Stories: Both Pilots Falling Asleep

[User546]

The previous post about "Getting Bored At Cruising" left me with a curious question.

How many of you guys have woke up while taking a quick little nap at altitude, and found that your co-pilot was also asleep?

A good friend of mine is a United captain, and he told me that on a long trans-con flight one night, he let his F/O catch up on some sleep. At some point he had dozed off himself, and was terrified when he woke up and found that neither of them had been awake! Luckily he was only asleep about 10-15 minutes, and they were still on the same leg (and ATC apparently hadn't tried to get ahold of them!).

He says he hears stories all the time like that, so come on guys, I know theres got to be some good ones out there!

 

[FR8AINTGR8]

I heard a story about a Mountain Air Cargo crew falling asleep in the Fokker F-27, which has no auto-pilot. Guess center kept clearing them to a higher and higher altitude as the plane climbed, and climbed, and climbed so they wouldn't get in trouble. Eventually they woke, but it's still kind of crazy, was from a reliable source as well. BTW, yeah, I've caught the "at altitude" snooze a time or two, or twenty, hell, a couple cargo jobs ago, I was chatting on fingers coming out of DSM to a colleague, and he didn't answer for like 5 minutes, finally did, said he'd dozed off, only problem is what we were flying had no auto, no co-pilot! Ain't night freight grand!

 

[Lrjtcaptain]

I dozed off one night in the Baron after about 9 hours that day after jumping from maryland to northcarolina, into nashville, drop off in kansas, and into Omaha that night....Kansas City Center was trying to hand me off to Minny center and I didn't catch it for like 20 mins. No big deal, i knew the freq cause it was the center surrounding the omaha area. It was slow but still, kinda stupid, i should have stayed the night in Kansas but was only an hour between MPR - OMA so I said screw it. It was a long day, all IFR. Luckily it wasnt ice season. That could have been bad. Single pilot ifr sucked sometimes on long days but that goodness for a good autopilot.

 

[mar]

Sure

I was a new FE when both my pilots fell asleep.

I just poured myself another cup a joe.

 

[falcondriver]

I've been on the jumpseat and fallen asleep around 3AM and woke up about 30 minutes later, to find the Fo and the Checkairmen asleep. Made me think twice about falling asleep in flight. Things like that happen after being up all day and getting paged out at 10pm.
FD

 

[jettypeguy]

I remember a story from the old days of a United Airlines 727 or DC8 flying westbound towards LAX or somewhere on the west coast and all 3 pilots fell asleep and the company had to selcal to wake them up, the problem was they had flown 45 minutes or so out over the pacific...ah the good ole days

 

[Benhuntn]

Crew sleeping

I have a friend that worked with me as an evaluator for the USAF. He was flying with a C-130 crew in Greenland. The crew had landed their ski bird on the ice and were returning to Thule. My friend was in the back watching the Loadmasters and returned to the flight deck. When he climbed the steps and looked in to the cockpit he found the Navigator, engineer, and both pilots asleep. They were well of course and nearly ran out of gas by the time they got to Thule.