Seven U.S. airlines have filed an appeal to stop new Federal Aviation Administration rules that more strictly regulate the quality of rest crews get on ultra-long flights. As the debate on whether or not the proposed rules are legitimate, some historical perspective might shed some insight.
The FAA wants crews on aircraft that fly non-stop 14 hours or more to have separate rest areas. It also wants to put more pilots on those airplanes.
The landscape is laced with examples of crew fatigue contributing to accidents. Some of the flights were short-hauls, other transoceanic sojourns. Regardless, the common contributor in the crashes was fatigue.
Consider two of the more prominent accidents:
- June 1, 1999, American Airlines Flight 1420 from Dallas/Fort Worth to Little Rock crashed on landing in bad weather, killing the captain and ten passengers. The MD-82 was destroyed. On the cockpit voice recorder, shortly before the crash, the captain tells his first officer, “This is a can of worms.” A bit later—in searching out the runway—the first officer tells the captain, “We’re way off.” The captain replies, “I can’t see it.” Seconds later, the first officer says, “We’re sliding.” Then, the first sound of im pact. The National Transportation Safety Board www.ntsb.gov concluded that, “Contributing to the accident were the flight crew’s impaired performance resulting from fatigue;”
- August 6, 1997, Korean Air Flight 801 from Seoul to Guam crashed on landing in bad weather, killing 228. The well-respected captain of the 747—recipient of an earlier safety award for his airmanship—was in need of real rest. NTSB says the pilot’s fatigue contributed to the accident.
While it’s important to differentiate between “duty-time” issues (which contributed to these accidents), and crew rest accommodations on board aircraft, the fact remains that fatigue can be deadly.
In their lawsuit, the airlines contend that there’s no “conclusive evidence” that the older crew rest provisions which the new rules seek to replace contribute to fatigue or hurt safety.
Underpinning the carriers’ opposition to FAA’s new rule is money. Cash-strapped carriers, not yet recovered from last summer’s staggering fuel bills, say there are “significant costs” entailed in—among other things—fitting more airliners with crew-rest areas.
© Cheapflights Ltd Jerry Chandler
