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| from the newswire this p.m.: WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Pilots, lawmakers and safety investigators Tuesday pressed the government to issue new pilot flight and duty hours, saying current regulations allowed develop potentially dangerous levels of fatigue to develop. Pilot fatigue has been cited as a factor in several air crashes in recent years. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is also reviewing fatigue as a factor in the crash landing of an American Airlines MD-80 in June this year at Little Rock Airport in Arkansas, in which 11 people were killed. Duane Woerth, president of the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) told a congressional hearing that his union received daily reports of scheduling that caused pilots to be ``virtual zombies'' by the end of the day. The NTSB told the House Transportation aviation subcommittee that it had first mentioned pilot fatigue in 1972 and the issue had been on its most wanted safety improvement list since 1990. The Federal Aviation Administration, which issued proposals for new pilots hours in 1995 but failed to get industry agreement, now plans to issue a new version of its proposals next year. Current regulations limit flying in any 24-hour period according to how much rest a pilot has had in the 24 hours up to completion of a flight. Within a 100 hour-a-month limit, a pilot can fly eight hours a day with 10 consecutive hours of rest or fly more than nine hours with 11 hours of rest. But the regulations make no allowance for actual duty time, which can be much longer, or the effects on pilots working during their natural sleep period due to overnight work or long-distance flights across many time zones. ``It is frustrating to be here today to discuss an issue that the safety board has discussed in safety recommendations over and over again,'' said Vernon Ellingstad, director of research and engineering at the NTSB. Ellingstand said fatigue was listed as a contributing cause of a nonfatal 1993 crash at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba of a DC-8 freighter. Lack of crew rest was also cited in another DC-8 crash that killed three people on takeoff from Kansas City Airport in 1995. Ellingstad said initial indications were that the pilots in the Little Rock crash in June had flown slightly less than eight hours but had been on duty for slightly more than 13 hours the day of the accident. The first officer, who survived the crash, was awake for 16.5 hours on the accident day and had about 9.5 hours of sleep the night before. Major airlines, represented by the Air Transport Association, cautioned against ill-considered changes to the current rules based on opinion rather than yet-to-be-done scientific analysis. ``There has never been a scheduled commercial airline accident attributed to pilot fatigue -- not one, not ever,'' said ATA senior vice president John Meenan. Pilots were highly trained professionals who worked 13 to 15 days a month on average, Meenan said, it was ``absurd'' to suggest they would show up for work sleepy and endanger their own lives and those of passengers. The ATA's position was attacked by several lawmakers. ''Fatigue never shows up in autopsies,'' said Minnesota Democrat Jim Oberstar. Oregon Democrat Peter DeFazio quizzed Meenan at length on whether a pilot could expect to get a full eight hours sleep if that eight hours included time to get to and from an airport hotel, food and bathing. The FAA, working with research done by NASA, has previously proposed 14 hours of scheduled duty including 10 hours of flying, and 10 hours of scheduled rest. --------------------------------------------
Strikemama- That is an excellent report.
For the ATA spokesman to have uttered such garbage |
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