JetBlue experimenting with passenger safety?
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Fly with JetBlue last year? You may have been a passenger on a test flight: An experiment to see how long pilots can actually control a passenger jet before fatigue sets in.
You don’t remember filling out a consent form? Oh, that’s because the airline pulled a fast one: They convinced low-level FAA officials to bend the rules for their little experiment. Instead of limiting their flying to the legal limit of 8 hours per day, pilots spent as much as 11 hours at the controls.
It wasn’t until someone called in the experiment to some FAA higher-ups that the experiment got canned. The Wall Street Journal reports (subscription only):
The two-pilot crews were equipped with specially designed motion detectors on their wrists to measure activity, and participated in tests with hand-held computing devices that issued random prompts and then recorded the speed of responses. All told, JetBlue says 29 pilots, including the backup aviators, participated in more than 50 data-gathering flights during May 2005. All of the flights were domestic, and a big portion were coast-to-coast trips.
The carrier says it proceeded under the assumption that local FAA officials had the power to approve the company’s plans under so-called supplemental flight rules. Those rules specify that airlines flying longer distances must have at least one extra pilot on board so no single pilot flies more than eight hours in total. However, in the JetBlue test, even though each flight had a third pilot on board, the original crews stayed at the controls for more than 10 hours a day. None of the reserve pilots ever replaced a regular crew member.
Thankfully nothing seems to have gone wrong, and 2 to 3 hours of overtime is probably not that much of a stretch. But it’s simply not acceptable that the company or its pilots play these kinds of games with passengers. Passengers should not be made unwitting co-test-subjects in a corporate experiment. Unless there is an experimental “informed consent” clause in the JetBlue contract of carriage?
It’s apparently not enough that so many airline pilots sound like legendary test pilot Chuck Yeager when they’re welcoming you onboard over the intercom. No, these guys actually wanted to BE test pilots.
Experiments are fine, but not with a plane full of unwitting subjects. And what were the results of those tests, anyway? As members of the “research team,” doesn’t the public have the right to know?
UPDATE 10/23/06: Full text of WSJ article now available here. Not sure how long it’ll be there, but read it and weep.
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October 22nd, 2006 at 10:00 pm |
Would have been a lot easier to test this in a simulator and no doubt have saved the public embarassment.
October 22nd, 2006 at 10:09 pm |
Thanks for posting this news. I’m saddened by this… I regularly fly Jet Blue coast to coast. I would like to see the actual flights published– which dates and routes were these tests conducted? I hope there is public pressure to make that information known, in addition to the results of the tests.
October 23rd, 2006 at 7:35 am |
I see absolutely nothing wrong with this. They cleared it with the FAA. Jet Blue did nothing wrong here. No passengers were in danger, and there was no real prospect of danger. There was even a third reserve pilot, in case one of the first two said “Oops I’m tired.” Do you really think every time the FAA or an airline makes a teeny tiny change to previous practices the passengers should all get written notification or something? That is silly, as is this entire “issue”.
October 23rd, 2006 at 8:48 am |
That can’t be legal… Overtime is ok if unavoidable, but deliberately putting paying customers at a higher level of risk without their consent?
October 23rd, 2006 at 6:55 pm |
This is very much overblown.
Many airline pilots are routinely on duty for upwards of 15 hours. Unfortunately, FAA rules primarily regulate only that time spent actually *at the controls.* That’s what JetBlue was getting the waiver for.
Crew fatigue is an issue, and has been for years. But believe me, it’s not cockpit time the causes pilot fatigue, it’s *duty time,* which includes airport layovers, delays, etc.
Patrick Smith
www.askthepilot.com
October 23rd, 2006 at 6:56 pm |
This is very much overblown.
Many airline pilots are routinely on duty for upwards of 15 hours. Unfortunately, FAA rules primarily regulate only that time spent actually *at the controls.* That’s what JetBlue was getting the waiver for.
Crew fatigue is an issue, and has been for years. But believe me, it’s not cockpit time the causes pilot fatigue, it’s *duty time,* which includes airport layovers, delays, etc.
Patrick Smith
www.askthepilot.com
October 23rd, 2006 at 8:19 pm |
The bigger issue, to me, is not the 2 or 3 hours of extra flying time. Anyone who’s driven cross-country knows that you can drive for quite a while and still maintain control. But that’s not the point. It’s the fact that the airline abused the public’s trust and secretly experimented like this, rather than publicly admitting that these flights weren’t operating under typical FAA rules.
May 19th, 2007 at 7:34 pm |
[…] let’s just keep the pilot alertness experiments to a minimum, […]