WASHINGTON — Many jet pilots operate under flying-time rules written in the era of propeller-driven planes, raising fatigue issues that industry and union leaders want addressed.
In an earlier time, far removed from today’s crowded skies, delayed flights and overbookings, officials defined a reasonable workday for a pilot without a scientific understanding of fatigue.
Finding ways to prevent pilot fatigue has stymied federal regulators and the airline industry for decades. The National Transportation Safety Board has been recommending since 1990 that rules on how many hours pilots can be scheduled to work be updated to reflect modern research and take into account early starting times and frequent takeoffs and landings.
An advisory committee on pilot fatigue delivered its recommendations to the Federal Aviation Administration late Tuesday. Committee members said the FAA had asked them not to make their recommendations public.
Although FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt has promised to vet the recommendations swiftly and turn them into a formal proposal by the FAA, the process will take months to complete.
NTSB Chairwoman Deborah Hersman said she doesn’t expect the suggestions to address all the issues that are part of the fatigue problem, but she hopes they will supply a foundation.
“You have to build all the rest of the house around it,” she said.
Some members of Congress, though, don’t trust the FAA to finally come to grips with the problem. Besides forcing the agency’s hand, a bill proposed by lawmakers would require airlines to use fatigue-risk-management systems — complex scheduling programs that alert the company to potential fatigue problems.
After the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee approved the bill last month, chairman James Oberstar ran through a list of airline crashes in recent decades.
“The common thread running through all of it is fatigue,” said Oberstar, D-Minn.
