Pilots Are Dying of Tiredness. Tech Can't Save Them
wired.com
wired.com
- At least 9 consecutive hours of rest during the 24-hour period that precedes a flight assignment of less than 8 hours.
- At least 10 consecutive hours of rest during the 24-hour period that precedes a flight assignment of 8-9 hours.
- At least 11 consecutive hours of rest during the 24-hour period that precedes a flight assignment of 9 or more hours.
- At least 24 consecutive hours of rest in any 7 calendar days.
These can be reduced to 8 hours of rest if additional rest is scheduled on the back end.
No pilot may fly more than 1,000 hours a calendar year, 100 hours a calendar month, or 30 hours every 7 days.
I'm not familiar with the rules in the EU or elsewhere in the world.
Getting to a hotel to sleep takes a lot of time even after wheels touch ground - gotta taxi, follow SOPs, pass through security/immigration, travel to the hotel, and then actually fall asleep. Also, repeat in reverse to get back to work.
our brains and bodies are lazy and efficient, do nothing long enough and the instinctive "screensaver timeout" kicks in, and you get bored, then loose alert attention. preventing this from happening for multiple hours is tiring and a skill which means it gets easier to do the more you do it
Or maybe the other way round! Master meditators could be great at piloting as well..
That said, one of the steps in being qualified to fly any given aircraft is having to occasionally get in the simulator and fly a "Kobiyashi Maru" type sequence of multiple compounding emergencies over and over again. You're being graded not just on being able to follow the checklists, but knowing enough about the aircraft to know what to do when multiple systems fail and the checklists contradict each other, or you're in a corner case where following a checklist blindly is a dumb idea.
In cases like these, being able to be calmly present in the moment is a very valuable skill.
Hospitals are chalk-full of surgeons, doctors, and nurses that are all overworked, burned out, and half-awake.
While I do not have the statistics, I would imagine sleep deprivation is a frequent cause of a lot of medical mistakes.
I am also sleep deprived too. ;)
It is “chock full” btw
The long hours themselves aren't the goal, they're a side effect of the artificial barriers put up intended to keep pay high.
Do you have more information on this?
Not my field, but I have a hard time believing surgeons and doctors want to work to the point of burnout.
I did try and find information myself first, googling for things like “Surgeons lobby for longer hours” and “Surgeons lobby for more work” and am not seeing anything remotely like your claim.
Truck drivers have similarly high responsibilities. But it is private industry, and there are strict regulations to prevent tiredness.
If trucking would be state operated, we would get 30 hour driving shifts again!
The reason pilots in the US have very stringent well-followed rules around flight hours and fatigue has more to do with federal regulations being enforced stringently by the FAA. Which is pretty strong evidence that your assertion is baseless. If trucking had a regulator half as strong as the FAA you'd see similar rules around fatigue.
Part of the problem with trucking is more a race to the bottom in the commodity service of moving something from point A to point B. When your pay is directly tied to mileage or to shipment contracts then of course working longer hours produces more mileage or more contracts. Federal regulation actually counteracts this perverse incentive.
If anything medicine in the US needs more regulation of insurance companies and private equity owners of hospital systems. Those are the people who don't want to spend the money to hire enough nurses and hospital staff for every shift. If they raised wages for nursing staff and opened up more nursing schools the shortages would go away.
There are a limited number of seats in medical schools. The medical schools cannot limit these seats themselves, only the authority of the government makes that possible. Given that there is a direct relationship between the number of medical students and the number of future physicians/surgeons, and that there is a direct relationship between the number of physicians and the available physician man-hours, it must be true that government is limiting the number of physician man-hours for hospitals and other medical treatment venues.
If they wanted to increase the supply of the latter, they know or should know how to accomplish that.
Pretending that this is a private industry because there's some thin veneer of privatization is a little weird.
Because you can only see this through the lens of your own politics, you end up very confused. Leverage might make things better for those doctors... but we're not talking about that. We're talking about making things better for the public. A greater supply of doctor hours are needed... no more can be squeezed out of the existing supply of doctors (not even if you paid them more). You start talking about this topic or thinking about it, and your brain goes immediately into the "oh noes, those poor doctors, they need more leverage or something, maybe they need a union!". All I see is that they are overworked because we have a very limited supply of man-hours.
Truly, can you even force your mind to go to a place where you can think about how we might not overwork doctors? Do we just need to use medical treatment less? All those sick people are just greedy, but the doctors have to work 30 hour shifts during residency because they're shackled to the door handles or something?
> If anything the hospitals would be able to demand even more from their staff.
Yes, this would be true to some extent. But that's not the topic of conversation. It's not "how can we arrange these details so that doctors are compensated even more highly than they are now". It's literally "how can we arrange details do doctors aren't working 100 hours a week and killing people when they're falling asleep standing up". You've confused the two things, and you can't even tell. It's bizarre. I live in a world filled with p-zombies, I swear.
Preventing overlong shifts and too many work-hours per week requires regulation. "The market" cannot provide this, unless there would be a miracle of medical staff unionizing to a great degree.
And, in the grand scheme of things, hiring two doctors for 40 hours per week instead of one doctor for 80 hours a week does not change any bottom line. If they pursue the latter over the former, it is because finding any doctors at all to cover shifts is difficult... doctors are in short supply. By design.
I considered this, it just didn't matter.
> In that scenario increasing the number of medical doctors does not help to improve the working situation for them
Again with this nonsense. That wasn't what we were discussing. We didn't start off with "how can we make overworked Indian pilots' lives better". And we didn't end up in "how can we make overworked US medical doctors' lives better".
If there were a solution that made things safer (in either situation) while making the lives of those workers worse somehow, it would be worth discussing because their job performance affects many lives beyond their own.
> Preventing overlong shifts and too many work-hours per week requires regulation.
This is naive at best, but it's probably unintelligent. For essential work, where there is a small supply of workers qualified to perform the work, making sure that people don't work overlong shifts and endanger the public *actually requires expanding the pool of workers qualified to perform the work*. Unless, somehow, you think the supply is adequate and people with $300,000 in medical school debt have just decided to sit things out and do Uber because the hospital's too stressful. Do you somehow believe that? What evidence led you to believing that? Is your comprehension of economics so flimsy that you just assume that all supply of qualified, highly skilled workers in effectively infinite or at least indefinite in quantity?
I feel like I'm talking to a spider monkey or maybe a marmot or something. How is this not obvious to you? What cognitive defect do you suffer from?
This is so true. It is unbelievable how much pressure they are in constantly. This is a high risk for all patients and I don't agree that medical providers are paid enough for the amount of pressure they are under.
I truly think that the corporation structure sucking up money into executives, admins and shareholders needs to be cut down. The share of revenue for "corporation" needs to be much much much lower than share of revenue for actual providers.
A friend, who switched from electrical engineering to medicine, told me that the medical residency program in the US was essentially molded by a doctor who was a cocaine addict; seemingly a lot of his students were, too. Maybe it’s a lot easier to work ridiculously long hours when you’re hopped up on coke.
The (admittedly limited) looking I did into the topic suggests that there’s at least a kernel of truth to that story — if not more.
You can look for yourself: the doctor’s name was William Stewart Halsted.
Tongue-in-cheek, but maybe the ADHD medications that doctors and academics often abuse today aren’t as efficacious as good old fashioned cocaine in keeping people working for 80+ hours a week.
To be fair, I don’t think cocaine was illegal during Halsted’s time, though he was in and out of treatment for that and, later, morphine addiction.
Well, I have ADHD and take those meds. They can absolutely work like cocaine in that regard, but I have never intentionally used them like that. Those meds would have to be used very judiciously because tolerance would mitigate that effect quiet quickly.
One thing that I wasn’t aware of until I happened upon a blurb somewhere is that Adderall is harder to get in many other countries than in the US (and seemingly impossible/illegal in a few).
Well... we see the same bullshit being pushed across Europe (particularly Germany and France), justified by us being no longer "competitive" with particularly Asian countries.
How about we just go and say "hey, no more imports and trade with these countries until they either reduce their working hours to reasonable limits or there will be levies applied to compensate for the extra productivity gained through exploitation"? Or why do we not go and close our skies to airlines that operate under clearly unsafe regulations?
The super rich will not stop undoing a hundred years worth of labor laws history until we all stop them.
IIRC during WW2 people were volunteering for long shifts to help the war effort, but after week three or so their (absolute, not merely hourly) productivity had dropped below those who hadn't.
> From the evidence brought to their attention, in January 1916, the HMWC recommended shorter working hours: for men, hours of no more than 65-67 per week (13-14 hours daily) on average and for boys, for girls, and for women a maximum of 60 weekly hours. It is not always clear whether these recommendations referred to scheduled hours or actual hours worked. 12 The basis for these recommendations was not because shorter hours would yield higher average product or higher marginal product, but because total output would be unchanged.
The nation does ghanta for Indian youth so why should they slave away for people who treat them like crops that regrow every year, and try to extract the highest yield. Every test for good jobs becomes a scam for politically connected kids. Every movement by people to raise wages (like the farmer's movement) is violently put down. The government has no plan, just doing stupid things like cancelling all the currency randomly and causing us all to miss so much work standing in bank lines, then blame us for work not getting done. Absolutely sick of it.
See also: the "996" schedule in Chinese companies, which (if I understand correctly) was ruled illegal but the ruling is not really enforced [1].
> At 13 hours of flight duty time, India’s FDTL is already demanding, but after the pandemic slowdown, increased route expansion and pilot shortages have forced many to fly beyond the recommended maximum of 60 hours a week, exacerbating crew exhaustion.
It's not only unsafe for the pilots, but also for the passengers.
> An airline CEO ... claimed the proposed regulations would ... escalate expenses ... By the end of the month ... appeared to have yielded to influence from the airline lobby.
But you know, corporate profits are more important, so lets just keep working people to death.
These rules are written in blood and we(as the consumer) pay for it in higher ticket prices.
A simpler app that keeps track of the time off the clock allocated to rest would solve the problem but that increases operational costs pretty significantly. Not just reduced hours per pilot but also cancelling/delaying flights when crew run past their time and need to rest instead.
only because pilots and crew are unionized which allowed them to fight for these; if they weren't you can be sure that conditions would be much worse up until the point of a major air disaster that would put pressure on the airlines
With an air transport pilot flying 700 hours and making $220k annually, with 300 flights and 150 people per flight, that's <$5 per seat. The flight crew's wages are a very small part of the cost of a ticket.
> IndiGo, India’s largest airline, announced it would be an “early adopter” of a wrist-worn fatigue-monitoring device it was developing with French defense and aerospace company Thales Group.
That's toeing the line. If your employer is measuring things like your heart rate variability and blood pressure to figure out how close you personally are to a heart attack, and deciding whether it's worth it to cancel your flight so you can rest- that's abhorrent. It's somehow worse than the employer purchasing your health. It's planned obsolescence for people. How many people would drop dead a year after retiring? Horrifying.
The problem is not a lack of pilots or the needs of the country, either. There are foreign pilots and airlines. It's just pilots being driven far too hard by institutions. It won't go away when there are more pilots, it will just become calcified. This is a habit that should be ended through legal means, and fast.
[1] https://www.dgca.gov.in/digigov-portal/?page=jsp/dgca/Invent...
Forget about PPP for a moment and just pretend goods cost the same everywhere for the sake of this example. A country where everyone has $0 and makes $1/year has a "perfect" gini coefficient, indicating perfect wealth and income distributions. A country where everyone's a millionaire, but where some people make a million a year and others make a billion a year has a much worse gini coefficient, and yet is still the place you'd rather live in, out of these two examples.
The suffering by the people of the former is not mitigated by their high gini coefficient, because their suffering is a result of poverty, not a result of inequality.
The celebrations of prosperity by the latter occur in spite of inequality.
The takeaway is clear - equality or inequality have a completely non-causal relationship with the quality of life of the people in the region being measured.
Further, adviocacy for combatting inequality sounds laudable at face value, but underneath the surface, what does it look like? After all, here in the west we're all the rich oppressors who benefit from economic exploitation of the global south. Accordingly, are we all going to have our assets seized and income garnished to reduce the inequality of the global poor? Remember, the average American public school teacher is in the top decile globally by both income and wealth.
The actual problem that you're unhappy about is that average wages have not been keeping up with the rising cost of living over the last 50 years. That's a complex problem with a lot of variables, including quite a few that violate what popular social consesus dictates you are allowed to even think about or question, and is beyond the scope of my response to enumerate. That said, calls to "reduce inequality" aren't it - those are just calls for most of the people on HN to have wages and assets seized involuntarily - at gunpoint and under threat of imprisonment by a SWAT team that will shoot your dog and throw a flashbang grenade in your infant's crib if you resist...
...unlike car drivers, cyclists, doctors, other humans.