Fatigue has been a popular issue among media in recent months, triggered by Colgan Air’s Bombardier Dash 8-Q400 crash in Buffalo, New York earlier this year. Worse yet, the recent Delta/Northwest NW188 flight fiasco only added fuel into this intense speculation.
Airways Aviation News recently talked to an Airbus First Officer (FO) who provided insights that are not publicized.
This Airbus First Officer, who works for a major Asian airline and wishes to remain unidentified due to the private nature of the conversation, admitted that certain pressure has built up on the flight deck crew internationally and a lot of skepticism has been raised following these “fiascoes”.
He kindly dispelled the skepticism raised by the general public if FAA’s call for allowing pilots to take a nap during flights is ridiculous and credited the FAA in adopting such measure which he claimed could improve flight safety.
Image Courtesy of AviationExplorer
“People just think all the pilots are supermen, probably because they watched television programs too frequently in their childhoods… On the contrary, pilots are just human beings,” the pilot conceded.
“I’ve been on a flight from India returning back to our home base in Asia recently. The preparation work began at 0200 in the morning, working through until the plane took off at 5 in the morning.
“Under the effect of time lag, coupled with the east-bound routing of the flight, we were actually chasing the sun and the sun has been shining on my face all the way… I was very tired and essentially liked aliving vampire,” the pilot told Airways Aviation News in his vivid personal recount.
He added that allowing pilots to take a nap alternatively can improve the overall flight safety since the fatigue problem has been resolved.
On the other hand, regarding NW/DL flight 188′s incident in which both the captain and first officer were using their laptops and overflew the flight’s destination, he lamented this incident as the cultural problem in the cockpit.
He pointed out that not every airline has a policy to ban the usage of laptops and when this was the case, the first officers “would follow what their captains did”.
But he nevertheless criticized the pilots of NW188 as “too ridiculous” and unprofessional.