Op een ander forum waren er een aantal personen die de oorzaak reeds bij de vliegers wilden leggen.
Hierop mijn antwoord, dat vorige maand de realiteit was:
maybe lay the blame by the FAA for allowing rediculous duty and rest times for international operations (no duty time limit for 3 man crews). 16 to 24 hr duty days are not uncommon. Time up between sleep periods routinely exceed 30 hrs. Just go to the MIA customs office when these crews come back from dodging cumulus granite in the middle of the night at crappy S. American airports and see how awake they are.
Want an example: fly all night, come back in the hotel at 0900, sleep 5 hours (your body has a hard time sleepingin the day time) and have to report at 2200 for a scheduled 13 hr duty day for a MIA-BOG-MDE-MIA turn. At 2130 scheduling call that the flight has been pushed back 2 hours.
When arriving in BOG there is no parking space, so sit on a taxiway for 2 hrs (1st delay). Now you can pull in and load the flowers. When you're ready to go MDE is fogged in, another 2 hr delay. After loading in MDE you find out us customs has problems clearing the inbound cargo. Another hour delay. This thing is turning into a 18 hr duty day (the 2 hr schedule delay is not part of this).
Finally you come to MIA and find out that the computer at customs doesn't work and you have to wait another hour outside in the 90 degree heat. Oh, don't forget your duty time ends 30 min after setting the parking brake (at 1800). So there went your first hour of the 12 hr block-to-block rest period and haven't even entered the country yet! Another hour and you finally made it to your hotel room at 2000. 28 hrs since show time. Add the other 7 hours that you were up since 1400 and you've been up 35 hrs.
Now you can go to sleep at night and according to the FAA you're good for a 0600 release of the parking brake for another day with a unlimited duty time. Subtract 1.5 hours for show time, another 1 hr for the wake-up and travel-to-airport routine and there's a maximum of 7.5 hrs sleep. This doesn't even include some wind-down time or a bite to eat.
And we wonder why people drive aircraft of the end of runways. It's just a big surprise that there are not more often incidents / accidents.
Now the FAA will do all kind of line checks and ramp checks to see how poorly the crews operate, instead of trying to get the duty / rest times adjusted to a more humane level. Yet that change will be resisted by the operators that see their crewcost increase. The same operators that threaten to fire you if you want to go to a hotel down range or refuse a trip because of fatigue (I know some guys that kept their job because of their Alpa membership, most of these crews flying to S.America don't have the luxury of a union backing them)
Wij hebben per contract een maximum werkdag van 16 uur, maar soms gaan we er overheen, soms omdat de bestemming een heel wat betere lokatie is dan waar we zijn (Entebbe, Uganda ipv Lagos, Nigeria of Miami ipv Bogota. Soms ook omdat je er bijna niet onderuit kunt: 75000 kg verse bloemen in een kist zonder APU in Bogota of Medellin waar het gedurende de dag heet is; Een behoorlijk verlies als die naar de knoppen gaan
