www.navytimes.com
| "Aviation in itself is not inherently dangerous. But to an even greater degree than the sea, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity or neglect." Aviation has learned about fatigue over the years and implemented procedures to counter it. Still, in the military, I saw those procedures thrown out the window in the name of combat needs. Such as the time I heard a hallucinating pilot tell the crew of the aircraft ahead of them that someone was climbing on their tail. Or the time lead started to inexplicable climb while we were crossing a large swamp. In response to a query he said he was avoiding the mountain in front of him.  Still, we learned from those things and tried to keep pilots on the same schedule or give them time to reset. On the airline side things are much more strict. For example, when doing a long flight we have 4 pilots rotating out every few hours and a bunk available for those who want to sleep when they aren’t “on watch”. Once we land and duty out we need a minimum amount of time to reset.I’m sure many aboard ships have similar stories. Imaginary ships, shore lines or other things in the night. Staying awake for 24 hours is like having a blood/alcohol level of .10. Yet in the military we seem to admire those who stay up with no sleep, even if their decision making is crap. But heaven help anyone who even thinks about bringing alcohol anywhere close to a US Navy ship. |
For some divisions on the ship, just the requried maintenance actions are enough manhours to keep everyone working 40 hr weeks. A few like "A Gang" (Auxiliaries Division) were notorious for this. My first division was Guns and Missiles and my gunners mates had close to full time jobs of just maintenance before even thinking about watch, working parties, etc.
This.
I love when the Government pays PHD's to research and write reports on the obvious. How's this for a a hypothesis -- people perform better with more sleep ! Corallary, sleep is more effective when you have a normal circadian cycle ! That is way up on the "Nooooo (expletive deleted) list !
When I flew the 747 crews were amazed at how my priority was sleep and how given 4 hours I could take a 3:45 nap (15 minutes to heat up a crew meal a stretch). I’d tell them I could take a nap on the hard metal deck of a UH-60 in 110 degree heat of Iraq. The cool, dark cocoon of a crew bunk with a mattress? Out right away.
I don’t think we are too far away from the “Starship Trooper” ability to command naps. Cadets at USMA were recently issued trackers. On some of them the COC can track quite a bit such as O2 saturation. Not sure how much of the information is currently used. I’m sure things such as sleep can be tracked. It would probably be possible to set up alerts when personnel hit a certain amount of time without sleep.
P3's have a couple racks in the back for the Off Duty Pilot and FE. We typically flew 10+ hour profiles while deployed (plus 3 hour preflight; 1 hour postflight), so they were well used. Rest of the crew grabbed a break when they could (usually enroute and returning from Onstation time). We also had mandatory crew rest before flights, and there were weekly/montly flight hour limits (rarely reached during my time, but used to be an issue when we had Soviet boomers parked off our coast). Most of these were safety protocols developed the hard way. I will admit that we had it easier than Navy communities, but still had to keep up with our ground job, and during an extended flap (round the clock ops on a Soviet sub) the crew rest was sometimes set aside.
