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Insufficient Sleep And Low Pay Might Affect Pilot Safety At Regional Airlines

Insufficient Sleep And Low Pay Might Affect Pilot Safety At Regional Airlines

Old May 16, 2009, 11:34 pm
  #1  
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Insufficient Sleep And Low Pay Might Affect Pilot Safety At Regional Airlines

After reading the following article, I shudder at the thought of having both a captain and a co-pilot dozing off at the same time. And not being able to afford nutritious foods, and the audacity "the airlines charge crews for bags of peanuts and cheese and crackers."

"But of the six scheduled passenger flights that have crashed since Sept. 11, 2001, only one has been from a major carrier. Four, including the one in Buffalo, were commuter flights; a total of 133 people died on those flights. (The fifth, a 50-year-old seaplane in Miami, was in neither category.)

And one of the worries about commuter pilots, fatigue, is also a problem for the mainline carriers; in fact, in some operations, the big airlines are more vulnerable. They are now conducting flights of 16 hours, across more time zones than a pilot can be expected to adapt to.

Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, who is chairman of the subcommittee on aviation, said Thursday that the group would hold a series of hearings next month. He said he was stunned by the Buffalo crews lack of sleep and relative inexperience.

We need to understand, is this an aberration, or are standards sufficiently lax or insufficient, or insufficiently enforced that we need to be concerned about a much broader set of issues? he said."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/ny...agewanted=1&hp
Coralreef Lover is offline  
Old May 16, 2009, 11:39 pm
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Don't you think it's odd that the only time we care about employee health and working conditions in the US is when they affect someone else's safety?
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Old May 17, 2009, 6:15 am
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Originally Posted by whirledtraveler
Don't you think it's odd that the only time we care about employee health and working conditions in the US is when they affect someone else's safety?
It is part of the mindset that has us running at a frantic pace from one preventable crisis to the next.
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Old May 17, 2009, 9:28 am
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Originally Posted by whirledtraveler
Don't you think it's odd that the only time we care about employee health and working conditions in the US is when they affect someone else's safety?
It's the entire aviation model of "tombstone technology," where the FAA will only do something when something falls out of the sky.

That said, Colgan 3407 will do little, if anything, to change the aviation set-up. Congress will kick up some dust, airline people with impressive business cards will say it will cost passengers more money to enact what Congress wants done, people will be angry and resist, Congress will then let it go quietly. Rinse and repeat.

There might be some new de-icing protocol that might be set up, but in the big picture, and I don't say this to be cruel, but it's going to take a lot more than 50 bodybags to change things with the FAA and the airlines.
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Old May 17, 2009, 1:23 pm
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I see many of those pilots and crews daily. They carry their meals with them, canned goods and live in crash pads in many cities if they are on call. They are paying off college, flight school, car loans, etc and they make very little money after those expenses. We have many non-rev crews trying to get to their airports daily where they can't afford to live. Some can afford a crash pad shared by many others but some can't. They have to commute. They also get mad at pax that piss and moan about paying for luggage, tickets etc when they never see increases but decreases in their pay. Just another side of the coin.
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