I’ve had so many personal experiences with fatigue that it’s scary.
Flying for my last airline prior to retirement, we used to fly from JFK to Guyana, in South America, and back — all in one duty period! We’d show up for work before midnight and were lucky if we were home by 4 p.m. We did it with an extra “relief” pilot on board, like somehow that was an adequate substitute for sleep.
FORMER OBAMA PILOT: A CRISIS OF INEXPERIENCED PILOTS
I remember on one occasion, the relief pilot went into the cabin to take a break. At about 3:30 or 4 in the morning, the captain told me that I looked tired and should close my eyes for a while (a totally unapproved procedure that we used to battle fatigue in flight). When I woke up, I realized that I was the only one awake in the cockpit. The captain had fallen asleep during my nap. We had been flying pilotless over the waters of the western Atlantic for who knows how long. Imagine if the passengers had known.
And then there was another time, a round trip flight from Germany to Kuwait. On the approach back into Germany — in bad weather — I turned around to ask the relief pilot a question and he was sound asleep, drooling, hanging forward like dead weight from his seatbelt. Nice. Fatigue does that to you.
