Are these really the people that should be required to work so much? Isn’t their job about handling life and death daily? Wouldn’t we want exactly these people to come fully rested to work every single day and be fully staffed?
I don’t know if there are jobs with similar stakes that are so carelessly staffed and disgustingly paid.
Because the results of malpractice only kill, maim, or injure one person at a time.
In aviation, however, the consequences are much more visible; so commercial pilots have regulated limits to flight duty.
Funnily enough, those duty cycle limits played a significant role in history’s worst aviation accident: The collision of 747s at Tenerife.
The short version of the story: There was some bomb threat at a European airport, so traffic bound there had to divert to wherever else they could. A lot of them ended up landing on the Spanish island of Tenerife, at an airport not used to handling that much large aircraft traffic. This included two 747s full of passengers.
When it was time for them to go, a thick bank of fog had rolled in. The taxiway was apparently not suitable for 747s so they had to taxi down the runway. The first of the two 747s had taxied to the end of the runway and was in position and ready for takeoff. Extremely ready for takeoff; the captain was pre-occupied with a recently tightened air crew duty cycle policy and was anxious to get home before going over his hours.
The second was taxiing up the runway straight toward the first, and had missed a turn off the runway, so they were kind of jackknifed across the runway trying to figure out where they were.
The captain of the first jet decided to take off without clearance from the tower. One 747 under full takeoff power T-boned another 747. Nearly 600 people died.
I’m all for crew duty cycle rules, we shouldn’t have exhausted pilots at the controls. Something that has kind of shut my life down is the notion that even our good laws turn poisonous when interpreted with absolute strictness. A pilot afraid of breaking the “You’re not allowed to over-work pilots because flying tired is unsafe” law killed 583 people including himself.
The video I linked above calls it “The Worst Air Disaster In History.” It’s one episode of a long-running series, and they always feel the need to come up with some similar line, so some of them are “The worst single-aircraft disaster involving a non-American made plane operated by an American airline to take place during daytime.” I think my favorite quote from the show was during the Cross Air CFIT episode, “On board was Passion Fruit, Germany’s answer to the Spice Girls.”