Pilots admit they took a nap on air

New Delhi: Details from voluntary information reports handed over by pilots to their flight safety departments cite extreme fatigue.
"I was tired. My mind had stopped functioning. I took a power nap,” a pilot said.
Another pilot added, "There was a point in my flight today when I could see nothing. I lost focus. I had dozed off.”
The reports shown exclusively to CNN-IBN are anonymously dropped by pilots and co-pilots in a Debrief Box, in which many of them admitted to taking a nap on air.
"Flying is a complex job. After all a pilots body is similar to any other human body,” says Former Indian Airlines Chief Operation, R S Anand.
The number of hours a pilot flies is governed by Flight and Duty Time Limitation or FDTL. According to the DGCA rules – no pilot can fly more than 125 hours during a period of 30 consecutive days, and not more than 30 hours in week. However, within this any permutation or combination is possible.
So the onus is on pilots, and the British Airways (BA) pilot who refused to fly because he was sleepy after a disturbed night at the hotel may have inconvenienced a lot of passengers, but was reinforcing high standards of air safety.
16/04/07 Anubha Bhonsle/CNN-IBN

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Categories: Foreign Apr 2007, Safety Apr 2007