How about this: Just this past tour, we had 4 really easy days in the beginning of the tour. All day shift. On day 5, we do two short hops in late afternoon. Then get told we are needed for a recovery that had us flying all night and landing at 6AM on the east coast. We were pretty fresh and took the trip. No problem there. So we check in to the hotel at 6AM. Of course, by the time we get to the hotel we're very tired. They have us coming back on duty at 6PM that same day and doing a short hop at 11PM that night. Guess what happens around 8AM at the hotel? People are moving around. Doors slamming. People shouting to each other in the hallways. Maids running vacuums in the adjacent rooms. The sun is up and the curtains aren't keeping out all the light. Not to mention that even though we're tired, we're working against our bodies own circadian rhythms. How much sleep do you think we got? I talked to my partner when we came back on duty and he, like me, only got about 5 hours of actual sleep.
We felt rested enough to do the one quick hop they had us scheduled for that night, but do you really think we would have been out of line if they had dropped a transcon on us and we had fatigued? Because we talked it over and decided ahead of time that we weren't rested enough to do any long duty period that night.
While certain factors (maids running vacuums in adjacent rooms and loud folks in the hallways) are out of the company's control, they still affect us, the pilots who deal with those factors, on a daily basis.
But how do the rules protect us from the repeated big circadian shifts the company throws at us all the time? Sorry, but there are numerous gaping holes in the rules that allow the company to schedule us until we fall back on the fatigue rule. And when pilots become reluctant to use the fatigue rule because they want to help out the company/owners, then the rules aren't providing much protection at all, now are they?
And even the rules we do have aren't necessarily all that safety-oriented. 14 hours of duty in a 24-hour period? Hey, I think it's great we can't be forced past that, but if you think about it, that's still a very long day! The average American only works 8 hours a day, but we can go 75% longer than that in a safety sensitive job like flying, and that's safe?! The fact that we operate like that on a daily basis with very few incidents is a great testament to our professionalism and skill, but doesn't constitute proof that "the rules" we operate under protect us and are safety-focused.
