Does your pilot need a nap?
The likelihood is that sleepiness has impacted airline pilots more than you — that is, if you are the average person.
A new study found that almost one-fourth of pilots or 23% said their job performance was impacted by sleeplessness. That compares to 17% of non-transportation workers.
One in five pilots admitted to making a serious error on the job, according to the poll by the National Sleep Foundation.
By comparison, 14% of truck drivers say they've had a near miss due to sleepiness.
The study found that sleepiness also could have caused car accidents commuting to and from work. Pilots as well as train operators were more likely to get into car accidents while commuting than non-transportation workers, the poll found.
"Driving home from work after a long shift is associated with crashes due to sleepiness," Sanjay Patel, a sleep researcher at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, said in a written statement. "We should all be concerned that pilots and train operators report car crashes due to sleepiness at a rate that is six times greater than that of other workers."
Pilots generally reported not getting enough rest on work nights. Half said they rarely or never get a good night's sleep when they have to work the next day, compared to 42% of non-transportation workers.
The findings support new Federal Aviation Administration rules finalized in December that require pilots to fly shorter shifts and get more rest in between work shifts. Pilots must now get at least 10 hours of rest in between shifts with eight hours of uninterrupted sleep.
"The margin of error in these professions is extremely small. Transportation professionals need to manage sleep to perform at their best," David Cloud, CEO of the National Sleep Foundation, said in a written statement. "As individuals and employers, we need to know more about how sleep improves performance."
The poll found that part of the problem is that pilots have more varied shifts than other occupations. Only 6% said they work the same work schedule each day compared to 76% of non-transportation workers.
Non-transportation workers reported having an average of 14.2 hours off between shifts, compared to 12.9 hours for pilots. If given one more hour off between work shifts, more than half the pilots polled said they would use it for sleep.
So “who among us wants to take a one in ten chance of flying on a plane with a sleepy pilot?" Edward Edens, PhD of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, said in a written statement.
By David Wilkening
David
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