Sleep Is Underrated

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Time to quit worrying about flying inverted yield curves and stay awake long enough to reignite virtuous ire over the Piper Navajo pilotwho allegedly fell asleep on a November trip between Tasmania and King Island, two places that, if you’re like me, you had to Google.

The backstory in a conch shell: The pilot drifted off, but not off-course … except inadvertently overflying the destination by 29 miles. Big flying deal, right? Who hasn’t done the same? When I was a low-time pilot in Hawaii, I was flying a Grumman to Kauai and managed to miss the island despite being awake and distracted by a passenger who kept asking if I really had a license. I did but still bypassed the only land mass in that stretch of ocean. Apparently, pilotage, the dying art of navigating by landmarks, isn’t best practiced over open water.

In my defense, Kauai’s not that large. Bigger than a poi basket but not, say, Australia. I wouldn’t have missed finding that island. Still, the passenger got all huffy-like when he pointed to Kauai well to our seven o’clock and approaching half-past six, while I insisted it was hiding behind a cloud at a quarter-to-twelve. I attribute this confusion to the difference between UTC and HST, adding he could take a boat home if he felt so strongly about gross navigational errors. He did.

Back to sleep, which is considered essential to a healthy pilot’s whatever, so why should we get judgmental over taking a restorative nap as the Tasmanian flier allegedly did? It’s not like he didn’t wake up. He did and gently arced back to his destination with–I’ll add in no one’s defense–plenty of fuel on board. How much I don’t actually know in terms of having the facts, but as any loose interpretation of FAR 91.167–or the Tasmanian equivalent–makes clear, “Plenty of fuel includes enough to reach the intended destination and taxi thereafter to an FBO that’ll accept out-of-town checks.”

Running out of fuel is so pass that such incidents (or accidents) rarely make it into IFR magazine’s annual Stupid Pilot Tricks review. As the tired adage goes, “When it comes to operating on aviation fuel, there are those who have run out of it, and those who get caught running out.” Show of hands: How many readers have run a tank dry and lived to not tell anyone about it? Thought so. Your secrets are safe … with mine.

Enough with skinny fuel scenarios and back to the pros and cons of sleeping enroute. While “good safety practices” include remaining awake for most of the flight, it’s not entirely uncommon for pilots or air traffic controllers to drop their lids for just a second, only to lurch wide-eyed and foggy-brained, struggling from the arms of Morpheus while pleading, “Where in blazes am I?” For a controller, that’s particularly weird. I know, because I’ve dwelt in the land of Nod on midnight watches.

I worked in four ATC facilities (Center and tower/approach) in my inglorious FAA career, and two were open 24/7 like a Las Vegas tattoo/wedding parlor. Shift work messes with all that good sleep rhythm stuff the FAA promotes, so by the waning hours of the mid-shift (8 AM) my controller brain was mushier than usual, especially when alone, working clearance delivery, ground, tower and approach/departure control.

And, adding to the charms of all-night ATC, the secondary radar (transponder processing) would frequently go down for routine maintenance–greasing the approach gate’s relative bearings and such. Luckily, traffic was usually light, so reverting to 1950s semi-radar conditions was no big thrash. Plus, at night the freight dogs came out to play, and there were no better participants than cargo pilots–awake or otherwise.

Long ago everyone wrote checks, millions per day, and all that floating paper had to get to far-flung banks for payment. Enter the check-hauling freight dogs in anything fast with wings and no back seats. Des Moines, Iowa, was a freight hub, where at 3 a.m., the empty radar scope would pulse with handoffs from eight points on the compass. Mostly twin Cessnas, Cheyennes and a Lear that launched from Minneapolis into the stratosphere, then throttled back and dropped like an ICBM lawn dart at speeds exceeding daytime 91.117 limits. Night freighters seemed to know two power settings: full and idle. And they all arrived at once, because they had to land, taxi to the ramp, swap mailbags and call for their outbound clearances while taxiing out again to the nearest runway. And they were always ready to go, launching in turn-on-course starbursts into the night.

Inbound, they’d request direct to the nearest runway regardless of winds. As with the FARs, the rules of physics didn’t apply to the night hawks, and once I learned that they would provide better self-separation and sequencing than I could from the tower/approach, I just sat back and said, “Approved … follow company (aircraft), cleared visual approach, clear to land, taxi to the ramp.”

If weather dictated using the ILS, they’d request slam-dunk intercepts at the marker, sometimes inside of that. I obliged. Procedures turns (rare) resembled crop-duster reversals rather than time-sucking PTs. This was ATC improv night rock-and-roll. And, one night a somnolent freight pilot in a Twin Cessna pulled a Tasmania fly-over until 30 miles north of Des Moines, the intended airport, when the sound of a sputtering engine must’ve caused him to wake, switch tanks and stammer, “Airport in sight!” Not off course, just slightly off the nighttime rhythm.

By dawn, the blue-jeaned rodeo-fliers would vanish to wherever sleep-deprived freight dogs went when the sun shines, and the daylight regs returned as I’d stumble from the tower, flop into my pickup and catch a steering-wheel nap, driving home.

Miss it? Nope. At least not the unhealthy ATC lifestyle, but I miss the rush of hell-bent traffic blasting through our otherwise FAA-prescribed skies. Too bad no one writes checks anymore. PayPal isn’t nearly as inspiring, plus, these days I can’t stay awake past 9:30.

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