Does Falling Asleep at the Controls Make You a Bad Pilot?

Delta 767 and Greek F-16s in formation.

Not necessarily, though it might very well make you a dead pilot if you were in a single pilot aircraft such as an F-16 or Cessna. But as far as airliners go, if the pilots take a snooze at altitude with the autopilot flying, the airplane stays on course and airspeed. Falling asleep is a physiological incident which can be due to many different reasons, but one thing it is not, is a moral failing. Let me explain.

In a recent event over Greek airspace, a Delta Airlines 767 flying a charter for the US military entered Greek airspace and did not check in with air traffic control. The Greeks then launched two F-16s which intercepted the airliner about 40 minutes after it entered into Greek airspace. Shortly after the intercept, the aircraft reestablished communications with air traffic control and proceded onto its destination of Kuwait.

There have been some unsubstantiated reports in Greek media that the fighter pilots saw the airline pilots unresponsive in their seats. The reports also claim that it was calls from the flight attendants who noticed the intercept which alerted the pilots to the situation.

Delta, for its part, reported that the aircraft couldn't make contact with Greek controllers after their handoff from a previous sector. That's plausible, though losing communications in an extremely busy part of the world for 40 minutes does seem unlikely. Maybe 5 or 10, but 40 is more difficult to swallow.

They Want You to Lose Communication

A little known fact is that many jurisdictions around the world actually love it when an airliner from a wealthy nation flies into their airspace without making contact. They then get to launch an intercept or search and rescue (SAR) forces and then send the bill to whoever has the deepest pockets. That would be Delta and the US government in this case.

Notice that it only took 18 minutes from the time the airliner entered Greek airspace to the launch of the fighters. There are rumors around that Greece itself is in some financial straits. They're smelling a payday. Sure there are legitimate reasons to intercept a comm-out airliner in today's crazy terrorist besotted world, but money also makes a good motivator as well. Win-win I suppose.

At any rate, any pilots worth their salt flying in this part of the world must know that going comm-out while crossing a flight identification region (FIR) boundary while bound for the Middle East will not be good.

So what other reason might there be?

They Were Snoozing (Maybe)

The nature of this job is many days and time zones away from home, back side of the clock flying, lousy diet, and hotel beds which only get the straw changed every other year. I jest about the straw beds, but I often feel like I've slept on one as my back will let me know when trying to roll out of bed. 

My point is that getting a reasonable amount of sleep on the road is a serious challenge, and that is if everything goes right. A noisy or inop air conditioner, maids knocking on the door early in the morning after a late night arrival or my personal favorite, hammer drills in a nearby room from construction crews can make a good night of sleep nearly impossible.

Even though most airlines have good fatigue policies which allow pilots to decline a flight with no sanction, there is no guarantee that halfway through a flight which you felt fine to start that you won't simply find it impossible to keep your eyes open. This can be in the middle of the day, perhaps right after lunch while sitting on the sunny side of the jet.

Do you do what you can to prevent this? Sure. Get up and stretch, get a cup of coffee, or take a restroom break. Even after all that you might still be droopy. So it is by far from implausible that this happened to both of the guys or gals up front.

Are They in Trouble?

No, they are not. As I mentioned above, falling asleep is a physiological incident and not a moral failing. There will be no scene from 12 O'clock High with Gregory Peck chewing out a guard who has fallen asleep at his post. What will happen is the crew will fill out various safety and fatigue reports (if that indeed is what happened) and life will go on. And if it was merely a case of lost comm, mostly the same thing will happen.

Their reports will go into a safety database where de-identified safety data will hopefully guide any policy changes which need to be made. Yea, that may be somewhat idealistic, but the point is the crew will live to fly another day.

And as I always brief to my copilots, I never want to wake up and find them sleeping! (Just kidding!)

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

Have you ever been on a flight where everything just seems to be going wrong before takeoff? You think you’re going and then you’re not. There’s a problem. Then the problem is fixed and you're going again. Then there’s another problem and you’re not going. And it goes on like this for a while until either you end up finally going hours late or the flight is cancelled.

As frustrating as such a scenario is for you, it’s equally if not more so for the crew. Even though it may not always seem that way, no one wants to get you where you are going more than the crew on your airplane. In most cases, the cause for the problem is out of their hands but they are the ones left trying to make it all come together while not running afoul of the myriad rules thrown in the way.

Let me tell you a story about what happened recently to a friend of mine at another airline while trying to get the job done amidst a raft of problems. He’d like to stay anonymous for obvious reasons so let’s just call him Rob Joe. The trip started out somewhere in the Midwest and was scheduled to pass through LaGuardia and then Atlanta before finishing in Chicago. Both LaGuardia and Atlanta are known for delays so Joe was hopeful that the day would go smoothly, but realistic in his expectation that it would not. He was not disappointed.

La Guardia is Another Word for Hell

LaGuardia is a hopelessly congested airport.  Even though it is slot controlled, meaning that there are restrictions on how many airplanes are allowed to land, someone must have paid someone off so that on any given day a line of 30 or more airplanes waiting to take off is the usual order of business. This day was no different. A departure rate of one takeoff every two minutes meant an hour delay from pushback to takeoff.

Well there was no worry because such delays have already been baked into the cake with a padded schedule and extra fuel on board for the wait. But, as the company had planned the flight for only a 30 minute delay, the actual hour that it took put them 30 minutes behind.

The arrival into Atlanta was busy but uneventful. Rain showers had been predicted but held off. The flight to Chicago was the last leg of the day and so far it looked like the flight might be only slightly delayed due to LaGuardia. Pushing back with a full airplane,  Joe elected to taxi out on one engine to save some fuel. The second one would be started a few minutes prior to takeoff.

Here’s where it started getting weird. There is an uphill grade on the taxiway leading to Atlanta’s runway 26 Left, the takeoff runway that day. There’s also a restriction on the maximum thrust allowed during single engine taxi so as not to blow anything over with jet blast. Unfortunately, that setting was too low to get the full airplane up the slope so Joe directed his copilot to start the other engine.

Just then, another airplane reported that they had hit a bird on takeoff, suspected some engine damage, and were returning to the airport. This meant that the runway was shut down until ground operations could send someone out in a truck to inspect the runway for bird or airplane parts. This meant more delay and with two engines now running it might mean a return to the gate to get more fuel if the delay was extensive. So Joe shut an engine down again to wait.

It Won't Start

After about a half hour and the removal of bird remains, the runway was opened and the conga line started moving again. As he approached the runway, Joe again asked for the second engine to be started. His copilot dutifully turned the switch…and nothing happened. The engine wouldn’t start. It wouldn’t even turn over. They checked for popped circuit breakers and rechecked that the engine was receiving starter air which it was. Everything was in order but it just wasn’t happening.

This meant a gate return. On the taxi trip back in they tried it one more time and of course it turned right over, but after any anomaly like that, a mechanic needs to inspect the engine. The mechanic was waiting at the gate and had a good idea that the pneumatic start valve was sticking, which it was. When Joe asked how long for the repair, to his surprise the mechanic said 10 or 15 minutes.

And he was right. It only took a very short time to fix the motor. In the meantime, though, the air-conditioning had to be off while the mechanics worked on the air system. The poor passengers were cooking in the Georgia summer heat. Ground air was hooked up but it was no match for the Southern cooking they were experiencing.

A New Problem

Soon enough, though, the plane was fixed and they were ready to go. Except for one new problem. The pilots were about to go illegal. With their original day scheduled at about 8 hours of flying, the delays had taken them close to going over 9 hours of actual flying or “block” time.

New rest regulations passed by Congress in the wake of a regional airline crash a few years ago now mandated maximum flight hours regardless of either how the pilots felt or any delay status. Under the old rules, pilots could finish a trip if the trip had been planned to be under the limit but exceeded them due to delays. Legal to start meant legal to finish. The new rules now allowed for no exceptions regardless of how the pilots felt. And they felt fine but it didn't matter.

Given the amount of time they already had on the clock, they were allowed exactly 19 minutes to get airborne or by law they'd have to taxi back to the gate. A truly tall order in Atlanta. Well they pushed back and taxied out to find only a few airplanes in front of them. But as luck would have it, another airplane had a problem and needed to go back to the gate. This caused more delay. As the clock clicked through 17 and then 18 minutes, the other plane cleared the runway. As Joe taxied over the runway threshold, the clock showed 19 minutes. It looked like they'd make it. Or so they thought.

You Are in Violation

Well they did take off and flew uneventfully up to Chicago. Upon landing, though, there was a phone message waiting for Joe to call scheduling. The scheduler informed him that he had taken 20 and not 19 minutes to takeoff and was therefore in violation of Federal Aviation Regulations. A criminal. This made him subject to enforcement action by the FAA, and the airline. That meant potential investigations, lawyers, and fines.

See, the onboard clock doesn't log the airplane airborne until the wheels leave the ground and the weight on wheels switch is triggered. It must've clicked over to 20 minutes sometime during the takeoff roll.

The scheduler advised Joe and his copilot to fill out a special safety form which under certain circumstances can provide immunity from punitive actions. The idea is that people won't be forthcoming with safety information if they are under threat of prosecution. So that's what they did. As of this writing, they haven't heard anything back and may be in the clear, but won't be sure for some time. The wheels of justice turn slowly but inevitably.

A Cynic is Born

If you've ever wondered why airline employees might seem just a bit grumpy at times, perhaps this little tale will help you to understand. Those who lean forward to make it all work can at times end up walking into a propeller as reward for their efforts. Should that happen too many times, you might find people who don't lean so far the next time around.

Joe and his copilot discussed calling it quits before going but just thought that the poor folks in back had had enough. The copilot even lived in Atlanta and therefore had extra incentive to call it a day. Heck, Atlanta is a crew base for Joe's airline so they would've been easily replaced...after another two hour delay getting reserves to the airport.

Well it all ended happily (I think), and 139 good folks got to their homes and/or meetings or weddings, or wherever they were going albeit a few hours late. That's what it's really all about.

The Pilot Shortage Meets Econ 101

As the current pilot shortage worsens, two of the players, commuter airline managements and labor unions are turning up the rhetoric on what is actually happening and who is to blame. A recent article in Business Journals placed the blame squarely on "miserly airlines":

The nation's big airlines want you to know that there's a dreadful pilot shortage and they apologize profusely if their commuter-carrier partners cancel flights to your hometown airport due to the debilitating shortfall. 

The nation's big airlines don't want you to know that their commuter carriers, which operate half of all the nation's commercial flights, often pay pilots so little that it's often financially wiser to drive a truck or flip fast-food burgers than fly a plane.

And in addition, what the author of the article also doesn't want you to know it that he doesn't understand basic precepts of economics (which is kind of embarrassing being a financial reporter).

As we've explained previously, a not insignificant part of the commuter airline pilot's compensation is the flight hours he receives in the course of doing his job. Those highly coveted hours, like passes caught or RBIs for ball players, are the stock and trade of aspiring airline pilots. Without the minimum number of hours required, they cannot even apply to a major airline for a pilot job where the real money is.

In fact, were it not for the quest for flight hours, pilots would never even consider working for the admittedly low wages offered by the smaller cargo and commuter airlines. It is an unstated deal that young pilots stay with commuter airlines only until such time as the pilot gains enough hours to move up to a major airline.

The other half of the equation is that since commuter airline managements know their valued pilot employees have no intentions of making a career at their podunk airline, but are there only to gain hours, there is simply no point in paying any more than is necessary. A basic economic tenet of staying in business is to pay your employees only what it will take to retain them and no more. Not miserly, just common sense. It's not a charity.

Doing that is apparently also some sort of crime according to social justice warriors masquerading as online business 'zine reporters who conflate a profit making enterprise with a social cause.

Normally taking between six and ten years to gain the required hours to join a major airline, commuter airlines might be thought of as a minor league for the major airlines. You may have noticed that minor league baseball doesn't pay much either.

Commuter Airline Managements Have a Problem 

This gentleman's agreement of low wages in exchange for flight hours has now been put in jeopardy by several new government regulations mandating hugely higher hours requirements to even get a commuter pilot job. These flight hours must now be purchased and this raises the entry bar to many tens of thousands of dollars to get that still very low paying job. This effectively destroys the calculus young pilots count on to start their careers.

It also throws a wrench into the business plans of commuter airlines who now complain that they don't have enough pilots to fill their cockpits. Their sweet deal of paying pilots food-stamp qualifying wages is also coming to an end. Pilots will now be required by government regulations to purchase their own hours to qualify for any flying job, and will need to service their flight school loans with higher wages.

This whole process begs the question of why huge numbers of hours are needed to qualify for a major airline job anyway. Around the world there are countries without large commuter airline establishments from which to draw pilots, such as Japan. These countries have what are called ab-initio aviation programs which take a pilot from novice to the right seat of a major airline in about a year with only several hundred hours of intensive instruction.

The US military effectively operates such a program with it's undergraduate pilot training, placing pilots in their 20s with only several hundred hours experience into the cockpits of widebody airliners. If this is the future of US aviation, the commuter airline managements may well have a real problem on their hands. The future may be pilots taking out huge loans for ab-initio programs and leapfrogging commuter airlines straight to a major airline job.

So why don't the 'miserly' commuter airlines simply up the pay of their pilots to attract and retain them in sufficient numbers? It's simple: they can't (and expect to stay in business). Their economic models are built on the assumption of cheap pilot labor and their margins are so thin that increased pilot salaries make them into money losing operations at current fare levels.

So why don't they just raise prices to cover the higher salary costs? A trip back into the Econ 101 textbook reveals that for a demand elasticity curve which is not vertical, a higher price will result in less demand for a given product. In English this means that if the already high price of a commuter flight goes even higher, maybe it'd be easier to just watch the game on TV rather than fly to see it. Or perhaps the businessman doesn't have to attend the meeting in person but rather by Skype. (These are called substitute goods). People will fly less and the business will shrink or cease to exist.

And as airlines must sell their product in prepackaged amounts, (the number of seats on their aircraft), below a certain level of demand, service to a particular city becomes a money loser at any reasonable price. It is well known that smaller aircraft have higher per seat costs to operate, which only makes the problem tougher. Time to sell.

Labor Wakes up on Third Base (And Thinks They Hit a Triple)

Right on cue, labor groups have been crowing that the lack of pilots to staff commuter airlines is just desserts for stingy airlines due not to increased government regulation (which labor itself championed), but rather that managements have paid sub-par wages for too long and pilots just woke up one morning deciding not to take it anymore.

Alpa, the largest airline union, calls the shortage imaginary, instead choosing to call this a pay shortage. Well, semantics aside, if you one day go to the grocery and find that your customarily priced $3 bottle of orange juice suddenly jumped to $12, it is doubtful that your first impulse would be to think that gee, I've been paying too little all these years! No, you'd probably think that an early freeze caused a shortage which caused the price to jump.  

Labor is realizing that a shortage labor-supply mismatch may in fact work out in their favor. That is, in favor of pilots who already have an airline job. The new federal regulations, which quintupled the flight hours needed to get an entry level commercial pilot job, are what's known in economic terms as a barrier to entry. 

Barriers to entry are popular with already established members of a particular profession or business as they serve to limit competition and thereby drive up wages or profits. It's been said that the toughest part of becoming a doctor is getting into medical school and that the difficulty serves only to enhance doctor wages. In fact most professional credentialing has some element of this going on.

The taxi and car-for-hire business is being disrupted to great consternation by mobile-paged car services such as Uber and Lyft. They are being ferociously fought by taxi companies and the urban regulatory bodies which profit through control of outrageously priced medallions or licensing requirements.

So this is all well and good if you already have your airline job and are far enough up the list to avoid a furlough should your airline need to shrink to profitability. No where in any economic text book does it state that any particular service should exist and be generally available to the public at a reasonable price. The commuter airline business model may just find that given current fuel and increased labor costs, the service simply can't be provided as a mass commodity.

One need only think of the fledgling space taxi business. We have the technology to routinely fly passengers into space, but with only the occasional billionaire dilettante as a willing passenger, the demand for space plane pilots is small.

Commuter airlines may shrink into a boutique or air taxi operation for very wealth clients in the model of the current fractional ownership of private aircraft, at least for many smaller cities. That would mean the pilot shortage solves itself on the demand side with commuter pilots being furloughed or shrinkage of the industry through attrition.

The winner in all of this? Well, not the small city customer who, when he can even find a commuter flight, will pay through the nose. And certainly not aspiring pilots who will now need to borrow tens of thousands of dollars just to get their first job. And perhaps not even existing commuter pilots who find their companies shrinking due to decreased demand.

Who wins? Flight schools may see an uptick in students who now have to purchase (at about $120/hr) their experience. Probably lending institutions making loans to these aspiring pilots. And most certainly the politicians who get to claim that they "did something" for the aviation industry.

The New Pilot Rest Regulations Are Making Me Tired

One thing that can be counted on as surely as death and taxes is the unintended consequences of good intentions. I firmly believe in the maxim that no good deed goes unpunished, and an excellent example of this is now on glorious display in the new FAA rest rules for pilots.

As I've mentioned in posts here and here, the decades old rules for determining the rest and duty requirements for airline pilots were recently updated. For years on the most wanted list for aviation safety improvements, the new Part 117 rules, as they're known (named for their subsection in the Code of Federal Regulations), replaced a much simpler set of rules known as the "30 in 7" rule. I say much simpler because 30 in 7 meant just that: 30 flight hours in 7 calendar days. It also included two other easily remembered rules, 100 hours in a month and 1000 hours in a year. Easy to remember, easy to apply.

The new rules as befitting any product of bureaucratic sausage making multiple stakeholder input, now involve complicated charts and tables instead of easy to remember time limits. Also included are rolling windows of 168 hours and 672 hours needed to calculate both flight hour limits and "FDP" or flight duty period limits. This as opposed to just using a week or month as in the old rules. The charts and tables reference your report time translated from where you actually are into your home or "domicile" time, your projected and past duty time, your projected and past flight time and your projected number of flight segments. In short, it's a minefield.

Calculating whether or not you are legally tired per the new rules is guaranteed to put you to sleep as you need to fill out a complicated spreadsheet to figure it all out. This is of course impossible to do as you're pre-flighting your aircraft and checking the weather. The company, realizing this, has installed a convenient software tool you can use right after you wrestle the gate agent away from their computer used to scan boarding passes. Good luck.

The other big change in the rules is that if your schedule was legal when you started your day, you were legal to finish your day regardless of delays (up to a point). The new rules don't allow for such rare occurrences as airport delays, and should a pilot be projected to exceed a time limit due to a departure delay,  he must taxi back to the gate and shut down regardless of how actually tired he may feel.

Remember that any time a pilot really feels fatigued for any reason, all airlines have a no fault fatigue policy whereby the pilot gets replaced and pay protected.

But the last and best unintended consequence of the new rules is that because they give the airline less flexibility to cover the schedule, more pilots have had to have been hired and the schedules that are being written work longer days than I've seen in 24 years. One compromise made in crafting the new rules was to allow an increase in flight time from 8 to 9 hours.

I had one of those days yesterday. Starting out in LAX, we were to fly to Atlanta,  New Orleans and then Chicago. The day was planned for 8:35 of flight time to be done in a duty day of 10:50. When we got to Atlanta, the airport was briefly closed due to a storm which required holding and several runway changes before landing.

Like a freeway jam that persists after an accident is cleared, we were delayed getting airborne again as we waited in the conga line for takeoff for about 45 minutes. These two delays put us within striking distance of our 9 hour flight time limitation.

Upon powering up my cell phone in New Orleans, I got a message from scheduling requesting a call to discuss our time limits. We had flown 6:50 up to that point which left 2:10 hrs left while our flight to Chicago was planned at 2:05. This left us with only 5 minutes of slop before we'd be mandated to strand 143 passengers in New Orleans because the government said we were tired. We both felt fine.

So we blast off and immediately get a reroute due to thunderstorms along the Mississippi valley. No big problem as it only added about 5 minutes additional flying time. I was properly incentivized to be on time as my commute flight home left only an hour after our scheduled arrival and we were late.

In another small favor from the aviation gods, the airport was turned around to allow for a straight-in approach shaving a few precious minutes. Then as per usual when running for a commute flight, our gate was occupied.

This is the cosmic pimp. You might run on time for the whole trip but have to hold out for a gate when it's your own commute home. It's even better if you have to hold out for your own commuter flight, especially if it's the last one of the night.

Then a miracle happened.

We were assigned another nearby open gate. This almost never happens. Moving hundreds of people to a new gate to board usually results in mass chaos and so is rarely done. But I didn't ask twice and drove the beast to the new parking spot having to wait for surprised ramp workers not expecting a jet to appear.

Were phone calls made by our dispatch? There's no way to know but it's certainly plausible.

Then after shutdown, it took several minutes to get an agent to bring the jetway up. In the meantime, the door is still closed meaning our automatic time reporting system is still logging time.

Finally the door gets popped, the ACARS system logs us "in" and what does our accumulated block time read? 2:10 which made our total time for the day right at 9:00. It was the longest amount of flight time I've ever logged in one day in commercial aviation. Another minute would have meant a report to the FAA.

So all's well but you, dear reader, are probably wondering if pilots are now less tired as a result of the new rules. I wouldn't bet on it. During certain irregular operations the 10 hour minimum rest rule (an increase over the previous 8) will help but overall I didn't see a problem that needed fixing.

One change that is for certain is that your flight is now more likely to be cancelled during delays due to your pilot becoming illegal under the new rules regardless of his desire to fly you.

As for me, I never sleep well in hotel rooms so little has changed.