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NTSB Ready To Address Sleepy Pilots Concern

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Nov 8, 2007 7:57 pm US/Eastern

NTSB Ready To Address Sleepy Pilots Concern

Passengers At LaGuardia Say Fatigue Is No Excuse

By Elizabeth Hur, CBS 2 HD News
NEW YORK (CBS) ―

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Here's scary thought for the next time you're about to board a plane. A new study says pilots falling asleep in the cockpit have become a big problem.

CBS 2 HD went to LaGuardia Airport to see what passengers think about this.

Right now, airline pilots can work up to 16 hours per day, even longer if a flight is delayed. Knowing this, many passengers say they can understand why so many flights are delayed. Others, however, say it's simply no excuse.

The Ruffs were getting ready to fly to Miami. Understandably, the last thing they wanted to hear was news about sleepy pilots.

"That's not really great to tell me right now," Anita Ruff said.

But here are the frightening facts. On Wednesday Frontier Airlines confirmed two of its pilots fell asleep on a red-eye flight from Baltimore to Denver in 2004. It took frantic radio calls from a controller to wake them. According to a safety data report released Thursday there have been five more similar cases since 2003.

"Oh God, I didn't want to hear that 'cause now I'm going in and I'm now scared," passenger Amparo Alvear said. "What's going on?"

Pilot unions will tell you pilots are simply overworked.

"We are now flying more and that's why we're starting to see more cases of pilots being fatigued," a union representative said.

The National Transportation Safety Board calls pilot fatigue a serious safety concern. Tired pilots are being blamed for 10 crashes so far and now transportation authorities say it's time to take action.

"It's time to do something before we have to investigate an accident that is catastrophic," NTSB Chairman Mark Rosenker said.

The NTSB says the aviation industry needs to look into some technology that's out there to compensate for these human mistakes. However, first thing's first. It said there needs to be tighter restrictions on the number of hours pilots can work and passengers CBS 2 HD spoke to on Thursday said they could not agree more.

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