track hold mode laterally and altitude hold mode vertically after the nav solution ended. We have a procedures trainer app on our tablet that’s pretty decent, but of dubious fidelity in the oddball corner cases. In the next while I’ll have time to fiddle with it and see how it reacts to this scenario. Which will be suggestive, not definitive.
It’s not quite that simple. I’ll explain US rules which are not too weird versus industry norms, but are probably different from Ethiopian rules.
We in the US industry can generally have aircraft-in-motion at most 8 hours per shift, but under favorable circumstances it can be 9 hours. As a separate matter we can be continuously at work planned for up to 14 hours in a shift that can be extended to 16 hours. Those are the base cases. It gets tax-code complicated after that, but let’s just run with these two rules: 8 hours in motion during a maximum 14 hours on-shift.
I’m typing this riding in the back of a 737. Here’s my rather typical shift / workday today, selected for me at random yesterday by HQ for our collective enjoyment. Which day is conveniently all in one timezone and all in one calendar day, so no conversions are necessary.
This morning I woke up at home at 0445 to get clean, dressed, & fed. I left the house at 0615 & drove to work. I parked the car, took the van to the terminal, walked to the gate, and clocked in for work there at 0710, prepped the flight, & we pushed back the first flight on time at 0825. We got to the destination at 1030. So by then I’d flown 2:05 but been on-shift for 3:20 and had been up 5:45.
We then deboard the airplane which takes about 15 minutes, then we hung around the airport another 1:15, wasting time & eating an early lunch. So 75 minutes’ break between actively working job tasks, but 100% still at work. Then at 1210 we started prepping for the next flight, pushed back at 1310, and arrived at 1500 for 1:50 flight time. Now we’ve flown 3:55 total and I’ve been at work for 7:50 and awake for 10:15.
We once again deboard for 15 minutes then hang around this other airport another 1:15 minutes wasting time & eating an early dinner. I actually am riding on this last flight but I could have flown it instead. Assuming I really did work it the rest of my day would’ve looked like this:
Then at 1640 we started prepping for the next flight, pushed back at 1740, and will arrive at 2045 for a flight time of 3:05. Now we’ll have flown 7:00 total and as we park the jet I’ll have been at work for 13:35 and awake for 16:00.
Then I deboard this jet, go clock out at 2115 having been at work for 14:05, walk & van back to my car, then drive home arriving at about 2230. Home front door to home front door, that was 16:20 for a day’s work.
Now it’s time for bed and get up at 04:45 to be back at work the same time tomorrow to do it again.
That’s a pretty normal length workday. But instead of two 1:15 breaks long enough for a sit-down meal, we more usually have two 15-30 minute breaks just long enough to hike from gate to gate buying a clamshell sandwich along the way to eat during the next flight. The two-ish hours saved midday will instead be spent flying another fourth flight, or the other 3 will be a bit longer.
To be sure, the driving to and fro isn’t work. Nor is the daily shit, shower, and shave. But it still adds up to duration awake. The critical last landing occurs about 15:30 after I woke up. That’s not in any sense unusual, whether the workday started in a hotel or at home.
Now do 2 days on this schedule, then the next day arrive at work at 4pm, push back at 5pm, and fly 2 hops until 3am. Good luck sleeping all afternoon on that third day to be freshly awake when it’s time to get clean, dressed & go to work. More likely you “slept in” until 0600 then got a 90 minute - 2 hour nap in the early afternoon before dressing to go. Or maybe the nap didn’t happen.
Some folks can adapt to this. Some can’t. But adequate rest is always a struggle in this 24/7 time-zone spanning business.
And that’s before we get into rampant regulatory cheating that occurs in some parts of the world (though not here that I’ve ever seen), folks who spend their off time drinking, chasing, SDMBing, or whatever instead of sleeping, etc.
I and the rest of the culture have no patience for folks who get tired enough to be sloppy or nodding off or worse yet falling hard asleep. But for damn sure it's easy to get drug out with day after day of this stuff. Sometimes the job is so easy it's silly. Other times it'll kick a young person's ass, much less what it'll do to a 60-something like me.
Maybe the Ethiopian airline should have a dog in the jump seat.
Really appreciate your contributions, as well as @Richard_Pearse , @Llama_Llogophile , and @Sam_Stone . Very edifying to this guy in the back!
Sorry, what? I nodded off there for a bit. 
Edit: I’ll also add briefly that when it comes to fatigue, pilots can and should make the call themselves. Meaning, even if you do get the mandated rest, if you feel like crap you’re supposed to say so. A good company will say nothing but, “OK”, even if it screws up every piece of logistics.
I’ve done it once in my career. Should have done it on a couple of other occasions, but didn’t. Fatigue is insidious.
Just a general “thanks” from someone who has interest but no knowledge.
Missed the 
. Carry on!
Are you a charter pilot, or do you have a specific client? Lots of kerfluffle about PJs this last week, but if I had the money I might splurge and try to offset if that’s even possible.
Yes, I fly charter. Used to fly for a regional airline, but I’m now on my third charter company.
I read just a little of the reporting about private jets last week. Someone pointed out that those really short flights that drew some attention were probably “re-position” legs, not someone taking a private jet to go the city next door. I’ll explain…
Say you’re Taylor Swift and you own Gulfstream or a Challenger jet. When you’re not using it you may choose to use it for charter. This involves complying with more complex regulations than mere private use, and you may engage a separate company to provide pilots, maintenance, etc.
Anyway, let’s say I’m a charter pilot for that third party company. I take the plane on a day you, Ms. Swift, have a a few days off. It happens to be at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, and someone has chartered it for a flight out of White Plains, NY. So I fly it empty to White Plains (call it a 20-minute hop), then take on passengers and fly them to, say, West Palm Beach. They leave, and it turns out my passengers for the following day are going from Boca Raton to Chicago Midway. So either that day, or the following morning, I have to move the plane empty to Boca.
So if someone follows all of this on FlightAware (assuming the tail number hasn’t been blocked) they see several long-ish flights interspersed with some really short ones. That’s normal scheduling in my world.
From the pilot POV, I initially found that hard to get used to. Flying a jet on a short hop of ten minutes or so is harder than a “normal” flight. All the typical steps are compressed into a very quick time period. I’ve had flights that went like this:
“Positive rate, gear up”
“Runway in sight, cancel IFR, before landing checklist”
Believe me, you’d better have prepared for a hop like that. I found it challenging at first, having never done that sort of repo as an airline pilot.
What do you think the fuel burn is on a 10 minute ferry? I think that’s a lot of the uproar. @LSLGuy talked about tons of fuel on a taxi, so even a PJ must burn a bunch on a taxi/ferry/taxi?
Well, there is no such thing as a private jet with a reasonable fuel burn. Private jets are obscene, and while I won’t say they shouldn’t exist, there’s very little excuse for them as a form of private travel.
There is a need for chartered jets - medical transport for patients, transplant organs and the like, and probably some other tasks. So I’m not advocating outlawing them. But my 8-seat jet takes up the same ATC slot that an airliner carrying hundreds of people uses. So while I like my job, I can’t really defend it. Maybe I’m a hypocrite for doing it.
But to answer your question, a short hop in my jet is going to use a few hundred pounds of Jet-A. We can sometimes “fuel through”, meaning we would take enough to reach the repo and the charter destination. But we can’t always land with that big a fuel load, so sometimes we are forced to fuel at both locations.
My shortest flight in a jet: 6 minutes, from Thermal in Palm Springs to Bermuda Dunes (a funky little private strip). At that time I worked for a company that had no provision for flying without an IFR flight plan. I actually called the chief pilot that day, telling him that it was clear and million in the desert there, and the destination was literally next door - was there no exception that would allow us to go VFR?
Nope, came the answer. Had to file and cancel it almost instantly once airborne.
Thanks for the answer. You do your job, and I imagine you do it well. I guess we’ll fly commercial although business class is still brutal climate-wise.
There’s fatigue and then there’s boredom. Imagine sitting in a seat while the plane is flying itself at night. You’re staring into nothing looking at gauges that show the plane is flying normally without much change. Generally pilots are cued to their call sign and will snap out of a lulled state.